Re: ****ny Happy Caliphate

On Thu, 15 May 2008 15:22:52 -0400, mimus <tinmimus99@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>On Wed, 14 May 2008 20:57:07 +0000, Gene wrote:

>> mimus <tinmimus99@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in 
>> news:lpednagpy9kK2rbVnZ2dnUVZ_h_inZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>> True. Another factor was that the term didn't seem 
>>>> appropriate to the High Middle Ages anyway.

>>> We're still talkin' a serious dearth of independent 
>>> intellectual analysis from the time here, are we not?

>> Europe in the High Middle Ages was one of the world's great 
>> civilizations. Kerala, in India, was way ahead in science, and 
>> the Islamic world comparable in terms of philosophy. In China, 
>> notable technological advances were made in the Tang and Song 
>> dynasties-gunpowder, the compass, movable type, machinery for 
>> textile manufacture, and so forth. (However, Tang was invented 
>> later.) But in Europe, there was a terrific development in 
>> music, literature, architecture and so on, rendering it quite 
>> notable in its own way.

><doggedly>

>So what happened to non-aristocratic non-priestly readin' and writin' and
>'rithmetic during the supposedly mischaracterized "Dark Ages", again?

>You know, all the non-aristocratic non-priestly books?

Uh, the same thing that happened to all the non-aristocratic, non-priestly
books in every other pre-Renaissance culture everywhere?  

They were never printed, because the printing press hadn't been invented
yet, and for that matter neither had paper[1].  And the methods for making
vaguely book-like objects without paper or printing, were too expensive 
for anyone who wasn't an aristocrat or a priest[2], even if they happened
to be literate.

And really, that state of affairs didn't immediately vanish with the
Renaissance.  Remember, the widely-credited idea that Shakespeare is not
the true author of Shakespeare's plays, hinges on the alleged absurdity
of a middle-class commoner being a noteworthy writer in the sixteenth
century.


>(I even concede that the Christian Empire that succeeded the Roman, or at
>least the relatively short-lived Western of the two Christian Empires it
>rapidly broke into, doesn't seem to've been too good in that respect,
>either.)

What are the cultures, anywhere, anywhen prior to ca. 1500, that *did* do
a good job in that respect, in your opinion?  

Because if you're going to use "Dark Ages" to refer to all of history up
to the early Renaissance, I don't think that's terribly useful.


[1] In both cases possibly excluding some early Chinese work that never
really came together to make a publi****ng industry.

[2] Or whatever the rough equivalents are in whatever culture we are 
talking about.


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