Best 3 quotes of James Hannam on MyQuotes

Before we criticize Gerbert and his compatriots for their foolish adherence to ancient Greek and Hebrew authority, consider this: if someone asked you today to demonstrate that the earth orbits the sun, you almost certainly could not do it. You could show them every book and ask every expert, but you could not provide them with direct evidence without a telescope, a lot of time, and a lot of mathematics. Gerbert lacked the telescope and the math, so we cannot blame him for believing his books when they so clearly echoed common sense. The idea that the earth moves was absurd, and it would take a great deal of careful thought before people realized that it was even possible.

Even historians, who should know better, still seem addicted to the idea that nothing of any consequence occurred between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance.

In traditional histories, the rise of humanism is usually portrayed as “a good thing,” but the truth is that the humanists almost managed to destroy 300 years of progress in natural philosophy. By discarding the advances made by medieval scholars together with so many of the manuscripts that contained them, they could have set back the advance of science by centuries. Einstein might have had to do the work of Newton. The reason that progress in science was not so held back (although it arguably didn’t move forward as quickly as it might have done) was that the invention of printing had guaranteed that, if nothing else, the old books were preserved. Most people forgot about them, but a few, like Galileo, used the knowledge found within.