Christianity In The Middle Ages

Imagine a farmhand going to sleep around 500 A.D. and waking up in 1450 A.D. while having the world seem no more advanced than it was when he went to sleep. The Middle Ages were a time of nearly no scientific discovery due to the strong grip of the Catholic Church throughout the period. The ideals of humanism and the spirit for scientific discovery were beginning to rise during the Medieval Era. It was the humanist world view, with its spirit of inquiry, in addition to the diminishing grip of the church beliefs, that led to the scientific revolution; setting the stage for the large amounts of scientific observation and discovery for centuries to come.
The Medieval Era was characterized by the inclusion of church in the state. Though religion
For example, Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first intellectuals to truly depict a human with anatomic accuracy and to use the human form as art, in his work: The Vitruvian Man (Dartmouth College, Leonardo). While da Vinci may have not been a direct part of the Scientific Revolution, he still embodied the ideals of humanism, while making many scientific discoveries that wouldn't have occurred previously. He was considered a true Renaissance man; he broke away from trying to explain the supernatural world humans believed in, but rather tried to explain the human itself and the nature around it. Furthermore, scientists, theologians, and philosophers all began to focus on nature with the advent of the Scientific Revolution, with many historians believing that this focus on nature had a direct correlation to the decline of the Christian church and its beliefs (Kreis, The Scientific Revolution). Scientists began to transition to logical explanations of world, while defenestrating the theological reasoning of nature. Case in point, twelve members of The Invisible College worked together to create the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, in 1660, whose purpose was to compile all natural information possible and communicate it to the public (Kreis, Medieval Synthesis and the Secularization of Human Knowledge). This event exemplifies two main characteristics of humanism, namely the secularization of science and the emphasis of individual discovery, together with collaboration to complete a