Bio-warfare In Middle-earth

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

It seems to be very fashionable these days in a sort of postcolonial self-deprecation to portray the "barbarous West" relative to the glories of the Islamic world as if at the time of the First Crusade. But the fact is, Islamic intellectual progression in almost all fields had been stagnant since the 13th Century while Europe leaped ahead-... yes, even during the High Middle Ages ("Renaissance" is a term which has meaning in art history, but in little else).

I would suggest there was very little "leaping" in regards to intellectual progression in the West in the 13th or 14th century. Any leaping that was done was to escape being bludgeoned by mercenary armies, leaping from buildings infected by plague, or leaping from fiefs owned by various lords and abbots and running to hide in the relative freedom of the nearest city. Intellectually, academia was stratified in the rigid confines of monasteries and the monks' adherence to scholasticism. In literature and humanism, you had Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch, Froissart and Boccaccio (with Christine di Pisan the lone outlier of female writing) in a two-hundred year time span.

When you state "'Renaissance' is a term which has meaning in art history, but in little else", I would definitely disagree. The Renaissance was not merely a few Italian artists painting some portraits and sculpting a bust or two, which would certainly be a wretchedly naive outlook on the period, but rather a humanist and secular intellectual explosion.

With the printing presses of Gutenberg, Caxton and Aldus Manutius established in the mid-to-late 15th century, and, in addition, the influx of Greek scholars fleeing to Italy because of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, I would say the intellectual ferment was just as grand as the artistic masterpieces of the era; in fact, the arts of the time were fed by the same thirst for antiquities that fueled humanism and science: Humanists Lorenzo Valla, Pico Mirandola, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Thomas More, Rabelais and Montaigne; the birth of capitalism under the Medici and Fuggers; the sciences with Nicholas of Cusa, Da Vinci (he painted okay too), Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and later, Brahe, Kepler and Galileo; the architecture of Brunelleschi, Palladio, Bramante -- not to mention the explorations of Magellan, Columbus, Vespucci. It was a time of far more than just art.

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

As for dating the Enlightenment? I would say for a round number the nine decades from 1637, the publication of Descartes' Theory of Geometry and Discourse on Method, to 1727, the death of Newton. Although there were still ripples in the 18th-century pond, no real waves appeared until the Scottish Renaissance at the end of the century. One might push back as far as 1609 (Kepler), since he advanced a mathematical astronomy (which also, happily, was essentially correct for the first time).

French historians usually place the Enlightenment between the death of Louis XIV (1715) and the French Revolution. Others go all the way back to the publishing of Copernicus' work, and still others want to include the remarkable Americans like Franklin and Jefferson and their Constitution. Whatever, it is arbitrary and subjective.

P.S. In any case, I apologize for going so far afield and dealing in such extraneous debate, and returning to Sauron, I still feel he or Morgoth didn't invent the plague; they were either agents for spreading it, or took an evil delight in taking credit for it. Particularly since Tolkien inferred that Sauron, at least, could not control it from decimating his own minions.