What is something that was influential back in it's day but is now often forgotten despite it's importance?
What is something that was influential back in it's day but is now often forgotten despite it's importance?
You're viewing a single thread.
Monasteries. Relatively small groups of people living there have changed whole societies.
Can you give an example of such a change?
Not the op but a medieval history nerd all the same.
Monasteries actually were kind of technological powerhouses in their day. Cistercians for instance transmitted technologies, forging techniques, farming and cultivation advances and medical knowledge across Europe because basically you had a sort of "franchise" where every church they made was built and run to a regimented standard. They had the study of latin and a sort of sign language that meant travelling monks could all understand each other and since travel was fairly dangerous and rare it facilitated the transmission of scientific and philosophical thought.
It was fairly common for monasteries to provide state of the art medical care for their time which was actually fairly sophisticated in basic exchange for experimentation, the honing and propagating the research. You see the lingering effect of this in our languages. Clock comes from the word for "bells" because the mechanisms were developed originally to automatically ring the tower bells at the monestaries. Gutenberg likely got his early education in the hopes of pursuing a religious career and yhe printing press was originally to copy bibles. Latin is so entangled with modern science because those systems have their origins in monastic studies that veiwed the study of "natural philosophy" as a sort of religious observance of God's creation.
Similar situations were actually happening in parallel in other places. Religions of various sorts held a very "glue of logistical and technological ties" role in the past. Like the Muslim faith was very key in the developments of maths. Astronomy, medicine, metalworking, farming, the skills required to produce art..you track these developments in the religious temple structures of the Aztecs, Buddhists , Taoists, the Babaloynians, Greek and Romans, Egyptians and so on. Secularism taking over that role is actually all told a very new development in the grand scheme.
That's neat. I can't help but think that it's amazing what we can accomplish when we don't have all the distractions of ordinary life. You pointed out several intellectual achievements from western monks, and we've seen mind-blowing physical achievements from Chinese monks. We waste so much time and energy with socializing, working, farming, and whatever else is a part of ordinary life, that we don't have a lot left for other pursuits. I know that I had a million great ideas when I was unemployed, but never had the money to pursue them. Now that I have the money, I don't have any of the ideas or creativity because I spend all my mental energy at work.
I've always thought it was so neat that all academics spoke Latin in the past, and they could communicate with other academics from other countries without issue. I suppose now they all speak English, but that leaves the English speaking academics without a bad ass second language to distinguish them. One of the coolest scenes in Tombstone is when Jonny Ringo says something in Latin to Doc Holiday and Doc says to his girlfriend "That's Latin darling, apparently Ringo is an educated man", and then they talk shit to each other in Latin for a couple minutes.
Amazing things are being created at some workplaces as well