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Notes -
I saw it put once as- the weird thing about the collapse of the Roman Empire isn’t that Rome collapsed and there was a dark age. The weird thing is how big a corpus of classical literature survived.
That survival is largely down to medieval monks.
If you ignore the Eastern Roman Empire and the Arabs who cannibalized most of it.
China also preserved it's classical corpus despite similar collapses. India the same.
It isn't something unique.
Even the Parsis preserved most of the Avesta, despite their small number. The Samaritans number in the triple digits; and, still, preserved their version of the Torah.
...that would be one of the institutions having medieval monks who maintained the information, yes.
The had monks, yes, but they also had secular scholars who preserved these things. I assumed you were talking about monks like those in Irish monasteries and other monasteries throughout the Western Europe who preserved some of the ancient corpus despite being assaulted by pagan Germans.
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I always find this argument interesting because it is a just-so-story. Did medieval monks save classical literature because they were a scholastic order associated with Christianity or because they were a scholastic order and scholastic orders like to write things down and record literature. How much of the "Christian" element is important in their operation and why did Christianity in particular lead to the creation of these scholastic orders in a way that Greco-Roman paganism did not?
This led to a following thought. If these were Hindu brahmins/Buddhist monks would they too have recorded the literature, transcribing it so that it could be passed on? What about an Egyptian Pagan order dedicated to Thoth?
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