When we talked about the medieval philosophers in class the other day, I mentioned that they were disregarded for a while in the 1900s, on the grounds that they hadn’t been doing real philosophy, but that recently scholars have begun to emphasize that there was a lot of good intellectual work being done in the so-called Dark Ages.

Here is a really interesting book review/article about the same topic. The author is an atheist who is tired of hearing his fellow atheists spread the myth of the evil Christian empire that squashed all intellectual inquiry during the middle ages. He focuses on science rather than philosophy, but still it’s good reading, especially if you have a tendency to picture the middle ages as being a time when the church quenched scientific progress.