All Intensive Purposes

Pete Boettke, at The Austrian Economists, says:

David Brooks in his review of Rodney Stark's book I mentioned earlier in today's NYT he writes that the truly innovative aspect of Stark's work is that capitalism developed in the middle-ages and that the Catholic Church nurtured economic and scientific ideas. Whereas traditional accounts refer to the "Prision of Chrisitian Dogma" to describe the middle-ages, Stark demonstrates that many of the developments we attribute to the Renaissance actually find their origin hundreds of years before with the Scholastics and in Catholic monasteries. The Catholic Church rather than the cause of economic backwardness was responsible for the development of the ideas that led to one of the most impressive economic take-offs in human history.

But did the Catholic Church disseminate the ideas attributed to the Renaissance? I recently re-read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and with that account (fictional, 't'is true) in mind, it is easy to see that while new ideas may have originated in medieval Catholic monasteries, that does not mean that the monasteries and the church were responsible for disseminating those ideas. Back then, information did not want to be free. There is a technological explanation: Before Gutenberg, copies transcripts was a laborious process, and one requiring an education that few had. This made books incredibly valuable, to be protected and guarded, with access to them limited. In addition to this, let us say that the Catholic Church was not exactly committed to the open exchange of information. The language of the Church was one not spoken or read by most of its congregants. And the Church's internal divisions, easy to forget about a millenium and a half later, were surely an impediment to the exchange of learning. So, I find it easy to believe that medieval monasteries anticipated many of the advances of the Renaissance (which were, of course, in many cases the rediscovery of ancient learning), but it took developments in technology and changes in learned society for these advances to be realized.

Doubtless medieval historians will find much to quibble with here: fire away. Indeed, as a non-subscriber to Times Select, I haven't even read Brooks' column of today.