Bio-warfare In Middle-earth

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Any leaping that was done was to escape being bludgeoned by mercenary armies, leaping from buildings infected by plague, or leaping from fiefs owned by various lords and abbots and running to hide in the relative freedom of the nearest city. Intellectually, academia was stratified in the rigid confines of monasteries and the monks' adherence to scholasticism.

Oh, dear. Yes, that's the cliched version available from a pop-culture vendor near you. Actually, the degree of serfdom, war, plague, famine and instability was no worse and at times rather better than in the tumultuous 16th century, an age of chaos and incessant wars punctuated by pestilence, tyranny and starvation. Compared to the filth and squalor of Elizabethan London, Edward I's London was a clean (if smaller) place with functioning sewers and well-frequented public baths.

Never mind that scholasticism was hardly an unfruitful or straitjacketed endeavor, and it's something akin to Lewis' "chronological snobbery" to deny the intellect of men like Aquinas, Bonaventure and Scotus; the era 1100-1400 also saw Gothic architecture, the windmill, the mouldboard plow, the horse-collar, glass windows, Francis Bacon, the chimney, the hammer-mill, liquor, the astrolabe, the blast furnace, Peter Abelard, the wheelbarrow, the university, Albertus Magnus, trade guilds, crop rotation, eyeglasses, Giotto, the artesian well, the navigational quadrant and carrack that made Columbus & co possible, polyphonic harmony, the mechanical clock, lager beer and Parliament arise in Europe. Oh, and Protestantism too if one counts Wycliffe and Hus (not to mention Francis, Dominic and a whole new version of Catholicism, sadly squelched by the Avignon popes).

In other words, not at all stagnant, and hardly the Monty Python "plague village."

I think it's rather a hidden premise to take the position that intellectual life only counts if it's "humanist;" I would say rather that it became the fashion for authors and poets, like artists and architects, to emulate Classical models. Not unrelated, however, is the fact that the late 15th to early 17th century was also notable as an age of handwaving mystical woo-woo from alchemy to numerology to astrology, and, of course, witch-hunts (not really a medieval phenomenon). You see, the rigorous logic of the scholastic age made it far more an "age of reason" than the anything goes, wildly undisciplined Renaissance.

French historians usually place the Enlightenment between the death of Louis XIV (1715) and the French Revolution.

Well they would, wouldn't they?

Frankly,* the French contributed little between Descartes, Pascal and Fermat (all dead by 1715) and Lavoisier (executed in the Terror). Voltaire was merely the Oscar Wilde of rococo Paris, and Rousseau a charlatan whose influence has been wholly pernicious. "Reason" was just a buzzword, a fad for the fashionable (and put firmly in its place at century's end by Hume and Kant).

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*Pun intended. Forgive me.