The Family in the Early Middle Ages - Part One

Family life in the late Roman Empire and Early Middle Ages is in some aspects familiar to the modern eye, but in other aspects very strange. By the end of the early middle ages the family would look a great deal more like the families of today than the families of the ancient world, and this is in large part due to a working out of the differences between Roman marital practices and Barbarian marital practices. The force that was most often responsible for deciding which practices would be adopted and which rejected was the Christian church. Under the influence of Christianity, Roman and Barbarian customs would merge to forge new concepts, customs and laws.

Roman and barbarian families at the time of the great migrations of the 4th and 5th centuries (or Bloodthirsty Barbarian Invasions if you prefer) resembled one another in certain crucial respects. Both the Roman and the Barbarian families were often thought of in terms of the ‘household’. This was a much broader unit than the family of today, which is usually thought of in terms of the nuclear family; two spouses and their children. Roman and Barbarian households certainly consisted of a husband and a wife, and children if they had them, but it also consisted of many more people than that. It consisted of servants, slaves, distant relatives and household property. The only people in Roman and Barbarian society that had households which look like today were the very poorest individuals, those who could not afford servants and slaves.

Another similarity between Roman and Barbarian families was that the head of the household had extensive powers over the members of the household. According to Roman law, the father was the paterfamilias who had complete control over his children as long as he lived. The life or death authority once held by the Roman father was no longer in effect by the 4th century AD but the father still retained significant control. One of most famous examples of this was the right of the head of the household to reject newborns. If a child was born and the head of the household decided that ‘we have too many children as it is’, or that ‘the child seems rather sickly’, or that ‘we have too many girls already’, the head of the household could refuse to pick up the child and at that point the child would either have to be killed, or abandoned to either die or be picked up by someone else. Tacitus was astonished to hear that the Germans ‘hold it shameful to kill any unwanted child’ but it is now thought that unwanted children were exposed by the tribes, usually by being left in the forest.

The Romans and Barbarians accepted various types of long term relationships between men and women. They had marriage, which was intended to be a lifelong commitment between a man and a woman, who intend to have children. But they also accepted relationships which have not made it to the modern world, one example being concubinage. This doesn’t have a great reputation these days. If I was to go to a drinks party at the weekend and introduce my partner as ‘my concubine’ I would doubtless get some very odd looks and a few embarrassed mutterings like ‘oh....how interesting’. In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages concubinage was a socially acceptable relationship in both Barbarian and Roman circle. It referred to a long term, but not necessarily permanent, relationship between a man and a women who cohabited and were willing to have children. As for why someone would want to enter into a concubniage, sometimes there was no choice involved. Roman law forbade members of certain social classes from marrying those of other social classes, in which case your only option was for a relationship of concubinage. Sometimes individuals would not want to marry until the heads of their households had died. Another similarity was that the head of the household would have extensive powers regarding the arrangement of marriages of children. Children sometimes married against the wishes of their parents at great risk. The Lombard Code for example, imposes the death penalty for children who did so.

Another difference was in the naming of people. The Romans had three names signifying something different. So for example, in the name Gaius Julius Caesar, the first name Gaius is the individual name like John or Phillip is today. The second name, Julius refers to your clan or tribe; a group of people claiming descent from a common ancestor. The third name Caesar is the name of the head of the household into which you were born; this would usually be your biological father. The barbarians who came into the Roman Empire had a very different system. Barbarians only had one name, for example Einhart, the biographer of Charlemagne (see illustration on the right). A barbarian name often consisted of two elements, each of which had a specific meaning. It was possible to denote familiar relationships in barbarian society because each family had a collection of familiar suffixes and prefixes that it used almost exclusively. So you could tell who someone’s relatives were by knowing their name. That’s why, for example the historian Nithard's brother was called Harnid using the same combination of items.

You also find important differences in marital property transfers between Barbarians and Romans. When Romans got married, the property transfer took the form of a dowry, a property transfer that moves from the bride and the bride’s family to the groom. In a Germanic barbarian marriage, the property moved in the opposite direction. It was the obligation of the groom and the groom’s family to provide property to the bride and the bride’s family upon marriage. This transfer could take two forms. One was the bride price (property you give to the bride’s family before the marriage), the other was known as morning gift (this one to the bride herself the day after the marriage).

Another striking difference between Roman and barbarian relations was that Romans were monogamists who could only marry one person at a time or have one concubine. Barbarians were polygamists who could be married to several women at the same time and have multiple concubines (which sounds pretty high maintenance to me!).

Perhaps the most important distinction between Roman marriage and barbarian marriage related to marital theory. Romans and Barbarians both gave heads of households important powers over their children but Roman law stipulated that you could not have a marriage between two people who did not both freely consent to the marriage. If one or another party said ‘I do not want to get married’ there is nothing the other could do to force the issue. Barbarians did not regard free consent of the two people as an essential component of marriage. You could have a marriage against the will of one or both parties to the marriage if necessary. The only thing that you must really have under barbarian law was intention on the part of somebody that the two people get married, followed by consummation. No consummation, no marriage. This theoretical distinction had important consequences. For example, in Roman law, marriage by abduction is not permissible. You could not kidnap a woman and force her to marry you against her will. In barbarian law it would be reprehensible to kidnap someone and marry them – you would probably get fined for doing so – but it would still be legal.

As the dominant cultural force of the time, it was the Church which would ultimately sift through these conflicting practices and determine which were permissible. Roman culture would spread to the barbarians, but filtered through a Christian lens. We will look at what would eventually emerge in part two.

Further Reading

Family Life in the Middle Ages - Linda Elizabeth Mitchell

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Size Doesn't Matter, part 3

In this series I am contesting the claim that the unimaginable vastness of the universe, revealed to us in modern astronomy, makes it absurd to ascribe any significance to the earth and its inhabitants. In part 1 I addressed the science side of this claim and in part 2 I addressed the historical side. Ignoring the issues already discussed, this claim assumes that the relative sizes of the earth and the universe demonstrate that the former must be, somehow, insignificant or unimportant. Apparently, on some level, we instinctively equate size with value or significance. The original meaning of the word "great" is "very large", a phenomenon that occurs in many languages. "Bigger" just means "better."

But to take this as an ontological statement about something's actual importance is incredibly naïve. Just because bigger sometimes seems better, it's absurd to think that there is a significant correlation between size and value. What exactly is it about size that would bestow value anyway? Why would a smaller thing automatically be less important than a bigger thing? While it's true that the immense size of the universe can make us feel insignificant, this is a psychological fact about us, not a scientific fact about the universe. For people who accuse others of simple-mindedness, those who argue that the universe's size demonstrates our unimportance are remarkably simple minded themselves.

C. S. Lewis puts this so much better than I ever could that I'll just refer you to the 7th chapter of Miracles:

There is no doubt that we all feel the incongruity of supposing, say, that the planet Earth might be more important than the Great Nebula in Andromeda. On the other hand, we are all equally certain that only a lunatic would think a man six-feet high necessarily more important than a man five-feet high, or a horse necessarily more important than a man, or a man's legs than his brain. In other words this supposed ratio of size to importance feels plausible only when one of the sizes involved is very great. And that betrays the true basis of this type of thought. When a relation is perceived by Reason, it is perceived to hold good universally. If our Reason told us that size was proportional to importance, the small differences in size would be accompanied by small differences in importance just as surely as great differences in size were accompanied by great differences in importance. Your six-foot man would have to be slightly more valuable than the man of five feet, and your leg slightly more important than your brain -- which everyone knows to be nonsense. The conclusion is inevitable: the importance we attach to great differences of size is an affair not of reason but of emotion -- of that peculiar emotion which superiorities in size begin to produce in us only after a certain point of absolute size has been reached.

We are inveterate poets. When a quantity is very great we cease to regard it as a mere quantity. Our imaginations awake. Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality -- the Sublime. But for this, the merely arithmetical greatness of the Galaxy would be no more impressive than the figures in an account book. To a mind which did not share our emotions and lacked our imaginative energies, the argument against Christianity from the size of the universe would be simply unintelligible. It is therefore from ourselves that the material universe derives its power to overawe us. Men of sensibility look up on the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid men do not. When the silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal, it was Pascal's own greatness that enabled them to do so; to be frightened by the bigness of the nebulæ is, almost literally, to be frightened at our own shadow. For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them. As a Christian I do not say we are wrong to tremble at that shadow, for I believe it to be the shadow of an image of God. But if the vastness of Nature ever threatens to overcrow our spirits, we must remember that it is only Nature spiritualised by human imagination which does so. This suggests a possible answer to the question raised a few pages ago -- why the size of the universe, known for centuries, should first in modern times become an argument against Christianity. Has it perhaps done so because in modern times the imagination has become more sensitive to bigness? From this point of view the argument from size might almost be regarded as a by-product of the Romantic Movement in poetry. In addition to the absolute increase of imaginative vitality on this topic, there has pretty certainly been a decline on others. Any reader of old poetry can see that brightness appealed to ancient and medieval man more than bigness, and more than it does to us. Medieval thinkers believed that the stars must be somehow superior to the Earth because they looked bright and it did not. Moderns think that the Galaxy ought to be more important than the Earth because it is bigger. Both states of mind can produce good poetry. Both can supply mental pictures which rouse very respectable emotions -- emotions of awe, humility, or exhiliration. But taken as serious philosophical argument both are ridiculous.

It reminds me of Jodie Foster's comment at the end of Contact (I don't know if it's present in the novel by Carl Sagan): if we're the only living creatures in the universe, it seems like an awful waste of space. But as Victor Reppert writes, "It is not as if energy or time [or space] is a scarce resource for God and we have to ask him, if he seems to be ‘wasting’ it, why he isn't putting it to better use. ‘Waste’ is an issue only where there is scarcity."

A similar objection that I mentioned in part 1 needs further comment. I pointed out that the universe's mass density -- the amount of matter in the universe -- must be extremely fine-tuned. Otherwise, the universe's expansion would have precluded the possibility of life existing anywhere at any time in the universe's history. In other words, the universe must be the particular size it is in order for us to exist. However, one could point out that while this matter may have been necessary at the universe's inception, it seems gratuitous for it to still be here. To insist that this vast universe is all there for our sake seems absurd. Every piece of matter may have had some relevance to the universe's initial expansion billions of years ago, but there is no obvious connection between distant pieces of matter and the human race's present existence. There are plenty of galaxies billions of light years away, which have plenty of planets orbiting plenty of suns. What does a particular rock on one of these planets have to do with life on earth now? The absence of such a connection makes humanity appear irrelevant to the universe.

Ignoring my previous response, this objection assumes that life or the human race is the only possible reason why the Judeo-Christian God would have created the universe. But just because all this matter has no relevance to humanity's existence today, it does not mean that God does not delight in it for some other reason, and so sustains it in existence. Again, this point is made best by C. S. Lewis:

There is no question of religious people fancying that all exists for man and scientific people discovering that it does not. Whether the ultimate and inexplicable being -- that which simply is -- turns out to be God or "the whole show," of course it does not exist for us. On either view we are faced with something which existed before the human race appeared and will exist after the Earth has become uninhabitable; which is utterly independent of us though we are totally dependent on it; and which, through vast ranges of its being, has no relevance to our own hopes and fears. For no man was, I suppose, ever so mad as to think that man, or all creation, filled the Divine Mind; if we are a small thing to space and time, space and time are a much smaller thing to God. It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion.

A final point: in order to assert that the premoderns thought that the earth's size somehow rendered its inhabitants significant, it would require us to believe (at least) that they thought the earth and its inhabitants significant. In order for the statement, "they believed X because of Y" to be true, it has to be true that "they believed X." The argument that they thought the earth's size bequeathed significance on humanity can't even get off the ground unless they thought humanity had significance.

But this is not the case. We've already mentioned one criterion: brightness. The earth was thought to be less important and valuable than the celestial objects because they were bright while the earth was not. Another criterion that's often misunderstood is the earth's location at the center of the universe. This is usually twisted to imply that the center was the place of prestige, but the exact opposite is the case. They thought Earth was located at the bottom of the universe, which, in their view, was the least prestigious place therein. And the further down you went, the worse it was; this is why hell was thought to be at the center of the earth, and Satan at the center of hell. Arthur Lovejoy, in The Great Chain of Being, wrote that the medieval model is better described as "diabolocentric" than "geocentric." See the essays by Dennis Danielson on this.

However, one might object that Christianity conceives human beings as being so significant that God chose to be incarnated as one to die on their behalf. But this misunderstands exactly what the Christian claim is.

Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. It does involve the belief that God loves man and for his sake became man and died. I have not yet succeeded in seeing how what we know (and have known since the days of Ptolemy) about the size of the universe affects the credibility of this doctrine one way or the other. ... If it is maintained that anything so small as the Earth must, in any event, be too unimportant to merit the love of the Creator, we reply that no Christian ever supposed we did merit it. Christ did not die for men because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because He is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely.

In other words, whatever significance or value human beings have is derivative. The moral law tells us that people do have an inherent value; the reason murder is wrong, for example, is because each individual is of infinite worth. But the reason each individual is of infinite worth is because he/she is created in God's image. And the reason God loves us is not because we are lovely or lovable, but because he is loving; indeed, the claim is that God is love itself.

(see also part 1 and part 2)

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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Military Selection

Recently I have been trying to post on matters Medieval; however I always have one foot firmly in the 19th century. In the book Galileo goes to Gaol and Other Myths about Science and Religion there was quite a good essay by Robert J Richards on the German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel. Richards has had something of a longrunning spat with Daniel Gasman over how much inspiration the Nazis took from Haeckel’s work (see here and here). The full text of this essay happens to be online here and I thought it was fairly successful. Anyone familiar with the history of the Third Reich knows what a hopelessly confused mish-mash of ideas National Socialism really was; hence one can find many antecedents but no single blueprint.

The part I found the most interesting was Haeckel’s idea of ‘Military Selection’, a phenomenon he noted during the Franco Prussian War of 1870-71. He appears to have been under the impression, that while the most heroic and virile men were manning the front and getting slaughtered, the most cowardly and feeble men were manning the bedrooms and propagating themselves. Haeckel writes:

The opposite of this artificial selection of the wild Redskins and the ancient Spartans is seen in the individual selection which is universally practised in our modern military states, for the purpose of maintaining standing armies, and which, under the name of military selection, we may conveniently consider as a special form of selection. Unfortunately, in our day, militarism is more than ever prominent in our so-called "civilisation"; all the strength and all the wealth of flourishing civilised states are squandered on its development; whereas the education of the young, and public instruction, which are the foundations of the true welfare of nations and the ennobling of humanity, are neglected and mismanaged in a most pitiable manner. And this is done in states which believe themselves to be the privileged leaders of the highest human intelligence, and to stand at the head of civilisation.

As is well known, in order to increase the standing army as much as possible, all healthy and strong young men are annually selected by a strict system of recruiting. The stronger, healthier, and more spirited a youth is, the greater is his prospect of being killed by needle-guns, cannons, and other similar instruments of civilisation. All youths that are unhealthy, weak, or affected with infirmities, on the other hand, are spared by the "military selection," and remain at home during the war, marry, and propagate themselves. The more useless, the weaker, or infirmer the youth is, the greater is his prospect of escaping the recruiting officer, and of founding a family. While the healthy flower of youth dies on the battle-field, the feeble remainder enjoy the satisfaction of reproduction and of transmitting all their weaknesses and infirmities to their descendants. According to the laws of transmission by inheritance, there must necessarily follow in each succeeding generation, not only a further extension, but also a more deeply-seated development of weakness of body, and what is inseparable from it, a condition of mental weakness also. This and other forms of artificial selection practised in our civilised states sufficiently explain the sad fact that, in reality, weakness of the body and weakness of character are on the perpetual increase among civilised nations, and that, together with strong, healthy bodies, free and independent spirits are becoming more and more scarce....

If any one were to venture the proposal, after the examples of the Spartans and Redskins, to kill, immediately upon their birth, all miserable, crippled children to whom with certainty a sickly life could be prophesied, instead of keeping them in life injurious to them and to the race, our so-called "humane civilisation" would utter a cry of indignation. But the same "humane civilisation" thinks it quite as it should be, and accepts without a murmur, that at the outbreak of every war (and in the present state of civilised life, and in the continual development of standing armies, wars must naturally become more frequent) hundreds and thousands of the finest men, full of youthful vigour, are sacrificed in the hazardous game of battles.

It’s curious to see what is essentially an anti-militaristic argument coupled with a proposal to murder disabled children. This kind of rhetoric of racial disintegration was pretty much par for the course in the late 19th and early twentieth century. One recalls Francis Galton’s infamous plan to ‘restock Africa’ with ‘Chinamen’.

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The Great Translation Movements

“seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject, and regretting the poverty of the Latins in these things, he learned the Arabic language, in order to translate. To the end of his life, he continued to transmit to the Latin world, as if to his own beloved heir, whatever books he thought finest, in many subjects, as accurately and as plainly as he could.”

Extract from the life of Gerard of Cremona

Latin scholars in the 12th century recognised that not all cultures are equal. They were painfully aware that with respect to science and natural philosophy, their civilisation was manifestly inferior to that of Islam. They faced an obvious choice: learn from their superiors or remain inferior forever. They chose to learn and launched a massive effort to translate as many Arabic texts into Latin as was feasible. Had they asumed that all cultures were equal, or that theirs was superior, they would have had no reason to seek out arab learning and the glorious scientific legacy that followed would not have occured.

Edward Grant - The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages

Whatever the causes, the effects of the 12th century Renaissance were dramatic. It was a time of broad based cultural change across Europe in almost every field. The Gothic style of art developed and along with it the age of the great cathedral building. In religion, reforms occurred. The Cluniac reforms and the Cistercian reforms both originate from this period. Changes also occurred in language and literature. The vernacular became used more and more often in literature and song. Similarly, in music, in law, in education, there were new reforms going on everywhere. In the case of the history of science the most important development was the initiation of a widespread translation movement. In the Middle East one of these had occurred when Arabic culture had availed itself of Greek learning. Now it was the turn of European scholars to come into contact with and build on, the philosophical and scientific traditions of antiquity and Islam translating by their corpus from Arabic into Latin.

The earliest translations appear to have been made in Northern Spanish monasteries in the tenth century. There are manuscripts that exist now in Barcelona which came from the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll in the foothills of the Pyrenees. These talk about things like the use of the astrolabe and Arabic mathematics. The texts are in Latin, so clearly the people at this monestary had availed themselves of some of the learning around them. Gerbert of Aurillac (945-1003) was a teacher, and future Pope, who went to Spain and showed a particular interest in mathematics and astronomy (an account of his life can be found in chapter 2 of God's Philosophers). There he learned how to use the astrolabe and properly introduced the instrument back to Latin Europe. He also wrote a treatise on the abacus. These 10th century translations seem to have had very little impact. They were not widely spread outside of Spain. It was only with the political and social stability of the 12th century that an extended appropriation and assimilation of Arabic learning would take place. This would happen predominantly on the Iberian Penisula.

In the 11th century, Christian forces made substantial gains into the Islamic Empire which increased awareness of Arab learning. In the year 1085, the city of Toledo was taken, capturing a large chunk of northern Spain for the Christian west. Spain provided the prime location for translations for three reasons. Firstly, there was a settled Arabic culture. Toledo had been under Islamic occupation for 375 years, Cordoba had been ruled by the Islamic empire for 500 years. The second factor which made Spain a prime location was the presence of numerous Christian communities which had been there since the Islamic conquest. These were known as Mozarabs and they produced the first translations. These native Spaniards like John of Seville were born in Arab south but moved to the Christian north and began the translations early on. Another was Hug of Santia who was patronised by the Bishop of Tarragona in the Kingdom of Aragon. The third was the ease of travel to Spain. It is a lot easier to cross the Pyrenees from France than it is to get on a boat and go to Baghdad or Cairo.

What were the motivations of the translators?. Many of them note that their activity was aimed at curing what they called the ‘poverty of the Latins’. They recognised the riches of Arabic civilisation, learning and libraries and wanted to bring them to their native Latin culture. For example, when Robert of Ketton translated the first treaties on alchemy in 1144, he writes in the preface:

‘this is because alchemy, what it is and what its goals are, are hitherto unknown to my Latin people’.

Medieval Latins readily acknowledged the superiority of Arabic intellectual culture. In fact Arabic authorship of a text became more or less a mark or guarantee of it’s quality. This was so pronounced that in the 12th and 13th century there were Latin authors trying to pass themselves off as Arabic authors by signing their texts with pseudo Arabic names. This gave them the authority of the Arabic world. The most productive of the translators was Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187), an Italian. His students wrote of him that he:

had come to a knowledge of all of this that was known to the Latins; but for love of the Almagest, which he could not find at all among the Latins, he went to Toledo; there, seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject, and regretting the poverty of the Latins in these things, he learned the Arabic language, on order to be able to translate.

He would spend the rest of his life there in Toledo and taught his students how to translate and carry on his work. He would eventually translate over 70 books on astronomy, mathematics, physics, medicine, classical works and Arabic works. He translated six works of Aristotle, Euclid's elements and the algebra and mathematics of al-Khwārizmī. (It was hard to translate al-Khwārizmī’s name so it became Algoritmi from which the word Algorithm comes). He translated the work of Al kindi on optics and vision, Thabit ibn Quarra’s very technical treatise on Astronomy, eight books of Galen on medicine; works of alchemy by Jabir ibn Hayyan(Geber) and by the pseudo Al-Razi.

Floods of translators emerged from all parts of Europe, from England, Italy Germany and even from Slavic lands to translate works into Latin. But Spain was not the only place for this type of work. Sicily in the 12th century had a stable, multi-ethnic and trilingual culture. This was because a kingdom had been set up there by the Normans. They had conquered Sicily from the Muslims and set up a court in which the languages were Latin, Greek and Arabic. There they had a very multicultural atmosphere, for example Roger of Sicily invited Arab scholars to come and work at this court, the most famous being Al-Idrisi who was a cartographer. His maps are some of the only ones which uniformly put south at the top and north at the bottom (see the image on the right).

In the 13th century a second phase of the translation movement began and the attention turned eastwards towards the Byzantine Empire. By now the Latins had a taste for classical literature and thought it would be better to get the original sources. In some sense this was right. Translation was not the high art it could have been. The greatest translator here was William of Moerbeke, a Flemish Dominican who lived most of his life in Greece. He was the bishop of Corinth and was encouraged by his friend St Thomas Aquinas to find better translations of Aristotle (Aquinas was unhappy with the quality of those that were in Europe at the time – many sentences were incomprehensible). William translated 50 books, including everything we have now of Aristotle. He also translated everything he could find of Archimedes.

Interestingly not much classical literature appears to have been translated in these paticular movements. Instead the focus was primarily on logic and natural philosophy which indicates there was a strong demand for these in the 12th and 13th centuries. There was some need that had to be filled by natural and philosophical works, a need fuelled by the schools started by Charlemagne’s edict. These schools developed as important centres of learning and rapidly replaced rural monastic centres as the focus of intellectual study. The educational institutions which developed in the 12th and 13th centres in turn would give rise to a peculiarly medieval institution, the university.

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A Spectacular Invention

If anyone examine letters or other minute objects through the medium of crystal of glass, if it be shaped like the lesser segment of a sphere with the convex side towards the eye, he will see the letters far better and they will seem larger to him..such an instrument is useful to all persons and to those with weak eyes, for they can see any letter, however small if magnified enough.

Roger Bacon

One of nature’s great inventions is the human eye. Unfortunately it is also one which has a particular biological problem which usually manifests itself around the age of 40. Here the lens begins to harden, a condition which can bring about farsightedness (presbyopia) and cause the organ to no longer be able to focus on close objects. Until the 13th century the only way to cope with this was the use of crude magnifying glasses and crystals. Then in 1285, a breakthrough was made. In 1306 a sermon was given by a Father Giordano de Pisa, in which he said:

‘Not in all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them. Every day one could discover a new art...It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles that help one see well, an art that is one of the best and most necessary in the world. And that is such a short time ago that a new art that never existed was invented..I myself saw the man who discovered and practiced it and talked with him’

This announcement was probably meant to spread the word outside the monasteries to the general public who could make good use of the invention. The craft of making eyeglasses had evidently been established by a small group of artisans. Pisa at that time had a thriving glass industry with many mirror and drinking glass makers. The inventor himself had chosen to remain secret, probably more out of commercial self interest than personal modesty. The first spectacles produced were simply two magnifying glass handles riveted together and hung on the nose. The convex lenses were manufactured from quartz or beryl. These were difficult to keep in place and several different methods were tried. These included hooking them to a hat brim, attaching them to a plate over the forehead, clamping them on the temples and putting spatula like extensions under that hat. The lenses themselves were probably not of great quality, however they did not have to be particularly accurate to fix farsightedness which simply required magnification.

When printed books arrived, the demand for spectacles increased dramatically. Mass production increased resulting in many primitive poor quality products. In 1465 the Spectacle Maker’s Guild brought in regulation and quality gradually increased. By this time similar guilds had been formed in Germany, France, England, Italy and Holland. In the 15th century, thousands of spectacles were being produced in Florence and Venice and convex lenses had been developed for short-sightedness. The Florentines in particular understood that vision declines with age and manufactured their eyeglasses in batches of five year strengths.

What was so great about this invention?. Well as one commentator recently put it, ‘spectacles have effectively doubled the active life of everyone who reads or does fine work-and prevented the world being run by people under 40’. The invention of eyeglasses had the effect of more than doubling the working life of skilled craftsmen. This was especially true of scribes, readers, instrument and toolmakers, close weavers and metal workers. Fine work and fine instruments could be produced. Scholars and copyists could continue their work and people became accustomed to the idea that human physical limitations could be transcended by human inventions.

David S Landes in 'The Wealth and Poverty of Nations' suggests that the development of eyeglasses and manufacturing of lenses pushed Europeans into other areas and prompted the invention of precision measurement and control devices such as fine wheel cutters, gauges and micrometers. This laid the groundwork for articulated machines with fitted parts. Furthermore the Europeans were beginning to move towards replication and mass production.

Importantly for the history of science, the knowledge of lenses was spreading and opening up new possibilities. In the Low Countries (which became the main suppliers of spectacles to Britain) the microscope and the telescope would be invented in the 1600s and open the door to new worlds.

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Reawakening the West

‘When the wisdom of the ancient times was dead and had passed away, and our own days of light had not yet come, there lay a great black gulf in human history, a gulf of ignorance, of superstition, of cruelty, and of wickedness. That time we call the dark or Middle Ages.’

Howard Pyle, Otto of the Silver Hand (1888)

‘Popular opinion, journalistic cliché and misinformed historians aside, recent research has shown that the Middle Ages were a period of enormous advances in science, technology and culture’

James Hannam – God’s Philosophers

‘A series of interlocked technical innovations—an agricultural revolution, new military technologies, and a dependence on wind and water for the generation of power—shaped the history of medieval Europe.....Europe transformed itself from a cultural backwater based on an economy scarcely more advanced than that of traditional Neolithic societies to a vibrant and unique, albeit aggressive, civilization that came to lead the world in the development of science and industry.’

James E McClellan and Harold Dorn – Science and Technology in World History

The twelfth century is often referred to as the first renaissance for the Latin West, a time of great intellectual revitalisation in Europe. There were a few attempts from the period around 600 to 1000 to try to reorganise and reignite Latin culture in Europe after the traumatic collapse of Roman civilisation, but these tended to be largely local and short lived. The first real attempt was by Charlemagne who was crowned first king of the Franks and then in 800, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The so called ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ did have some effects, the most important being the edict he made stating that every cathedral and monastery must open a school. Charlemagne himself opened a palace school in his palace at Aachen and imported the English scholar Alcuin of York (705 - 804). The York school was renowned as a centre of learning not only in religious matters but also in the seven liberal arts. Sadly these nuances were lost on the Danish Vikings of Ivar the Boneless who managed to sack it in 866.

Alcuin was a superb teacher and scholar who copied out classical texts. He also wrote educational manuals, (rather homo-erotic) poetry and a large number of letters. Deciding that ‘the Lord was calling me to the service of King Charles’ , and with the support of Theodulf of Orleans, Alcuin brought in Anglo Saxon teaching methods, helped run a school for both clerical and laypeople and in addition, developed a new style of writing. The Carolingian script as it came to be called was easier to write and read and was also supposed to reproduce the way the Ancient Romans wrote (which it didn’t). Charlemagne’s edict was partially urged on by his concern that even the clergy were not well educated and it took some time for it to take effect. Alcuin had written to Charlemagne that ‘If your zeal were imitated by others, we might see a new Athens rising up in Francia, more splendid than the old’ yet reviving the intellectual culture was a rather sluggish process because of the instability of Europe in this period up until the 11th century.

(It was also Alcuin who said ‘those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness’, something that remains true today, as evidenced by the Guardian’s comment is free section.)

The cultural flowering of the 12th century was sparked by a number of different factors. The first was that the barbarian raids dramatically declined in frequency. These raids, a long torment of rapine, invasion and plunder by enemies from all sides, had contributed to the gradual attrition and collapse of the Roman Empire and continued throughout the Early Middle Ages. By the Tenth century they had begun to dwindle. This allowed for the resumption of a stable coastal life and trade once again.

The second factor was the surge of the European population in the 1100s. It is very difficult to estimate what the population of Europe was in the Middle Ages, but scholars have suggested that it doubled in that century. It may even have quadrupled in a very short period of time. This meant more urbanism which allowed more division of labour. More division of labour brought more leisure time, all of which meant more space for intellectual development (Interestingly the Greek word ‘schole’ from which scholar emerges means ‘leisure’, because scholars are leisured people; apparently).

How was this population supported?. It has been suggested that there was a widespread climactic change in the period from about 1000 to 1200 in which the weather was warmer and wetter than usual. There is some evidence this is actually the case (this was the time when the Norsemen were able to colonise Greenland and sail to North America).

A critical development was the enhancement of technology which was greatly improved at the time and is covered in chapter one of ‘God’s Philosophers’. One important innovation was the horse collar. This proved superior to the old method of harnessing which used a bar across the chest of the horse (the throat-girth harness). This meant that as soon as the horse started pulling it would cut off its windpipe, thus meaning the Romans, who had used it, could not extract the maximum work from their animals. The arrival of the horse collar would allow the full use of horse power.

The widespread use of water wheels also emerged at this time. The Romans because of their slave culture did not worry about where to get power from (there were always cheap slaves). They had begun to do some interesting things with water power in the last centuries of the empire because the supply of slaves had shrunk, but by this time it was too late; order and trade had collapsed.

In the Middle Ages ,water and wind technology started developing to a greater extent. Undershot waterwheels were constructed at many sites across the western European landscape. In England alone, there were 5,624 mills by 1086 and far more on the continent .Wind was harnessed to turn windmills and tidal flow to drive tidal mills. This required the mastery of older kinds of mechanical gearing and linkage. New kinds would have to be invented including accessories such as cranks and toothed gears. These made it possible to use power at a distance, to alter it’s direction and convert it from rotary to reciprocating motion. Millwrights were increasingly able to perform an increasing variety of tasks, to grind corn, to pound cloth, hammer metal and, most importantly, mash hops for beer. Saw mills, flour mills, and hammer mills sprung up and windmills were used to reclaim land from the sea. That combined with crop rotation produced more food, which meant less work and more leisure time and so forth.

As a result, Medieval Europe rapidly became the first great civilization not to be run primarily by human muscle power. The History and Economic Professor David S Landes goes so far as to call the society of Europe in the Middle Ages ‘one of the most inventive societies history had even known’. As James McClellen writes in ‘Science and Technology in World History’:

'Europeans perfected water- and wind-driven mills, the spring catapult (or trebuchet), and a host of other devices, and in so doing they drew on new sources of nonhuman motive power. Their civilization was literally driven by comparatively more powerful “engines” of wind and water which tapped more energy of one sort or another than anywhere else in the world. Medieval Europeans have been described as “power-conscious to the point of fantasy,” and by dint of the medieval fascination with machines, more than other cultures European civilization came to envision nature as a wellspring of power to be exploited technologically for the benefit of humankind. This distinctive attitude toward nature has had powerful and increasingly dire consequences.'

See also:

How Dark were the Dark Ages? - James Hannam
Medieval Science and Justinian I - James Hannam

Stirrups, Horse Harnesses and Richard Carrier - James Hannam
The Medieval Technology Pages - Paul J Gans
The Great Harness Controversy - Paul J Gans
The Great Stirrup Controversy - Paul J Gans


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More Reason for Ya

If you are short of amusement this morning, be sure to check out the spectacle of a Neuroscience PHD student with a BA in Philosophy to his name, lecturing the scientific community on who can and cannot be 'a true scientist'. This would be like me attempting to lecture the academic community of historians on how 'you cannot be a Marxist and a proper historian at the same time'; except of course my MA is actually in the subject I would be addressing. Eric Hobsbawm would still be more than entitled to tell me to 'sod off' though.

Of note is his comment that:

While it is invariably advertised as an expression of “respect” for people of faith, this accommodationism is nothing more than naked condescension, motivated by fear. Mooney and Kirshenbaum assure us that people will choose religion over science, no matter how good a case is made against religion. In certain contexts, this fear is probably warranted. I wouldn’t be eager to spell out the irrationality of Islam while standing in the Great Mosque in Mecca. But let’s be honest about how Mooney and Kirshenbaum view public discourse in the United States: watch what you say, or the Christian mob will burn down the library of Alexandria all over again. By comparison, the “combativeness” of the “New Atheists” seems entirely collegial.

This would be a remarkable achievement, not least because a Christian mob never burned down the Great Library of Alexandria in the first place. See:

The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria - James Hannam
The Foundation and Loss of the Royal and Serapeum Libraries of Alexandria - James Hannam
Tim O' Neil's treatment of the New Hypatia Movie - The Great Library and it's myths
The (rather heated) discussion in the comments here
This discussion by Roger S Bagnall in 'Hellenistic and Roman Egypt'

Interestingly, Roger S Bagnall says that:

Passions still run high on this matter. When Glen Bowerstock first invited me to present this paper, I hesitated because of a traumatic early experience. I wrote an article on the Alexandrian Library on commission for a short lived magazine called 'The Dial', published for Channel 13. The editor did not like my caution about the accounts of the destruction of the library and , without telling me, rewrote the article to blame everything squarely on the Christians. Whether he hated Christianity or just liked a simple storyline I do not know'.

So far, that's all these much vaunted 'secular values' of The Reason Project' appear to consist of. Simple stories, long-winded rants and rapidly disappearing up one's own posterior.

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Ratramnus and the Dog Heads

Near a mountain called Nulo there live men whose feet are turned backwards and have eight toes on each foot. Megasthenes writes that on different mountains in India there are tribes of men with dog shaped heads, armed with claws, clothed with skins, who speak not in the accents of human language, but only bark and have fierce grinning jaws.....Those who live near the source of the Ganges, requiring nothing in the shape of food, subsist on the odour of wild apples, and when they go on a long journey, they carry these with them for safety of their life by inhaling their perfume..Should they inhale air, death is inevitable

Megasthenes’ Indica – Reported in Pliny

People in the Middle Ages inherited many esoteric ideas from antiquity, among them the belief that beyond the known world there are races of beings that look very different to humans. Although strange to the modern eye, this notion was widespread in the ancient and medieval world. In Pliny we find that Ctesias, a Greek physician, claimed that he had heard of tribes without necks . This resulted in the eyes being displaced to the shoulder. Others had eyes in the middle of the forehead. Some, like the Scythian cannibals, drank out of human skulls and used the scalps as napkins (at least they had some table manners). Still more strange were the Monocoli (Monopods), a tribe which had one leg and an enormous foot. In hot weather they would lie on their backs and protect themselves with the shadow of their feet. The Machlyes, according to Aristotle, performed the function of either sex alternatively, being equipped with the left breast of a man and the right of a woman. Some people in India would have sex with wild animals and produce children of mixed species. Other races had men with dog’s heads and tails.

Ctesias wrote:

‘In the mountains dwell men who have the head of a dog; they wear skins of wild beasts as clothing, and they speak no language, but bark like dogs, and in this way understand one another’s speech. They have teeth bigger than a dog’s...they understand the speech of the Indians, but cannot respond to them; instead they bark and signal with their hands and fingers, as do mutes’.

They attempt to cook their food, but lacking the ability to make fires, they have to cook it in the boiling sun. Their sexual activity is rather what one would expect of a canine:

‘All of them, men and women, have a tail above their hips, like a dog’s except bigger and smoother. They have intercourse with their wives on all fours like dogs, and consider any other form of intercourse to be shameful. They are just, and the longest lived of any human race; for they get to be 160, sometimes 200 years of age’.

The existence or non existence of the dog-heads at the edge of the known world being somewhat hard to verify, the idea became popularised in the medieval period, a subject documented by Robert Bartlett in ‘The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages’. The dog-heads had passed into popular legend but also into the imagination of monks and clerics due to the great encyclopaedias and standard texts of the late Roman and early Medieval world. They were probably also used as bogeymen to frighten enemies and to represent virtues and vices in Church art. Hence according to a Welsh poem, King Arthur fought with the creatures:

‘On the mountain of Edinburgh; He fought with dog-heads; By the Hundred they fell’

A story of St Christopher from Ireland depicted him in these terms:

‘Now this Christopher was one of the Dogheads, a race that had the heads of dogs and ate human flesh. He meditated much on God, but at that time he could speak only the language of the Dogheads. When he saw how much the Christians suffered he was indignant and left the city. He began to adore God and prayed. "Almighty God," he said, "give me the gift of speech, open my mouth, and make plain thy might that those who persecute thy people may be converted". An angel of God came to him and said: "God has heard your prayer."The angel raised Christopher from the ground, and struck and blew upon his mouth, and the grace of eloquence was given him as he had desired.’

Having regretted his former pagan, human-eating habits, St Christopher became baptised. As a result he gained human appearance before getting martyred.

In the 9th century a churchman called Rimbert - who later became the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen – was planning to leave on a missionary journey to the northern reaches of Scandinavia. The idea of converting Scandinavia to Christianity had been enthusiastically pursued by the Emperor Louis the Pious and Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims in the 820s. In preparation for the journey Rimbert wrote to Ratramnus, a monk of Corbie in Picardy, asking for information regarding the dog-heads, whom he thought he might encounter. Ratramnus had been sent a dossier Rimbert had put together which informed him that the dog-heads lived in villages, practised agriculture and domesticated animals. In response Ratramnus wrote his Epistola de Cynocephalis a work which would answer the question of whether the dog-heads were worthy of evangelism. The issue hinged on whether the mysterious creatures could be considered rational. Ratramnus begins by describing their manner of speaking:

the form of their heads and their canine barking shows that they are similar not to humans but to animals. In fact, the heads of humans are on top and round in order for them to see the heavens, while those of dogs are long and drawn out in a snout so that they can look at the ground. And humans speak, while dogs bark.

And yet, despite their appearance, the information Rimbert had supplied clearly indicated they were capable of domesticating animals. ‘I do not see’ wrote Ratramnus, ‘how this could be so if they had an animal and not a rational soul’:

since the living things of the earth were subjected to men by heaven, as we know from having read Genesis. But it has never been heard or believed that animals of one kind can by themselves take care of other animals, especially those of a domestic kind, keep them, compel them to submit to their rule, and follow regular routines.

Ratramnus pointed to the way in which the dog-heads ‘keep the rules of society’ and recognised the rule of law. ‘There cannot be any law, which common descent has not decreed. But such cannot be established or kept without the discipline of morality’. Unlike Ctesias’s dog-heads, Rimbert’s report stated that they covered their genitalia. Ratramnus interpreted this as a sign of decency and these and others attributes convinced him they were human; in any case, St Christopher had once been one and converted. Hence, Ratramnus concluded that the dog-heads were degenerated descendants of Adam, although the Church generally classed them with beasts. They may even receive baptism by being rained upon. Here Ratramnus was following in the footsteps of Augustine of Hippo, who had written that if the monstrous races do exist, they were created according to God’s will and, if they are human and descended from Adam, they must be capable of salvation. This would extend the Churches missionary obligation to the farthest flung parts of the earth and make ‘monstrous missionising’ a necessary fulfilment of Christ’s charge.

Lest we sneer from our Modern standpoint, it has to be pointed out that Ratramnus is responding to what he thinks is good information from a man who was travelling to Scandinavia, the edge of the known world. In his reply he is using what are recognisably modern anthropological categories to decide whether the dog-heads are man or beast. His work covers issues which were to become extremely pertinent when Europeans came into contact with other peoples in the New World and the debate began concerning whether they had souls capable of salvation and were entitled to equal dignity and universal brotherhood.

In the event, according to Bartlett, one John de Marignollis travelled to the Far East in the 1330s and looked for the monstrous races the ancients had spoken of. Unable to find the one legged monopods he concludes that the travellers who had reported their existence must have been confused by the umbrellas the Indians carried. He tried to ask the locals about the existence of the dog-heads and other tribes but unfortunately the only response he appears to have got is ‘we thought they lived where you came from’.

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The Dragons of the Swiss Alps

" Its length, he said, was at least seven feet ; its girth approximately that of an apple tree ; it had a head like a cat's, but no feet. He said that he smote and slew it with the assistance of his brother Thomas. He added that before it was killed, the people of the neighbourhood complained that the milk was withdrawn from their cows, and that they could never discover the author of the mischief, but that the mischief ceased after the dragon had been killed."

Johann Jakob Scheuchzer - 'Itinera Alpina'

The early modern period was a time of revolution in intellectual thought which profoundly altered the European relationship with nature and human possibility. That’s certainly part of the story. It was also a time in which the Royal Society took seriously a plan for an expedition to the Alps to search for dragons, a scheme supported by Isaac Newton and prompted by the work of a Zurich based scientist called Johann Jakob Scheuchzer.

In 1723 Scheuchzer, who was a correspondent of both Newton and Leibnitz, wrote a detailed study which detailed all the species of dragon which were known to exist in the Alps. He felt compelled to do this after having seen a ‘dragon stone’ in Lucerne, a type of rock which you can cut out a dragon’s head if you catch him sleeping. Scheuchzer had learnt that the technique for doing so was to first catch a dragon asleep, then scatter soporific herbs about him and cut the stone out of his head, all the while taking care not to wake him up since this will ruin the stone (luckily, in the case of the Lucerne stone a dragon had dropped it when flying past and it was picked up by a farmer called Stämpfli). This was said to cure a range of complaints including bubonic plague and nose bleeds. Having seen the empirical evidence, Scheuchzer felt that the existence of Dragons was not just common folklaw and could be logically inferred. He had reason to doubt the authenticity of the ‘dragon stone’ but decided it was genuine, firstly because a dishonest man would never have invented so simple a story, secondly because the finder was of good character, and thirdly because the stone could cure simple haemorrhages.

Scheuchzer set about collecting witness reports in the mountains, including that of one Johann Tinner of Frumsen, who had seen one of the beasts:

" Its length, he said, was at least seven feet ; its girth approximately that of an apple tree ; it had a head like a cat's, but no feet. He said that he smote and slew it with the assistance of his brother Thomas. He added that before it was killed, the people of the neighbourhood complained that the milk was withdrawn from their cows, and that they could never discover the author of the mischief, but that the mischief ceased after the dragon had been killed."

A Johann Bueler of Sennwald reported seeing " an enormous black beast," standing on four legs, and having a crest six inches long on its head. Another credible testimony came from Christopher Schorer, Prefect of Lucerne, who reported that:

‘In the year 1649, I was admiring the beauty of the sky by night, when I saw a bright and shining dragon issue from a large cave in the moutain commonly called Pilatus, and fly about with rapidly flapping wings. It was very big; it had a long tail ; its neck was outstretched ; its head ended with a serpent's serrated jaw. It threw out sparks as it flew, like the red-hot horse-shoe when the blacksmith hammers it. At first I imagined that what I saw was a meteor, but after observing it carefully, I perceived that it was a dragon from the nature of its movements and the structure of its limbs.’

Scheuchzer added these accounts to his detailed study in which he described several distinct subspecies of dragon. In writing this , Scheuchzer claimed that his sole objective was to create a ‘historical description of the dragons of Switzerland’. Some were ‘winged, windless, without feet and many footed’. There was also ‘one who had the body of a snake and the head of a cat’ (see the illustration on the right). Some of them had ‘bats wings’, elaborate crests and ‘two pronged tails’. One variety reached only two feet in maturity. Others were said to ‘breathe so hard as to draw in not merely air but the birds flying above them’. The best specimen, Scheuchzer reported was the ‘ginger tom’ which lived in Graubunden. 'This region' wrote Scheuchzer, 'is so rugged with so many caves that it would be strange not to find dragons there'. One of the questions puzzled over by Scheuchzer was whether the crest on the dragons was to be taken as a specific distinction or merely characteristic of the male. This curious work was printed in England in the 1690s and entitled 'Proof of the existence of dragons'. Members of the Royal Society in London paid the cost of publication.

In Scheuchzer’s defence, he is now considered one of the founders of paleobiology. While he believed in dragons he also spoke out vehemently against the practice of burning witches which was then very widespread. Witches and other minions of the devil were apparently all over the Alps, spreading plague, manipulating the wind and making the glaciers expand. A series of witch trials in Swiss cities were held and hundreds of suspects were tortured and executed. They were said to be spreading the plague using a potion ‘made of the flesh of a hanged person, the grease of the dead, cow’s blood, pigs’ blood and arsenic’.

These and other examples serve to remind us that the early modern period was as much a time of superstition and magic as the medieval period; in fact probably more so.

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'God's Philosophers' by James Hannam is available now from Amazon

God's Philosophers is Available NOW

God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science is now being sent out by Amazon.co.uk. It will hit the shops next week, but if you would like your copy as soon as possible (and probably cheaper than in the High Street), you can order it now.



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