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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 3556861" data-attributes="member: 15538">And on what day did this vast and enormous change take place? I am certainly aware of the differences between medieval theology and the flowering of humanism, the rise of the burghars and the consequent mercantlism of the noble class, etc etc.Don't assume I fell asleep in history class. You don't know what courses I took in college. You don't whether or not I've been studying medieval history since I was a young child, or whether I've participated in medieval reanactment socities. You would have no way of knowing if I've read translations of Augustine and Aquinas, of for that matter whether I've read over a third of the books in your bibliography, some more than once. I'm disputing some simplistic claims about the "medieval mind" based on a reification of historical periods. I have no patience with the claim "someone from the period X would have no concept of Y" unless you are talking about a particular person, who was then insulated from exposure to the concept itself. It is certainly true that our own world view colors our assimilation of new knowledge. That is why it is so tempting to put things into neat little boxes.The sack of Rome... event in ancient history, or the Dark ages?1450.... medieval or renaissance?The idea that a medieval person works steel in some kind of particularly medieval way, distinct from a modern way of working a hot forge and going home at the end of the day for a few beers, is just ridiculous. In 546, according to the Wiki, Rome was sacked for the third time by barbarians. In the 1270s, the crusades were going on... a period of time halfway between the sack of Rome and today. However "medieval" someone's mind may have been in 1275, it was more than seven hundreds years distant from an event emblematic of the so-called Dark Ages, and also a little over seven hundred years from before today.The phrase "the medieval mind" reduces the psychology and culture of Western Europe over hundreds of miles and close to a thousand years to a single stereotype of a smelly, superstitious peasant, incapable of understanding "reason" or experiencing "skepticism." I can describe changes in music decade by decade over the course of the 20th century... do you think Mozart felt any less that his music had evolved from that of his teacher? While the pace of some changes has radically increased over history, the number of generations in time has remained much the same. Do you think the generation of the Sack of Rome was any less transformed than those that experienced the bombing of London? And we are talking about hundreds of years of such events. Medieval scholars and heretics conceived countless ideas. Some gained currency, others didn't.</blockquote>

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