Did monks from the European dark ages preserve knowledge?

Did monks from the European dark ages preserve knowledge?

They did a less than perfect job but I'm not complaining.

so they did but not so well.

actually the did monopolize knowledge and writing for their end of days cult. In a way they did conserve knowledge, but then they where part of the problem why wisdom needed to be conserved in the first place.

monks

yes

>Did monks from the European dark ages preserve knowledge?
No they did not, Christianity as a whole had a bad influence on scripture, monopolizing knowledge . Take a look at the eastern roman empire for example, they went from roman level of literacy down to medieval levels.

no they spent their time memeing and being gay

Because every political and social institution collapsed at the same time?

Yes, the Catholic Church and the Papal State was the continuation of the Roman instetution in the west.

In some way they helped science along, church laws on dissection was a lot more permissive than pagan laws.

And produced new fresh knowledge.

>actually the did monopolize knowledge
Yeah, around 800 everybody wanted to read and the monks blocked the entrance to schools.

yes. Go away fedoramonger.

They preserved approved knowledge, but destroyed a lot by re-using the pages of Plato etc.

90% of ancient knowledge was lost.

...

fuck no y do u think it's called the "dark ages"???? -.-

more like 99%..

Worst meme ever. Monks only win by default because abrahamic religion and other forms of decline ruined everything.

Even then, they still fucked up by writing abrahamic gibberish over quality ancient texts.

I'm sure the Turkish and Arabian hordes conquering and pillaging the most wealthy parts of the empire had no role in that.

Arabs chimped out at 700s, turks at 1000s. Christianity was the state religion since 400s
If you start with Theodosius.

and a few generations later literacy was down the drain and scripture was rare and mostly religious. If you look at the Byzantine empire you can see how Christian religion marginalized and monopolized science and education.

No, retard Christians burned all the books and that's why we don't have space colonies on the moons of Jupiter today.

One of the big reasons why so much was lost was because muslims conquered Egypt from the christian Rome, so the christians lost their source of papyrus, the only cheap material for writing, and had to use parchment instead.

Except that is not the case. The Eastern Romans maintained high rates of literacy for centuries because they were an urban empire that requied beaurocry to function and allowed trade to flourish. They were Christian and if people could afford it they would have their children educated because their society was urban and the state required a literate population to function. Christianity had nothing to do with this.

The reason there were less educated people in the west was because it was a rural society that had just suffered the loss of all their major urban population centers. They had to rebuild this kind of education system again from scratch, something that is not easy to do. However unlike the East in the West the church basically replaced the beauocracy of most places, this is why they became so important in later centuries, they were the best educated.

Tl;dr the religion had nothing to do with the literacy rate, having warlords tear apart the empire, the collapse of all levels of society and the destruction of population centers destroyed literacy rates in western europe.

>this is what plebeians actually believe

This is why no one likes you