Book Summary: The Dark Ages

Western Civilization
Medieval Science by Dr. Jack Sanders book summary

The Dark Ages are a part of a longer period known as the middle Ages that continued to 1500AD. Both ages emphasize the effect of an age on European civilization. Science was thought to have vanished from the world’s progress and scientific understanding was easy to miss during the middle ages. Obstructions of European science and reason during the dark ages simply stopped even though many developments in Europe would prove to be vital to the expansion of human understanding. Dr. Sanders used the barbarians as an example stating that the barbarian’s techniques and ideas that were adapted and made part of European life. For most of the Middle Ages human progress was
Alexander the Great carried to the east the Greek culture which was already spreading over the Mediterranean and throughout Babylonia and Egypt. Alexander took his conquest and army as far as India and new information was taken back to Greece. This new information encouraged the shift from abstract thinking to a more imperial way of thinking. The conquest of Mesopotamia in 331 BC gave forth the details of Babylonian astronomy and mathematics and all this new knowledge was sent to Greece. After the death of Alexander his empire dissolved. Egypt was seized by one of Alexander’s generals, a man by the name of Ptolemy who studied with Aristotle as a youth. Ptolemy’s commitments to learning lead the establishment of the greatest centers of learning in Alexandria. Ptolemy hired Strabo to help him found the museum. Strabo gathered one hundred professors along with hundreds of documents and research from all over the world. Ptolemy turned Alexandria’s museum into the first large scale university in history. The museum/ university had four departments: literature, astronomy, medicine and mathematics. The Alexandrian period was a transitional time between
In science they were amateurs. The Dark Ages was at their worst in the parts of Europe that were furthest from the Mediterranean Sea far from where science was born near the Mediterranean. The secular schools of Italy maintained some of the classical traditions during the whole period but the general culture throughout Europe was not impressive. Many of the works were based on superstition and few men had any interest in philosophy and science unless these subjects could serve religious purposes which lead to fables being accepted as facts when they appeared to have symbolic significance of religion. The importance of craftsmanship for accuracy was increasingly apparent by the early 15th century. It was responsible for what is now known as the experimental method. As craftsman’s refined their specialties the demand for the information increased wanting to understand more and more about materials and how they worked. Important scientific development happened in the muslin world. In 970 the Ommiad’s set up a scientific academy in Cordoba followed by a second center in Toledo. One of the earliest scholars of these academies was a physician named Abu