The Importance of The Middle Ages

Middle Ages Essay

Michael Postan says many things about the middle ages, but the most surprising fact about the Middle Ages that he talked about was that the middle ages did not contribute anything.  The middle Ages was a time where there were many problems that contributed to the reasons that caused the poverty of scientific discovery.  Michael Postan says that there was a lack of scientific incentive in the middle ages.  He says that the people at that time had no scientific incentive to discover new things, or improve upon what they already have.  Michael explains that man has always had intellectual curiosity, and a desire to understand how the world works, but there was a problem in the middle Ages that caused this scientific failure.

                Michael explains the reasons for this lack of discoveries and inventions in this time.  He says that the biggest reason for the lack of incentive was faith.  Religion played a large part in the lack on incentive and inclination; this is because this was the time when religion was starting to spread.  Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions were spreading worldwide, and because of this, all men, even men of intellect were absorbed by the controversies and workings of religion.  They could not find time to create anything new, or discover anything because everyone was so absorbed in learning about their religion.  This does into the next reason, which is that these people lived in a time that they thought the world was perfect, and that anything that was worth discovering had been discovered, and they didn’t need to discover anything, or even build on anything.  Their way of thinking was basically this; what is there is there, and why add on to anything when what you have is already sufficient for the task at hand.  So all in all, what the Middle Ages lacked was incentive, and inclination, causing a time of scientific failure and poverty.

                I agree with Michael because I believe that religion did play a big part during the middle Ages and that he is correct when he says that scientific discovery and inventions are from people having incentives and an inclination.  An example of this would be the Ethiopians who were Christian at first, and then later on in the centuries, Islam and Judaism started to grow and coexist with Christianity as well.  Correlating this with inventions, most of their inventions were monasteries, churches, palaces, and statues.  All of these things show how devoted they were to expressing their religion, while building all this and coming up with all these buildings for religious purposes, they could have been improving on tools and coming up with other ideas for other inventions for everyday life.