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Notes -
Intellectual work in renaissance europe was very different from today, the primary mode of argumentation was appeal to authority: they "knew" earth was spherical because aristotle said so, they "knew" it like they "knew" that nerves connected to the heart (not the brain), that planets were carried by large solid spheres of quintessence and that heavy objects fell faster.
They were doing "science" (the word is anachronistic in this context, but whatever) the same way they were doing theology: commentary on a small corpus of approved authors that were assumed to be nearly infallible and to contain the totality of all possible knowledge. It's no wonder that intellectual work and religiosity was compatible.
The cathedrals are beautiful but they are also not designed by intellectuals but by semi-literate head masons. And, tbh, when you understand why all the flying buttresses are really there they start to look kind of ugly.
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