The catholic church destroyed almost anything it found that had threating to there power,including history it was dark that is why it is called the dark ages it pursed all people who thought outside the religion. It also hid all knowledge in monasteries that were eventually destroyed losing valuable knowledge. It may have its ups but it also had loads of downs. It was a bad time. when you near the 11th century you get closer to renaissances.
No, it didn't.
It's called the "Dark Ages" because a bunch of renaissance propagandists wanted to make themselves look good. All respect to Adam there, but modern historians are guilty of the same prejudice - the main difference being that they don't generally do it deliberately anymore.
So let's break this down, shall we?
The Church did not destroy everything that was a threat to their (note spelling) power. Early monasteries are responsible for the survival of an obscene amount of Classical literature. If the Church didn't copy it, no one else was going to. That includes magical and astrological texts, by the way.
"It was dark that's why it's called the dark ages" barely even makes sense. The sun still shone, you know. And while Imperial Rome had imploded, there was still learning and literature and discourse. The Carolingian Renaissance in the ninth century made great improvements in handwriting, let me tell you. Augustine of Hippo didn't "purse" Jews, he wrote tracts urging Christians to leave them alone. And with the Crusades, people tend to forget that Christianity and Islam lived in peace for some centuries, originally.
It didn't
hide all knowledge in monasteries -
it saved it. So many priceless works would have been lost if not for the monks and nuns who patiently copied it out, spending years on a single text. Looking at your posts, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have the patience to copy out the entire Aeneid, so why don't you keep that glass house of yours intact, mm?
The eleventh century isn't "close to renaissances." It's the beginning of the high Middle Ages. Anything that happened in the eleventh to sixteenth century belongs to the Middle Ages, unless you're using the terms to mean Middle Ages = Bad, Renaissance = Good, which is completely inappropriate. The medieval period was cultured, progressive, and pretty dang awesome on its own terms. It doesn't need to be relabelled "renaissance." To be completely honest, "the" renaissance kind of sucked in a lot of ways.
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Adam, I'm honestly not 100% sure what you're getting at. We may be using terms in different ways. Reason is not a modern concept. Medieval philosophers practically deified Reason (some of them conflated it with God himself, IIRC). They were rationalists to the very core. It's too bad they didn't have access to the factual knowledge available in the 19th century, because I'm sure what Albert the Great would have done with it would blow our minds. Medieval natural philosophers weren't stupid people - they were brilliant people limited by the knowledge available to them.
The intellectual attitude of the 18th century has very little to do with the medieval period. I've never looked at "naturphilosophie" much in the past, but a quick wikipedia skim* firmly convinces me that it has nothing whatsoever to do with "natural philosophy" as I've been using the term. In the Middle Ages, natural philosophy was simply the study of nature and the physical universe. Wikipedia again: "Major branches of natural philosophy include astronomy and cosmology, the study of nature on the grand scale; etiology, the study of (intrinsic and sometimes extrinsic) causes; the study of chance, probability and randomness; the study of elements; the study of the infinite and the unlimited (virtual or actual); the study of matter; mechanics, the study of translation of motion and change; the study of nature or the various sources of actions; the study of natural qualities; the study of physical quantities; the study of relations between physical entities; and the philosophy of space and time. (Adler, 1993)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy
When something's a bit kooky, I prefer to blame the renaissance. The Enlightenment was a little better but not all it proclaims itself to be, either. A really awesome sci-fi/history sort of book that I can recommend is Michael Flynn's
Eifelheim. Rather than the usual garbage that is set in the Middle Ages, this one is quite accurate in its depiction.
* I am nothing if not rigorous.