Diffusion of Knowledge among Social Groupings

After the creation of the Royal Society in London and the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, the two institutions began circulating scientific journals. This gave isolated academics and laypeople access to the newest scientific theories, research, experiments, and ideas, and was important for contributing to the spread of knowledge around Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A Salon served as a gathering place for philosophical thinkers. It was the setting for them to discuss the government, society, and the human condition.

An interesting quirk of history is that the Renaissance movement arose from the dedicated copywork of thousands of unknown and unrecognized monks, who through the centuries had been making copies by hand of numerous important works of philosophy, theocracy, mathematics, science, and history (and many others). The secularization of learning that began with the Humanist movement owes a great debt to the work of these silent monks.

The Royal Society of London was founded in the 1660s by King Charles II. It was created to advance the collective understanding of the natural world by providing funding to scientists, by providing scientists with a place to meet and collate resources, and by giving British scientists a platform from which to disseminate information around Europe.

During the Medieval Era, medical understanding was extremely rudimentary by our modern standards. A second-century Greek physician named Galen believed that the humor body contained four humors: yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. He believed all diseases were caused by an imbalance in these humors, and his understanding spread around European society so that by the Medieval Era it was the dominant understanding of medical science.

The first university in Europe was founded in the eleventh century in Bologna, a city in Italy. It is important to note that from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, Italy dramatically led the way in university education. Apart from Oxford and Cambridge, in England, Paris, in France, and Salamanca, in Spain, almost all of the earliest universities were founded in Italy. Italy was the wealthiest region of Europe at this time and the center of European learning from the twelfth century on.

Francesco Guicciardini wrote The History of Italy during the Italian Renaissance. Guicciardini’s most famous work was intended as a contemporary history of Italy during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and was intended for as wide an audience as possible. Guicciardini is responsible for advancing the study of history with his revolutionary historiography and is rightly credited with spreading an understanding of Renaissance Italian history around Europe.

Lorenzo Valla was an Italian humanist who lived during the fifteenth century. He is most famous for disproving the validity of the Donation of Constantine through an analysis of vernacular language and context. The Donation of Constantine was a document said to be dated to the fourth century whereby the Roman Emperor Constantine donated the entirety of the Western Roman Empire to the Catholic Church. Obviously, asserting the authenticity of this document served the interests of the Catholic Church, and they were thus disinclined to accept the arguments made by Valla. Nonetheless, Valla's arguments were adopted by other humanists and the fraudulent nature of the Donation of Constantine was eventually accepted.

Diderot wrote, collated, edited, and published the Encyclopedie in the middle of the eighteenth century. It was the first organized attempt to collect of “the sum of human knowledge” that had been undertaken. Diderot stated that his goal in writing it was to “change the way people think.” He believed that members of general public could be elevated simply by introducing them to new information and providing them with a resource to educate themselves. It is true that Diderot hoped also to influence the Enlightened Despots of Europe, but his primary goal was simply to spread knowledge around the continent.

During the dying decades of the Russian Tsarist Empire, the government mandated that all education be carried out in Russian, regardless of the ability of the students in various parts of the multinational empire to understand the language. This, predictably, was unpopular throughout the empire and impeded the ability of non-Russian-speaking citizens to achieve in education and improve their lives. When Lenin came to power, he instituted his “nationalities reforms,” which allowed schools to teach students in their native languages.