Roger Bailey, writing about trigonometry said: > >This brought home to me how dark the Dark Ages were in Europe. Our >Eurocentric view often misses the fact that civilization disappeared in >Europe for about 800 years. Today, Nov 11, Remembrance Day, reminded me of >recent events that show we are still at it! > >For an interesting spin on this topic see the book by Thomas Cahill "How >the Irish Saved Civilization". His premise is that Irish monks on the >fringes of Europe continued to copy not only the bible but the works of the >earlier civilizations. The Renaissance was based on this collected knowledge. > > Well, maybe. But the eighth century monk, the Venerable Bede, who lived just across the river from me and who wrote the seminal Ecclesiastical History of England declared that in measuring the average tidal interval between high water on one day and the next Pliny had got it wrong: it was not 24 hours 47 1/2 minutes but 24 hours 48 minutes. (The correct average is close to 24 h 50 m.)This is not the observation of a barbarian. Bede was trained in the Roman, not the Irish church tradition and in his day his church of Jarrow was one of the centres of the western world. But fifty miles up the road only a few years earlier the Irish church produced one of the most beautiful handwritten books ever, the Lindisfarne Gospels. In those 800 years that Roger refers to Europe invented the stirrup (which won battles) and the windmill. And shortly after that European ships sailed into Chinese waters. No Chinese junk ever sailed up a European river even though they had vessels capable of making the voyage. Ocean navigation is the overlooked seventh wonder of the world.
The eighth century also produced some really beautiful sundials, two within a few miles of here. Frank. 55N 1W. -- Frank Evans
