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To: SunkenCiv
Every now and then we'll have some discussion on FR that involves the DARK AGES (which begn in AD340 or thereabouts) and along comes a Freeper assuring us that there was no "dark age" because, lo and behold, someone somewhere in Italy wrote a letter to the bishop saying thus and so.

Then we have this ~ a remnant of a remnant of a remaining lawcode in use in Brittain at the time it was copied.

This and a few hundred other parchments are left from the pre-Dark Ages period in Western Europe because, alas, darned near everything else was burned to keep warm!

4 posted on 01/31/2010 7:49:21 PM PST by muawiyah ("Git Out The Way")
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To: muawiyah
This and a few hundred other parchments are left from the pre-Dark Ages period in Western Europe because, alas, darned near everything else was burned to keep warm!

"What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because of suspected heresy? Remember the Index Expurgato-rius, the Inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter, and the guillotine; and, oh! horrible, the rack! This is as bad, if not worse, than a slow fire. Nor should the Lion's Mouth be forgotten. Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years."

- John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814, quoted by Norman Cousins in In God We Trust: The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), pgs. 106-7.

9 posted on 01/31/2010 8:25:25 PM PST by James C. Bennett
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