From: Robert Schneider (rjschn39@bellsouth.net)
Date: Sat Sep 20 2003 - 20:56:29 EDT
As a former medievalist who studied medieval science many years ago, and
respects and appreciates its attention to the world that God created, I must
challenge strongly any belief that medieval clerics burned at the stake
anyone who believed that the earth went around the sun. As far as I know,
the idea itself was not entertained in any serious way before the early
16th century.
Our culture still suffers from the negative images of medieval thinkers that
their Renaissance successors pinned on them. They were far more bright and
capable than we have been taught to recognize. Medieval thinkers were
firmly anchored in the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model of the cosmos, and had
the writings of Greek and Muslim astronomers available.as sources for their
own thinking. They were not slavish imitators, however. Read Roger Bacon
on the Ptolemaic model of the heavens and a curious thing emerges: he cannot
make up his mind whether Ptolemy's model was merely a mathematical model or
a description of the cosmos as it was.
Medieval thinkers gathered and mined all of the data that they inherited
from their predecessors. They wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle's
"On the Heavens." They wrote detailed works on plant and animal life and on
minerals, e.g., the writings of Albert the Great. In many respects they
were precursors of modern science, not a group of people who resisted
learning about the world God created. Fourteenth century mathematicians at
Oxford, e.g., did some interesting work on motion that serves as a step in
the process that led eventually to the work of Galileo.
In fact, relatively speaking, there were relatively few persons burned at
the stake by the Inquisition during the Middle Ages, and most of them were
mystics or Cathars charged with theological heresies. The wave of burnings
that stick in people's minds are the product of the Renaissance/Reformation
period and arose with the wars of religion and the witch craze that swept
Europe. Those who know Kepler's story are familiar with the fact that his
mother was accused of witchcraft and he spent many anxious hours and no
little money in her defense. Perhaps Ted and others know more about this
than I do, but the only person I can think of who was burned at the stake
for holding a scientific concept was Giordano Bruno, in 1600.
Bob Schneider
----- Original Message -----
From: "George Murphy" <gmurphy@raex.com>
To: "Glenn Morton" <glennmorton@entouch.net>
Cc: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 20, 2003 4:19 PM
Subject: Re: royalty
> Glenn Morton wrote:
> >
> > This royalty thread seems amazing to me. If the medieval clerics would
> > bar-b-que you for claiming that the earth went round the sun or for
> > suggesting that one could read the Bible apart from the clerics, it
seems to
> > me that any claim to be descended from a sinful affair between Jesus and
> > Mary Magdalene, would gain one quick entry into the afterlife.
>
> It wasn't generally held in the Middle Ages that it was wrong for the
laity to
> read the Bible. Of course most laypeople couldn't read anything &, while
there were
> vernacular versions available, most Bibles were in Latin. & it's true
that laypeople
> generally weren't encouraged to read the Bible. But the chains sometimes
seen on
> medieval Bibles were to keep them from being stolen, not to keep people
from reading
> them.
>
> Shalom,
> George
>
>
>
> --
> George L. Murphy
> gmurphy@raex.com
> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
>
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