>>17438717
I think one problem with the Dark Ages terminology is we accuse it for things that a. most likely didn't happen (cat burnings, jus primae noctis, everyone is a flat earther, no technological innovation, bathing is bad, drink alcohol because water bad), b. happened in a different period (witch trials, absolute monarchies, slavery, and rapid tooth decay all occurred during the "enlightenmened" early modern period), or c. was normal throughout all of pre-modern history (plagues, famines, torture, warfare, misogyny). I think the middle ages mainly get a bad rep in terms of morality, when any connotation with "medieval" is associated with "barbarism, superstition, obscurantism," which happened sometimes, but not very differently compared to other civilizations.

>>17438717
There's also the other issue about where we say that Dark Ages happened, and that if Rome hadn't fallen we'd be exploring galaxies by now. Assuming that it began when Western Rome fell, shouldn't it only affect western Europe? What dark age happened in Byzantium? What about Persia and Moorish Andalus? What was going on in India and China? They were still making many mathematical and scientific advancements. Though some may use this as a way to boast how when whitey was still cave-dweller, black people wuz still kangz.

Back to Rome, it was an impressive civilization, and it was unfortunate how much was lost. Nevertheless, was it really the true light of the world? Such an empire couldn't have fallen so easily. It could be argued that if Rome hadn't fallen we'd still be stagnating because there's very little competition post-Hannibal. As a matter of fact, all the great scientific, medical, and mathematical discoveries were made by the Greeks themselves. Think about it; the Romans had the steam engine in their hands, yet they still relied on slaves. If you ask me this is true dark age of ignorance, when you have the resources but choose not to use them. Maybe the Dark Ages were necessary because it led to constant warfare, which eventually led to tough competition and rapid innovation.

If for nothing else I have a lot of respect and admiration for the people who did live in the Dark Ages and the strife they've been through, but what are your thoughts /his/? Do you consider it a real thing? How long did it occur? Where did it happen? Was it as bad as it was made out to be? How bad is it compared to other civilizations or periods? Who is to blame? Were the Dark Ages eventually necessary in the long term?

tldr: i consider the dark ages a reality, but i also defend it from some of the bad rep it gets, we see history too much in black and white

>>17438717
Go stand in the middle of any Gothic Cathedral and see if it seems "Dark" or "Ignorant" to you ;)

They put every Greek and Roman temple to shame in every conceivable way.

>>17438761
the pantheon and hagia sophia were still kino though

There was certainly a material decline after the fall of Rome, but that's to be expected when one civilization dies and another is born, the faggy melodrama that Europeans raised over it is what is truly unprecedented. China had plenty of dark ages, yet you don't see them directing the same feral malice towards their ancestors as post-Renaissance Europeans did.

>>17438794
china was just a supposed repeated up and down
europe was supposed a big up, a big down, then an even bigger up

>>17438717
There's just less textual documentation. Despite that there was plenty of info that contradicted the whole "decline into darkness".
>Theodoric running things with tons of new public works projects and treating Romans and Goths with dignity
>Visigoths and Ostrogoths developing written law in Gothic language
>Merovings establishing new cities in what was a more sparsely populated and unconquered southern Germany and building impressive cathedrals and churches as well as developing a general overall geographically stable pre-kingdom of France
>Iberian Muslims coming in building impressive mosques and well-documenting their skirmishes with the Franks
>Charlemagne being a major patron of the arts, philosophy, and astronomy; bringing in scholars from all corners of his empire to improve literacy rates among nobles and clergy; builds impressive structures, develops a fine metalworking art culture, and requires monasteries to make multiple copies of their books to share with each other; also got Frankish folk tales written
>Catholic church takes a foothold in power after being gifted land from Rome to Ravenna and becomes involved in crowning the Holy Roman Emperor only to more or less be the primary influence on the empire later on

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>>17438717

>>17438717
I thought this was about phantom time

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>>17438717
>yes but

the modernists who forced the "dark ages" meme were just anti-Christian or anti-Catholic polemicists justifying how shitty they were making things for commoners by saying "well it was even worse for you in the past, now get back in the factory while we enclose common lands"

it's called Whig history but started developing earlier, after Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and was fully formed as revisionist propaganda by the writings of Voltaire among few others and the French Revolution "Blue" historians
blue so-called because they were continental GO Freemasons

see they made special note to ban the guild system nationwide, resulting in the catastrophic loss of centuries worth of generationally accrued talent and labor protection laws
truly the French Revolution absolutely gutted French culture for all time, even demographically they never recovered

yes I know our fiat currency (the assignat) is absolutely worthless and the coins with the king's image are worth more than ever because they are made of precious metals, but things were much worse before we stole church land and sold it to bankers to back the pyramid scheme money trust me

>>17438761
>Go stand in the middle of any Gothic Cathedral and see if it seems "Dark" or "Ignorant" to you ;)
absolutely. gothic style is the materialization of darkness,
remember, the dark ages were dark because of the people, not because of architecture. mudhuts with thatch roofs can be homely and relaxing, but a gothic cathedral is just menacing the way totalitarian distopies always are.

>>17439521
>the modernists who forced the "dark ages" meme were just anti-Christian or anti-Catholic polemicists justifying how shitty they were making things for commoners by saying "well it was even worse for you in the past, now get back in the factory while we enclose common lands"
congrats, you seem to think being anti-christard is somehow disqualifying one's claims while you are also spewing commie propaganda.
who else do you think will expose the drawbacks of a christarded society, the christians themselves?

>>17439691
>the dark ages were dark because of the people
This.
>>17439521
>the modernists who forced the "dark ages" meme were just anti-Christian or anti-Catholic polemicists
Despite the fact that the term was actually coined by a Christian in the Dark Ages, Petrarch? I know you refer to "modernists" as Enlightenment scholars you dislike, but much of Christian Europe during the Renaissance and Early Modern era considered the Middle Ages a "dark age".

>much of Christian Europe during the Renaissance and Early Modern era considered the Middle Ages a "dark age".
lmao
the opinions of a romaboo poet and some protties does not make your hostile "dark age" stereotype real

an actual legendary historian like Cesare Baronius knew better to use that term for the time between the Carolingian collapse and the institution of the Peace and Truce of God movement by the Catholic Church coupled with the launch of the First Crusade, considering the anarchy of bloodshed and murder visited by a brigand aristocracy against peasants and churchmen during that period
that institution was the basis for the code of chivlary and sanctuary laws that the High Medieval era is famous for

only on a perpetually butthurt modernist board like /his/ do you see people defending Whig history, they are a disgrace to the entire field and an example of how NOT to do history, but do the ideologues care (no they do not)
in fact they don't even know about the Peace Militias, herbals, and why all the largest medieval villages were found in lands belonging to the church (sanctuary)

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The dark ages are real and who claims otherwise is a liar. The closing down of the Platonic Academy is another event that represents the middle ages.

literally every course on philosophy I have ever taken deliberately skips over all the scholastics because "there's no time to cover them", or pretends they never existed at all because "muh God is too offensive"
they'd much rather spend several classes on known retards like Nietsche and Foucault, so they simply pretend as if there was no development at all in philosophy until the "dark ages" ended

and wow what do you know, protestants spent centuries shitting on them for being Catholic
the chances, who can say even those odds
they really hated the fact that the monasteries were teaching women to read and write in Latin

which is sad because they revolutionized the liberal arts education, invented the university system and first forms of modern musical notation including the staff, made advancements in logic such as modality, among other things

>>17440272
you know it was Christian monks in the Byzantine empire who recopied that letter over centuries
the person who recycled it knew there were other copies too

at one point there were three copies floating around that the monks did, but only one survived through into the 20th century for various reasons
of course you'd never mention that because it wouldn't advance your hostile polemics against Christianity

Christians use information in the letter Archimedes wrote that later became the palimpsest to help build the Hagia Sophia, include it in compilations of his material and spend more than 600 years preserving it.

>meanwhile, your local fedora

HURR DARK AGES OF SUPERSTITION
FLYING SPAGETTI MONSTER
AMIRITE FELLOW EUPHORIC INTELLECTUAL NICE GUYS

>>17438717
>I do consider the period up to 1066 ad objectively the real dark age
Up to 1066 from where?

The dark ages were politicised as a concept which is why a lot of historians hate it because you think this is some kind of chronology question but then it ends up being a discussion about what did Voltaire like to have for dinner. So depending on how you look at what "medieval dark ages" are
>Destruction of well-organised state apparatus
By 430 or so it's hard to talk about it outside of Italy and maybe western balkans and that's charitable. This is where late antiquity becomes very convenient term I guess. That being said you could still talk about the state functioning somewhat for a while longer, even in Carolingian times it was possible for a nobleman to own extremely spread-out properties, it would be very difficult without relatively decent land registry at least on the local level.
>Decline in writing and literacy
Really happens in 7th century onwards and its reason is the Arab conquest of Egypt cut off supplies of papyrus - the Merovingian state ran on papyrus, just one thing to think about. 6th century still has relatively lively literary tradition and as with many things the decline fits in into the general trend of late antiquity... but it's obviously regionally dependant. The ability of writing in the British Isles seemingly died for some time, for instance while in Italy it remained relatively well-maintained.
>decline of sciences
While some vertical-integration of the Romans has died, by 1100 or so we start seeing engineering that is well-above Roman while before that it's not really that bad either. Everything most likely got more expensive so massive building projects were no go and nobody with a hindsight would ever shed a tear that I don't know, hippocratic medicine became a very rare knowledge. They may have started looking into ways of actually curing people if it was completely lost instead of babbling nonsense about humours.

>all the works from classical antiquity that survive to this day survived only because Christian monks bothered to copy them over and over again over centuries

don't care I just hate Christians and will lie through my teeth if it means someone will be fooled

https://historyforatheists.com/2020/03/the-great-myths-8-the-loss-of-ancient-learning/

>The idea that we only have a fraction of Greek and Roman learning and literature because most of it was destroyed by Christians is a common assumed truism in much New Atheist discourse. But this is substantially a simplistic myth based on a number of misconceptions and errors of fact. If anything, we have a succession of Christian scholars to thank for all of the ancient learning that survives.

"The wicked destruction of the wondrous learning of the ancients by ignorant Christians is a key trope in New Atheist historiography and one regularly repeated without question by anti-theistic polemicists. It is the nexus of a cluster of related historical myths, including the supposed Christian burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, the alleged murder of Hypatia as a martyr for science, the Archimedes Palimpsest as evidence of Christians literally erasing technical learning and many more.

In the fairy tale version of history used by these polemicists, the Greeks and Romans were wise and rational and scientific and on the brink of a scientific and industrial revolution until the evil Christians came along, destroyed almost all of their learning and plunged us into a dark age. What little we have of Greco-Roman learning survived this holocaust of ignorance by chance, largely thanks to Arabic scholars who preserved these fragments until they could be rescued from medieval ignorance by the marvellous rationalists of the Renaissance. As usual, this simple and pretty picture is almost entirely nonsense."

There are thousands of examples of this cluster of myths being articulated by New Atheists of all levels of prominence.

fedora talking points are so predictable because they literally work from a script

>>17440354
So what of Grayling’s claim that Justinian closed “Plato’s Academy” in 529 AD – an idea that he gets rather agitated about and mentions twice in his exchange with Holland? According to Grayling’s breathless retelling, this brought to an end a venerable 900 year academic legacy and saw “the philosophers … driven out”. That certainly sounds like the dramatic culmination of a successful campaign of suppression of ancient learning, but unfortunately, Grayling is perpetuating a periwigged Gibbonian fantasy here as well.

Contrary to Grayling’s claims, the Academy founded by Plato came to an end before Christianity even existed and centuries before Justinian. Plato founded the Academy in a leafy suburb of Athens around 387 BC and it was headed by his successors until the First Mithradatic War (89-85 BC) dragged Athens into conflict with the Romans. The Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla besieged the city in 86 BC and then sacked it, causing massive destruction and disruption. Plutarch relates that “[Sulla] laid hands upon the sacred groves and ravaged the Academy, which was the most wooded of the city’s suburbs, as well as the Lyceum” (Sulla, XII). The last head of the Academy, Antiochus of Ascalon, fled to Alexandria and when he returned to Athens he did not refound the ruined Academy and instead set up his own small school elsewhere. The Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, a student of Antiochus, visited the site of the former Academy a generation later, describing it as “quiet and deserted” (De Finibus, V).

>>17440481
So much for Grayling’s claim. The Academy he is referring to was not that of Plato, but ... founded in the fourth century AD by the neo-Platonist scholar Plutarch. This small private school was dominated by the teachings of Proclus and it was far from the centre of rationalist science and learning that Grayling seems to imagine. Proclus and the neo-Platonic devotees of the new Academy before him were of the late neo-Platonic school of Iamblicus.

... semi-Gnostic cosmology whereby humans were mired in a physical world that separated them from their true intellectual and spiritual nature. They saw the gods as manifestations and emanations from the divine, cosmic “One” and as beings who needed to be invoked by ritual, sacrifice, hymns and the pronouncement of nonsensical-sounding “words of power”, as well as apprehended by sacred and divinely inspired scriptures. The rationalist Grayling would almost certainly find their beliefs weird and their practices – animal sacrifices, relating stories of visions, miracles and talking statues, as well as the practice of ritual magic – ... Yet this is the institution whose end he laments as the destruction of rational learning. You would think an academic who has just written a history of philosophy would know all this, but it appears Grayling’s grasp of actual history is weak indeed.

And was this small school of hymn-chanting, magical mystics closed by Justinian as part of some Empire-wide campaign against learning? No, it was not. As Edward J. Watts details comprehensively in his excellent article on the subject ... Justinian issued a general decree that the few remaining overtly pagan schools were no longer to be funded from the Imperial treasury. The Athens Iamblican school was clearly not financially viable without this funding, so its last master, Damascius, closed up shop himself – evidence that his mystical philosophy was more a hobby of aristocratic dilettantes than a vibrant force.

>>17440486
So what about Grayling’s dramatic claim that “the philosophers were driven out”? Again, this is a bit of myth. Damascius and his small group certainly did decide to go into exile and abandoned the Roman Empire to take refuge at the court of the Sassanian Persian king Khosrow I in around 532 AD. Unfortunately, Persia did not prove the idyllic refuge they imagined and a few years later they petitioned to come home and were accepted back into the Empire. There they continued to teach unmolested, though not on the taxpayer’s dime. So much for “driven out”.

Finally, the implication that this dramatic “closing of the Academy of Plato” and philosophers being “driven out” somehow meant the death knell for ancient learning is also total nonsense. Other major schools, far larger and more important than Damascius’ mystical little salon, continued to operate in cities like Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria and continued to teach the late Roman curriculum of the classics, rhetoric, philosophy and science as they always had. The intellectual apocalypse that Grayling imagines and fulminates against … never happened.

Grayling seems totally oblivious to the fact that, far from condemning all pagan learning, Christianity had long since come to accommodate the Classical intellectual tradition and had done so well before Theodosius’ time, let alone that of Justinian. This is why those major academies in Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria and hundreds of others elsewhere continued to teach the traditional subjects and texts, even as schools that were overtly pagan in their religious teaching and practice faded away. As I have detailed several times before (here, here and here, for example), there was indeed a debate about the worth of “pagan” works among the early Christians. And it was those who argued that they should be rejected or even just neglected who had lost that debate.

>>17440497
“The handmaiden concept of Greek learning was widely adopted and became the standard Christian attitude toward secular learning. …. With the total triumph of Christianity at the end of the fourth century, the Church might have reacted against pagan learning in general, and Greek philosophy in particular, finding much in the latter that was unacceptable or perhaps even offensive. They might have launched a major effort to suppress pagan learning as a danger to the Church and its doctrines. But they did not.”

>(The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages), Cambridge, 1996, p. 4
“But they did not”.

Grayling’s claim that they, in fact, did is total fantasy and he seems woefully unaware of the real status of pagan learning in the transition to the medieval world. Blinded by his comic book-level grasp of the relevant history and his wild fantasies of burned books, closed schools and fleeing philosophers, the actual events are obscured to him by his wilful ignorance. That this person is considered a leading academic, and one worthy of penning a popular history of philosophy, is rather disturbing.

Of course, he is not so totally ignorant that he is not aware that they did, in fact, copy and study these earlier pagan works. After all, later in his testy exchange with Holland he actually takes medieval scholars to task for being too reliant on Aristotle and Pliny and praises his “Renaissance” heroes for being sceptical of these pagan authorities (it seems for people like Grayling medieval scholars are “damned if they don’t and also damned if they do”). So he explains this by claiming this veneration only happened “much later on” and making his strange comments about Aquinas.

>>17440509
>From his exchange with Holland:
"[The supposed Christian suppression of pagan knowledge] didn’t work in the end, because in the end Christianity had to absorb and adopt it.

>Look at Aquinas … That’s the reason why Thomism is the official religion – the official philosophy, beg your pardon – of the Roman Catholic religion … is because Aquinas had to take over the Aristotelian corpus wholesale. So you know that in itself is and enough of an example."

The only thing this is an example of is more of Grayling’s weird mangling of history. His supposed “systematic” campaign of suppression and destruction is feverish fantasy, so the claim it “didn’t work in the end” is nonsense because it never happened in the first place. Therefore the claim that this supposed failure forced Aquinas “to take over the Aristotelian corpus wholesale” is more nonsense. Aquinas was simply working in the centuries-long Christian tradition of accepting, analysing and absorbing pagan learning and synthesising it with the rest of his received intellectual tradition: carrying off the gold of the Egyptians.

After all, Aristotle had been at the core of the medieval curriculum for nearly eight centuries; ever since Boethius (c. 477–524 AD) translated his Categories and De Interpretatione and added them to the Isagoge of Porphyry to make up what came to be known as the logica vetus – the “old logic” that formed one third of the foundational Trivium in all western medieval education. Far from being somehow forced to accept Aristotle and his ilk, Aquinas was merely doing what medieval scholars had always done: using pagan texts that had been accepted since the ancient arguments of Origen and Augustine. Once again, Grayling does not have a clue what he is talking about.

>>17440516
>Then Transmission of Ancient Texts: Cliches vs Realities

... of Grayling’s distinctly spotty grasp of the relevant history is the tangle he gets into over how we moderns manage to read any classical Greek and Roman works at all. In his weird version, the Christians from Theodosius onward supposedly indulged in a “systematic” attempt to destroy these works, which ultimately failed. So then Aquinas, working a whole 900 years later, is forced to accept them in some way. But how did they survive the intervening almost-millennium of alleged Christian destruction and neglect? Grayling has an answer. He begins by talking about the Greek works preserved in Arabic translation in the Muslim world, citing “the library lists in the tenth century of [sic] Baghdad”. When Holland asks “who do you think was translating them?” he responds:

"The Arab and Persian scholars …. I forget the name of the caliph now, who had a dream and said that these texts must be translated from the Greek into Arabic …. [they] preserved technical and medical and astronomical and mathematical texts from the Greek."

Once again, this is a garbled pastiche of things that actually happened and ignorance of context or key details. What Grayling ignores (despite Holland’s repeated and increasingly exasperated attempts to tell him) is that the texts that these “Arab and Persian scholars” translated into Arabic did not fall from the sky – they were given to them by Byzantine and Nestorian scholars. Christian scholars. Christian scholars who had been preserving, studying and commenting on them for centuries and who continued to do so for centuries more.

The real story of how these texts were preserved and passed down to us is far more complex and interesting than Grayling’s confused comic book version. But it is one he has to reject, irritably brush aside or brazenly ignore because it does not fit his ideologically driven anti-Christian narrative at all.

>>17440521
... L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson’s Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, now in its fourth edition and a book that Grayling has clearly never read. Reynolds and Wilson note that “many influential clergy” disliked pagans and their literature and learning equally, but they go on to observe that “if this attitude had been adopted by all the clergy it would in due course, as the new religion became universal by the fifth century, have imposed an effective censorship on classical literature” (p. 48) but make it clear – contra Grayling – that this did not happen.

What definitely did happen is that tastes in what books and ideas were most popular clearly changed with the conversion to Christianity and, unsurprisingly in a period before printing, this affected what books did or did not get copied, which in turn had an impact on what books survived. ... are also clear that this did affect the survival of some ancient books:

"[T]here can be little doubt that one of the major reasons for the loss of classical texts is that most Christians were not interested in reading them, and hence not enough new copies of the texts were made to ensure their survival in an age of war and destruction. (p. 48)"

But this had always been the case. The lyric poet Sappho was highly praised by the Greeks and often referred to simply as “the Poetess” or even “the Tenth Muse”. But she was also depicted as both licentious and bisexual not long after her death and while many Roman poets imitated her style (e.g. Ovid) other Romans disapproved of her supposed “immorality” and especially her homoeroticism – Horace dismissed her as “mascula Sappho”. ... she became a poet who was more praised than read, largely because she wrote in the Aeolic dialect of her native Lesbos, which Attic Greeks regarded as “barbaric”. By Roman times Attic literature was the norm and Aeolic poetry was less read and so less copied.

>>17440527
There were also trends and preferences in pre-Christian philosophy that affected the transmission of certain texts. As Nathan Johnston has discussed, New Atheists like Hitchens and Stenger praise a romanticised version of Democritus’ atomism, mistaking it for a modern-style scientific idea and lamenting the supposed destruction of his works by wicked Christians. But pre-Socratic philosophers like Democritus had already fallen from favour long before Christianity. Diogenes Laërtius tells us that Plato declared that he wished to burn all the works of Democritus that he could collect and was talked out of doing so by Amyclas and Clinias, who pointed out that his works were already widely circulated (see R. Ferwerda, “Democritus and Plato.” Mnemosyne, vol. 25, no. 4, 1972, pp. 337–378.). That may have been so in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, but later trends in philosophy meant other philosophical schools, including Platonic ones, predominated and Democritus’ works were copied less and less.

Indeed, by the time the late Roman Empire converted to Christianity, forms of Neoplatonism were the dominant philosophical force and other schools of thought were already, to varying degrees, comparatively on the wane. Not surprisingly, Christianity adopted a great deal of Neoplatonic thought; both because of its prevalence from the third century onward and because it was broadly compatible with Christian theology. But this does not mean that other philosophies were totally neglected, let alone banned or marked for “systematic” destruction.

John of Damascus encouraged his readers to study “the best contributions of the philosophers of the Greeks” arguing that “whatever there is of good has been given to men from above by God, since ‘every best gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights’”(Philosophical Chapters, 1958,5).

>>17440532
Similarly, Clement argued that philosophy was worth study because “[t]he way of truth is therefore one. But into it, as into a perennial river, streams flow from all sides.” (Stromata, I.5). So not only was Neoplatonism widely studied, but Stoic and Aristotelian works were also commonplace in Christian schools. And even works that were broadly incompatible with Christian ideas were still preserved and studied. Ever since Renaissance literature scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s dubious book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012) became a bestseller, many polemicists have parroted Greenblatt’s claims that Christianity “suppressed” the Epicurean writer Lucretius’ De rerum natura. Of course, this ignores the fact that Greenblatt’s humanist hero Poggio “discovered” Lucretius in a copy preserved by medieval monks. And other evidence shows that this copy was actually one of many. So much for suppression.

What is actually surprising is not how little of this kind of material that was fairly incompatible with Christianity survives, but actually how much of it made it to our time. Even some of the pagan hymns written by the fervently anti-Christian Iamblican, Proclus, – whose mystical Academy in Athens Grayling laments – can be read today because they were preserved by Christians. And if works like this have survived to our time, they represent a fraction of what was actually preserved.

>>17440536
...

These works flowed into a newly vigorous western Europe at exactly the time that more complex political structures and royal and ecclesiastical administrations created a market for scholars. The successful students from the network of cathedral schools set up by Charlemagne and Alcuin and their copiers centuries earlier saw an opportunity and began to take on students of their own. They banded together to form trade unions to pool resources and get privileges from towns and local magnates and the universities were born – the direct ancestors of the modern system of higher learning.

Of course, Grayling is dimly aware of all this, but has to be typically dismissive of it, as it does not fit his agenda:

>[I]t took some time before the idea, the necessity, of a more advanced education – or, indeed, even any education – to come back into the picture. The medieval universities were law, medicine and theology. This was because the growing centralisation of power required bureaucrats; required educated people who could write, who could manage taxation, who could … who could run a kingdom … so, you know, this wasn’t just a matter of trying to understand God’s plan for that for the universe. This was a … this was itself a rebirth of an educational ideal that had been founded in classical antiquity.

Yet again, this is a melange of actual facts and total nonsense. Medieval universities were different to the more informally organised schools of the Classical world in that they had a common structure and adopted an idea from craft guilds whereby students could be assessed by their Masters and then granted a “degree” that made them a Master or a Doctor themselves. This in turn would be recognised in any university across Christendom: a system which nurtured a community of agreed and cumulative scholarship that was later to be an incubator for the rise of the Scientific Method.

>>17440272
i mean, a hungarian physician from the 19th century was scoffed at and forced and beaten a mental institution for merely suggesting washing hands

>>17438717
The Dark Ages refers to the early Middle Ages, not all of it. And what happened during those centuries? We almost never hear of them. This was also the period when Rome became the Byzantine Empire, or in other words, a Middle Eastern shithole.

>it just comes off as "le based Pagan vs le cringe Christcuck"
There's good reason for that. Christian missionaries are annoying, arrogant morons today, and no doubt were back then too. All of the Abrahamic religions have annoying followers. They're terrible religions.

>>17441213
but why is paganism scrutinized? how come christians slandered the nordic pagans as human sacrificers?

It kinda depends on how you define "The Dark Ages" though. A lot of times people don't use "Dark Ages" and "Medieval/Middle Ages" as synonyms. In this case the Dark Ages refers to a particular era of Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval periods before Charlemagne where Western Europe very much did undergo a period of economic collapse, severe population decline, a breakdown of centralized authority, plummeting literacy levels, violent migrations, and other assorted bad times. The problem is using the term to refer to the entirety of the Middle Ages instead of just a specific part.

>>17441220
>but why is paganism scrutinized?
Because the Abrahamic religions turn people into megalomaniacs. This is because they're derived from the Greeks, who themselves were megalomaniacs. The Greek word for barbarian meant "not Greek." Paganism, similarly, refers to anyone not Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. These religions don't respect the other.