How dark were the ‘dark ages’, really?

If your go-to headache remedy is to crush the stone of a peach and smear it with rose oil on your forehead, or to use a shampoo containing pieces of lizard, you may not be following a contemporary influencer, but some of the science of the Middle Ages.

While a new paper published by researchers at Binghamton University in New York State does not give trustworthy hacks for headaches and luscious hair, it does go some way to exploding a widely-held myth that early Europeans went through a ‘dark age’.

There is a common perception that little of scientific significance occurred between the fall of the Roman Empire (around 400 AD) and the discovery of Arabic mathematics and the recovery of Aristotle’s works in the 12th century. The blame for this is often placed on a Church fearful of science and desirous of maintaining its own authoritative voice on everything.

However, increasing evidence is being gathered which challenges such a view. The Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine, funded by the British Academy, has collected hundreds of manuscripts predating the 11th century. Professor Meg Leja comments that within them, it is clear that people were engaging with medicine in ways that are characteristic of the scientific approach. She comments that they wanted to observe the natural world, figure out what might work as a cure, identify patterns and make predictions. Of course, this is a long way from what we now define as science, but evidence of observations, experiment, analysis and prediction surely contradict the existence of the ‘dark ages’.

Indeed, other researchers have gone further, arguing that the contribution of the early medieval Church to the history of Western science is not widely recognised. The seeds of the modern scientific method might be found before the 12th century in the educational practices of the early medieval monasteries, with their interest in mathematics, astronomy, time, and medicine. 

Here at Durham University, the Ordered Universe project (in collaboration with Oxford University) has seen a group of historians and physicists revisiting the manuscripts of the polymath Robert Grosseteste, who became Bishop of Lincoln in 1235. Grosseteste wrote extensively on sound, light, colour, and the movement of the heavenly bodies. In Grosseteste, too, we can see that the ‘dark ages’ were in fact not too dark!

As with all science, the medical ‘remedies’ of the medieval period need to be tested, scrutinised and developed. Yet, these remedies do show that the Church was not suppressing the seeds of science.

In our own time, however, the Church has been enrolled in suppressing science for political purposes, especially in anti-vaccination movements. We need to be careful that our own time does not become a dark age.