From Catholic Herald-There’s something about the word “medieval” which makes some people behave very strangely. As Professor David Paton recently noted on the Catholic Herald website, GCSE textbooks are still repeating depressingly common misconceptions about the Middle Ages, painting it as a time of darkness, ignorance and superstition.
The BBC Bitesize website, for instance, informs students that in the medieval period “most peasants were extremely superstitious”, and that the medieval Church was responsible for “stagnation” in medical knowledge, mostly because of “its encouragement of prayer and superstition”. Supposedly the Church “discouraged progress” in science, “encouraging people to rely on prayers to the saints and superstition”, and telling people that “disease was a punishment from God”, a belief which “led to fatalism and prevented investigation into cures”.
This is a slanted and inaccurate picture of medieval learning, and the Bitesize website is not as exceptional as one might hope. An AQA-approved history textbook groups “superstition and religion” as a single phenomenon. A popular website, revisegcsehistory.co.uk, claims: “Doctors had superstitious beliefs, saying magical words when treating patients and consulting stars.”
More here-
http://catholicherald.co.uk/issues/september-15th-2017/stop-teaching-our-children-lazy-anti-catholic-myths/
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