La conoscenza scientifica nell\u27alto medioevo

Perspectives on historical periods and their watersheds change according to the lens employed. The medieval period may be considered to have started politically in Gibbon?s terms with the Fall of Rome and the formation of its successor kingdoms in the western Mediterranean in the fifth century . Economically, the major watershed may have been the rise of Islam in the second half of the seventh century according to Pirenne?s famous thesis . The end of the early medieval period my be categorised by the rise of papacy in the eleventh century, the popularization of the vernacular in the twelfth, the centralization of France and England and the fragmentation of Germany in the thirteenth, or the impact of the black death in the fourteenth. From a perspective of intellectual history, the early medieval period of Western Europe is surprisingly clear-cut, defined by the accessibility of Greek knowledge. Final attempts of salvaging Greek texts through translations into Latin in the sixth century marked the end of classical learning. The secular institutions of knowledge production and transmission were replaced by rapidly emerging monasteries and cathedral schools, thus transforming learning into a decidedly and almost exclusively Christian exercise. The rediscovery of the Greek classics through Arabic channels in the long twelfth-century opened up the Christian canon, and made the establishment of secular institutions of learning, the universities, a precondition to fully engage with pagan knowledge . The in-between period, from c. AD 600 to 1050, had intellectually to survive on a very limited Latin basis, but showed surprising creativity in overcoming this shortage