Needed time to be re-invented after European civilization straight-up collapsed.
Like, there’s considerable pushback in the modern day of the Medieval period as a time of backwards ignorance - and rightly so. The Medieval period was a period of great innovation in Europe.
But the fact is also that in the immediate aftermath of the Western Roman Empire’s decline and fall, European society was set back immensely. The ‘Dark Ages’ were a period of recovery. And recovery took time. Goddamn, did it take time.
Turns out, in a time before technical manuals were popular (another invention of the Renaissance - thank you, Renaissance), if all the artisans of a specific trade die or have to go back to working the fields instead of training successors, in a few generations, the accumulated and transmitted knowledge of hundreds of years is fucking erased and has to be re-invented from scratch.
I’ve heard that the last bit is still true for specific trades. Manuals are not enough. For instance, France stopped building nuclear reactors for a generation and now they take forever to build a new one, with plenty of technical issues.
Oh, tribal knowledge is still extremely important in most trades, it’s just not the “Start over from scratch” level of obliteration that you see without records of how/why to perform the technical processes on a basic level.
Needed time to be re-invented after European civilization straight-up collapsed.
Like, there’s considerable pushback in the modern day of the Medieval period as a time of backwards ignorance - and rightly so. The Medieval period was a period of great innovation in Europe.
But the fact is also that in the immediate aftermath of the Western Roman Empire’s decline and fall, European society was set back immensely. The ‘Dark Ages’ were a period of recovery. And recovery took time. Goddamn, did it take time.
Turns out, in a time before technical manuals were popular (another invention of the Renaissance - thank you, Renaissance), if all the artisans of a specific trade die or have to go back to working the fields instead of training successors, in a few generations, the accumulated and transmitted knowledge of hundreds of years is fucking erased and has to be re-invented from scratch.
I’ve heard that the last bit is still true for specific trades. Manuals are not enough. For instance, France stopped building nuclear reactors for a generation and now they take forever to build a new one, with plenty of technical issues.
Oh, tribal knowledge is still extremely important in most trades, it’s just not the “Start over from scratch” level of obliteration that you see without records of how/why to perform the technical processes on a basic level.