Quote:
Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
And if peasants have enough to last the winter, they would be able to do their own science.
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I'm not sure that's an entirely accurate assertion. I don't think medieval peasents would remotely have the education or information networks to do, or distribute scientific research.
Like it or not, monastic institutions did help create a surplus of learned men who for lack of a better word, weren't really engaged in anything all that conventionally useful. The thing is, this also gave you a body of people who could preserve knowledge, do rudimentary research within the fields of natural philosophy, along with having the network of communication between other monastic/religious groups to transmit the information on a small scale.
Maybe what they did seems pretty inefficient from our eyes, and it didn't jumpstart the scientific revolution as much as the printing press did, but I don't think it's very historically accurate to say that religious institutions did NOTHING to preserve/advance science.