Monks were not actually the first people to attend the universities, which developed from the late 11th century onwards.
And they had access to books, with many of the best libraries being monastic libraries. They were literate: primarily to read scripture, but that didn’t stop them reading other things as well. SF: Mainly because they were the most educated. RA: Why was it monks who tended to lead the way in medieval science? Darwin vs God: did the ‘Origin of Species’ cause a clash between church and science?.But its interventions were sporadic, and the sanctions it implemented often didn’t have much effect. And in those cases, sometimes the church did get involved. Now, of course, there were incidents where teachers were disseminating ideas that contradicted the church’s teachings. There was a popular metaphor that scholars in the Middle Ages liked to use, which was that there were two books in which one could understand God: you could read about God in scripture, of course, but you could also read about God in the book of nature.Īll the way through the Middle Ages, the study of science was done by religious people – by monks in universities – so to boil it down to some kind of conflict is misleading. First of all, the church, in so far as it was controlling anything, had a huge role to play in supporting science, in founding universities. But I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it. SF: There is this idea that there’s been a conflict between religion and science and that the church, as an all-powerful body, got in the way of science. Does the fact that they were intermingled in the Middle Ages devalue that era of scientific study?
RA: We now tend to have a clear divide between religion and science. But actually, it’s similar: they’re still looking at the same nature, they’re still studying the same stars, they’re still using mathematics, they’re still reading texts. This has led some historians to say that we shouldn’t talk about this as being science. By understanding the world around you, you understood creation and the mind of its inventor. In the Christian west, natural philosophy was a devotional activity – a way of getting closer to the mind of God. Medieval misconceptions: 12 myths about life in the Middle Ages – busted.Some historians argue that medieval people did what we now call science so differently that we shouldn’t use the word at all, and instead employ some of the categories that they used: either distinct sciences like astronomy, mathematics or geometry or grouping them together, as sometimes happened, under the heading ‘natural philosophy’. But that doesn’t mean that people weren’t investigating nature – they were doing it in other ways.
The idea of science as the study of nature separate from other kinds of intellectual endeavour is a modern concept. The study of nature was seen “as a way of getting closer to the mind of God”, says Seb Falk. A compass is depicted as a symbol of God’s act of creation in a 13th-century manuscript.