Knowledge of History Update

I was reminded today that the reputation that the Medieval Church interfered with the development of science comes largely from the Enlightenment writers - and has continued since.  Voltaire, D'Alembert, Draper, (Thomas) Huxley - they insisted on their narrative of the Renaissance replacing the Age of Faith.  Except they didn't actually know much history of the Middle Ages.  As we noted before, just because they were closer in time and space than we are does not mean they had good knowledge of the period. It took a hundred years or more, but the physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem discovered piles of manuscripts that had been circulated among monasteries and universities in the Middle Ages.  I don't want to pretend advanced knowledge here. I had not heard of him until now, though I had known that he and others had begun the recovery before 1900. Lewis makes mention of them when asserting his claim that there is no break between the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

That brings up the next difficulty.  I have seen dates as far back as 1275 for "first beginnings of the Renaissance." There is also a separate "Renaissance of the 12th C," itself the 3rd of the medieval renaissances.*500-1500AD are a common set of boundaries for the Middle Ages. If one wants ot argue for 1400 I won't quibble.  But the clear Italian Renaissance does not start until well into the 15th C, and the scientific achievements trumpeted as examples of freedom from the church largely began in the 17th C. This seems an excessive flexibility of centuries, with a bit too much science coming in before it's supposed to, and then taking its sweet time later when it is supposed to be taking off, if we are counting by churchiness years.  It is in fact simply cherry-picking data, yet the myth continues.

It's got a great central story to hang its argument on, of Galileo muttering "and yet it moves."  Unfortunately, that doesn't capture what happened in that specific incident very well. Heliocentrism had already been speculated on in publication, allowed by the Church. The arrogant Galileo ran up against an even more arrogant and controlling pope, insisting on publishing in his own way and his own time.

Admittedly, Voltaire and the others didn't much know that. But that's my point.