During this whole time, very complex social structures sprung up in Europe and the Orient. England was strictly entrenched in the Middle Ages’ way of doing and thinking, implying a universal degradation of murder and plunder; the Leviathan of antiquity had emerged from the great deep and spread it’s coils over the whole land. The majority of the people were considered property, young blood was all spent conquering and counter-conquering, emperors and kings tirade over everything, always enslaved to juvenile ambitions and power tantrums. All were ignorant. Sapience was an unknown word. Man walked on all-fours. It wouldn’t be until the fourteenth century that sapience would make it’s debut in English.
It’s mysterious that “sapience” took so long to be canonized because England was apart of the larger, post-latin world for over three-hundred years now, but were it for an almost biblical-style scourge in the guise of the Black Death. It is estimated that somewhere around one one-hundred-and-fifty-million people died, east and west.12 Such a catastrophe definitely pulled the rug out from under the feudal institution. Thus is it not in the least surprising to see that after the passing of the plague, a new world began to dawn.The Black Death ended in 1353, and in 1381 the Holy Bible was published in English, a space of twenty-eight years. Imagine some frail person, whom after surviving the deadliest disease in history being able to read the scriptures. Before then, none but the priestly classes were capable of reading the Bible because it was written in the archaic Latin. Ninety-six years after the Black Death died and fifty-eight years after the famous Wycliff Bible, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. The invention of that celebrated press cannot be stressed enough, but consider just how soon it came after the Bubonic Plague; a hundred and fifty years seems like a long time, but relative to all the literary, scientific, and mechanical inventions of the previous one-thousand years, the press was assembled overnight.
In the period of rebirth after the dismal days of sickness, both the Bible and the printing press appeared, which were both physical manifestations of what was happening in the minds of the people. No longer was man going to shrink back into his hairy pelt, but he was going to grow strong in wisdom. The printing press and the Bible were nutritional supplements designed to profit the sapience of man. As man took a greater interest in being learned and wise, he dove into the discarded books of antiquity. He started reading all the great classics, and as he grew familiar with them he began to publish his own masterpieces. Dante, inspired by Virgil took his pen to the “Divine Comedy” and Michelangelo, inspired by the classical arts, chiseled his “David.” Wikipedia reports, “Renaissance scholars were most interested in recovering and studying Latin and Greek literary, historical, and oratorical texts. Broadly speaking, this began in the 14th century with a Latin phase, when Renaissance scholars such as Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), Niccolò de' Niccoli (1364–1437) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459 AD) scoured the libraries of Europe in search of works by such Latin authors as Cicero, Lucretius, Livy and Seneca.[26] By the early 15th century, the bulk of such Latin literature had been recovered; the Greek phase of Renaissance humanism was now under way, as Western European scholars turned to recovering ancient Greek literary, historical, oratorical and theological texts.[27]
Unlike the case of those Latin texts, which had been preserved and studied in Western Europe since late antiquity, the study of ancient Greek texts was very limited in medieval Western Europe. Ancient Greek works on science, maths and philosophy had been studied since the High Middle Ages in Western Europe and in the medieval Islamic world (normally in translation), but Greek literary, oratorical and historical works (such as Homer, the Greek dramatists, Demosthenes and Thucydides and so forth), were not studied in either the Latin or medieval Islamic worlds; in the Middle Ages these sorts of texts were only studied by Byzantine scholars. One of the greatest achievements of Renaissance scholars was to bring this entire class of Greek cultural works back into Western Europe for the first time since late antiquity. This movement to reintegrate the regular study of Greek literary, historical, oratorical and theological texts back into the Western European curriculum is usually dated to Coluccio Salutati's 1396 invitation to the Byzantine diplomat and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras(c.1355–1415) to Florence to teach Greek.[28] This legacy was continued by a number of expatriate Greek scholars, from Basilios Bessarion to Leo Allatius.”13
10 see Bragg, M. (2004). The adventure of English: 500AD to 2000: The biography of a language. London: Sceptre.
BBC Documentary
11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Middle_Ages#13th_century
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