Name: Cathedrals and Universities: Crash Course History of Science #11
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T05:32:18.000Z
Duration: 12 min 30 s
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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.

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

but before colonial empires the medieval: a “middle age” that lasted from roughly

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 elites—nobles

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 Bologna—lots of medieval people were

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

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 diocese—the district

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

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

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?

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

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

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

The physics of flying buttresses reveals how innovative they were.

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

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

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 were “flying.”

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

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

This strategy worked pretty well for many cathedrals…

Although the one at Beauvais—with an incredibly tall choir and a slightly misaligned arched

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 question “where

The medieval Christian cosmos looked a lot like the Aristotelian–Ptolemaic one: an

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

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

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

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 uninteresting “dark 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

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Cathedrals and Universities: Crash Course History of Science #11

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