The author focuses on the medieval libraries and their scientific functions as well as emphasises
their connection with the Church, which – while promoting education in Latin – transmitted
many models of antiquity and its inspiring works, for example, those of Aristotle,
Plato and Sophocles.
Despite the fact the European Middle Ages did not boast large libraries as well-organized
as those of antiquity, the library network was relatively dense and grew until the 15th century.
Libraries were not merely an addition to scientific and educational institutions, such
as schools and churches, they were also an indispensable tool of spreading science, they
served as a fount of accessible and well-established knowledge. They were institutions that
inspired varies activities promoting humanities and sciences, guaranteeing the continuity of
scientific data. Eminent representatives of the Church were able to safeguard classical scientific
traditions and bring faith closer to science, including that of pragmatic nature. It was
a significant scientific simplification in the late 19th and of the 20th century to pit humanistic
and secular Enlightment against the clerical and scholastic Middle Ages. It should be
remembered that it was the Middles Ages that rediscovered Greek and Roman antiquity and
that it was in the Middle Ages that brought the Greek, Roman and Hebraic cultures together
