11 - Natural Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages

Summary

Knowledge of the natural world was an integral part of a broader kind of learning. Medieval natural knowledge juxtaposed practical knowledge with the theoretical findings of classical antiquity. Ostrogothic leader Theodoric, who had received some education in Constantinople, valued the Roman ideal of learning. Medieval scholars saw the order of nature as an expression of the Creator's activity. The relation between God's dominion and the natural order was elaborated in an eighth-century gloss on the Psalms by an unknown Northumbrian or Irish author. One widespread practical use of the concept of natural order in the early Middle Ages was to provide a guide for religious rituals. Thus the solstices and equinoxes provided a framework for a cycle of Christian feasts marking the turnings of the year. Computus became an essential part of the education of clerics and guided much of the preservation, transmission, and development of natural knowledge from the time of Bede to the rise of the universities.