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  • Hi, I'm Hank Green, this is Crash Course, and today I wanna explore two sites of knowledge

  • production in Europe during the medieval period.

  • This is the story of the cathedral and the university.

  • [INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]

  • First, let's agree to call the general time period in Eurasia and North Africa after the

  • birth of large states

  • but before colonial empires the medieval: a “middle agethat lasted from roughly

  • CE 500 to 1400.

  • So we've got our working definition established!

  • Across a large part of the medieval world, people traded knowledge, and many folks practiced

  • different forms of humoral medicine and alchemy.

  • The majority of these explorations of nature were conducted by individual elitesnobles

  • and other rich people who happened to take an interest in the world around them.

  • In a few places, however, knowledge production was highly centralized.

  • As we've seen in Baghdad, Delhi, Beijing, and Bolognalots of medieval people were

  • making knowledge systematically.

  • The north of Europe was a different story.

  • Until roughly 1100, there were relatively few places of knowledge-making.

  • Monasteries and abbeys had special rooms called scriptoria

  • where monks copied manuscripts by hand.

  • But the biggest places where knowledge was made were the Gothic cathedrals.

  • Cathedrals were great stone churches that took years, sometimes many decades to build.

  • They weren't simply places to go on Sunday to worship.

  • A cathedral was the seat of a bishop, or regional church leader,

  • and the administrative, spiritual, and educational center of the bishopric or diocesethe district

  • under the bishop's control.

  • And if you wanted to go to one of these places, that didn't make you a christian, just like

  • going to taco bell doesn't make you a taco.

  • And, unlike castles, cathedrals are still used today for their original purposes.

  • Choosing a site for a cathedral was high stakes.

  • While secular rulers paid for cathedrals, bishops often chose where to build them.

  • This redrew the map of Europe and made some cities vastly more important: once a cathedral

  • was there, a city grew economically.

  • As populations grew, bishoprics split.

  • New cathedrals were needed.

  • While the first cathedrals date back to Constantine the Great, the high age of cathedral building

  • lasted from roughly 1000 to 1500.

  • This was an era of frantic economic growth in Europe.

  • The French, for example, built eighty cathedrals between 1050 and 1350,

  • moving more stone for these projects, in total, than was moved to build the great pyramids!

  • The construction of these vast, soaring spaces required immense technical knowledge.

  • What made a cathedral such a technical wonder?

  • Help us out, ThoughtBubble:

  • The height of the cathedral was important: narrow and tall, cathedrals drew the eyes

  • of worshippers up, inside and out.

  • Inside, a Gothic cathedral generally featured spacious arched vaults, lots of narrow windows

  • casting light muted by stain glass, and a big round "Rose" window in the front.

  • Stained glass was not only an artistic achievement, but a highly technical one.

  • Medieval artisans discovered through alchemical experimentation that adding gold chloride

  • to molten glass resulted in a red tint, and adding silver nitrate turned the glass yellow.

  • Recently, scientists analyzed stained glass from this era and discovered that this technique,

  • possibly dating back to the tenth century, worked because of nanotechnology!

  • Analysis of the stained glass revealed that gold and silver nanoparticles, acting as quantum

  • dots, reflected red and yellow light, respectively.

  • Historians still have no idea how medieval artisans made this glass.

  • Outside, towers and spires, guarded by gargoyles, stood tall above the small buildings of the

  • medieval city.

  • Perhaps the most striking architectural feature of the cathedral were its flying buttresses

  • arches leaping off the side of the building, distributing weight down, allowing the great

  • stone mass to move up and up.

  • The physics of flying buttresses reveals how innovative they were.

  • High, stone-ceilinged cathedrals generated heavy outward thrust, a force that had to

  • be directed safely down to the ground.

  • Added to this was the problem of strong winds, which presented a danger to the tall, skinny

  • bodies of cathedrals.

  • One solution would have been to make the walls of cathedrals gigantic and thick and ugly.

  • But that's not what the cathedral builders did!

  • To move thrust out and down and resist the wind, buttresses were connected to the main

  • building with arms, making them look as though they wereflying.”

  • Capped by intricately carved pinnacles, these arched supports allowed much light to stream

  • in through the stained-glass windows.

  • They also used less stone, reducing the cost of materials and labor.

  • Thanks Thought Bubble!

  • This strategy worked pretty well for many cathedrals

  • Although the one at Beauvaiswith an incredibly tall choir and a slightly misaligned arched

  • vaultpartially collapsed in 1284.

  • For the most part we do not know who designed the cathedrals.

  • But we know that economic opportunities in cathedral cities attracted many skilled artisans.

  • Each cathedral project was led by a master builder.

  • Rough masons cut, mortared, and laid the heavy stones.

  • Freemasons completed the more intricate work, such as the tracery around the rose windows.

  • These artisans were the engineers of medieval Europe.

  • And having large numbers of them move from location to location was very unusual for

  • a time when most people died in the same village they were born.

  • These flying-buttressed monumental spaces didn't only motivate earthly activity.

  • They were representations of Paradise on earth.

  • This Paradise was part of a complex theoretical system for answering the questionwhere

  • are we?”

  • The medieval Christian cosmos looked a lot like the AristotelianPtolemaic one: an

  • earthly sphere bounded within a series of planetary spheres, and beyond that, an ultimate

  • heavenly sphere.

  • But this heaven was literally Paradise, the home of God.

  • And below the earth was Hell.

  • (Dante strikingly detailed this Christianized model of the Aristotelian cosmos in his Divina

  • Commedia.)

  • You might wonder why the medieval Christians were so obsessed with death and Hell

  • Well, we don't want to accuse medieval Europe of having been some uninterestingdark age."

  • But it could be a pretty rough time and place to be alive.

  • A striking example of this grimness is the Black Death, a plague that swept across Europe

  • from 1348 to 1350.

  • Perhaps spread by flea-ridden merchants traveling the Silk Road, the plague bacterium, Yersinia

  • pestis,

  • killed anywhere from 75 to 200 million peoplewhich was 30 to 60 percent of Europe's total population,

  • in two years.

  • aaaaahhhhh...

  • And the plague came back periodically until the nineteenth centurywhen cholera pandemics

  • arrived!

  • Before the Black Death, Europe had grown a lot.

  • And it was during this pre-plague period that universities took off.

  • Between 1100 and the mid-1300s, population growth and urbanization led to rise of the

  • university: there were more secular conflicts, so they needed more lawyers.

  • There were more religious arguments, so they needed more theologians.

  • And there were more peopleand more were sick!—so they needed more physicians.

  • The proto-university in Europe was Charlemagne's palace at Aachen or Aix, in what is now Germany.

  • Charlemagne and his successors centralized knowledge production at the palace.

  • From around 800 until about 855, Aachen was an important site for the production of manuscripts

  • including religious and legal texts.

  • The first true European universities included Salerno, Bologna, Padua, and Naples in Italy;

  • Oxford and Cambridge in England; Paris and Montpellier in France; and Valencia in Spain.

  • Still looking good, U. Salerno!

  • Eleven hundred is the new thirty.

  • Although they all feature impressive old buildings today, medieval European universities started

  • off as self-governing associations of people with a common function.

  • The places where those people taught and learned could change, but the legal entity of the

  • university stayed the same.

  • In fact, the Latin word universitas even means "Corporation."

  • Which is... maybe... accurate today?

  • Joining this corporation required swearing a Christian oath.

  • University curricula, or book lists, had to approved by the Church.

  • This was paradoxically freeing, though, because it meant that cities and kings had to recognize

  • universities as self-governing:

  • if the Pope said that the faculty of a university were cool with him, then kings and nobles

  • couldn't boss them around so easily.

  • They could teach and research what they wanted to, as long as it was vaguely Catholic enough.

  • Plus, universities became tax exempt!

  • Let's say we are well-off medieval students ready to make campus visits.

  • First, our medieval parents lay out our options: doctor, lawyer, or priest.

  • Those are real jobs.

  • If we can't hack it at one of those, we can instead study something called theliberal

  • arts.”

  • Again, here we ware!

  • Traveling around, we encounter two kinds of university: in theNorthernmodel, such

  • as at Paris, the most important discipline is theology.

  • The University of Paris was incorporated as an association of thesemasters,” or

  • teachers.

  • In theSouthernmodel, at Montpelier and the Italian universities, medicine and

  • law are the most important subjects.

  • These universities were incorporated as associations of students, who had to pay the salaries of

  • their teachers.

  • No matter which school we choose, we'll need books.

  • Our Scholastic curriculum revolves around a few core texts, including some names we've

  • already encountered:

  • the famous physicians, Aristotleespecially the PhysicsEuclid, Ptolemy, and Archimedes.

  • And did I mention Aristotle?

  • Which books we buy depends on what we'll study.

  • The artis liberalis, or liberal arts, are divvied up into a group of three, the trivium

  • or tools for thinking, which are grammar, rhetoric and logicand a group of four,

  • the quadriviumor specific subjects,

  • which are arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

  • If we decide to study medicine, we'll read and reread sayings attributed to Hippocrates,

  • Aristotle, Galen,

  • Ibn-Sina, Al-Razi, Ibn-Rushd and a few Latin writers

  • maybe Trota and an amazing abbess named Hildegard of Bingen.

  • She taught about human health as connected to thegreenhealth of the living environment.

  • Hildegard was way ahead of her time!

  • Our teachers' lectures serve as commentary on the canonical texts.

  • And there is also some emphasis on learning from experienceby visiting apothecaries,

  • shadowing doctors on their rounds, and attending anatomical dissectionsof criminals.

  • Dissection is everyone's favorite class!

  • Although our liberal arts or medical curricula are taught as more or less finished sets of

  • knowledge, this is not to say that no one can make new knowledge.

  • It just has to enter the classroom as part of an ongoing discussion with the long-dead

  • masters.”

  • And enter it does.

  • By 1200, translations of classical Greek works lost to the Latin- and Romance-speaking northwest

  • of Eurasia came back into the libraries of universities and monasteries.

  • These were Latin translations of the Arabic translations we mentioned back in episode

  • seven.

  • What was the result of all this book learnin'?

  • For one, medieval Christians had to work harder and harder to reconcile scientific works by

  • their favorite Greek and Arabic masters with a Christian worldview.

  • Increasingly, the facultythinking systematically about thinking as separate from the Bibleran

  • afoul of the Church.

  • In 1277, the bishop of Paris officially condemned 219 Aristotelianerrors,”

  • meaning that anyone teaching certain ideas from Greek philosophies would be excommunicated.

  • Historians are split on how this affected science: on the one hand, the suppression

  • of Aristotle's ideas sounds bad.

  • But on the other, this condemnation freed up medieval thinkers in continental Europe

  • to look beyond the so-calledmasters.”

  • Thought experiments about how Nature might really work, regardless of the Bible or Aristotle,

  • flourished.

  • Separating the study of a thing calledNatureout from that of a perfect God, even hypothetically,

  • helped set the stage for a secular scientific program.

  • Nature became God's delegate, an intermediary force between God and humanitysomething

  • to studyand, ultimately, control.

  • Control of nature meant first putting it in the right order: head before toes,

  • first causes before final ones, universals before specifics, and abstractions before

  • particulars.

  • This neat Aristotelian order, married to a Christian interpretation of the world based

  • on scripture,

  • would soon come up against theories drawn from meticulous record-keeping regarding natural

  • phenomenasuch as astronomical data

  • such as how heavenly bodies move

  • But that's for next time, when we'll meet a certain mathematician who attended four

  • great universities

  • Krackow, Bologna, Padua, and FerraraNicolaus Copernicus!

  • Crash Course History of Science is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula,

  • Montana and it's made with the help of all this nice people and our animation team is

  • Thought Cafe.

  • Crash Course is a Complexly production.

  • If you wanna keep imagining the world complexly with us, you can check out some of our other

  • channels

  • like Scishow Kids, The Art Assignment, and The Financial Diet.

  • And, if you'd like to keep Crash Course free for everybody, forever, you can support

  • the series at Patreon; a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you

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  • Thank you to all of our patrons for making Crash Course possible with their continued

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Hi, I'm Hank Green, this is Crash Course, and today I wanna explore two sites of knowledge

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