Medieval European learning advanced chiefly by translation, not original discovery

Evidence

Thus the main intellectual task of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was one of translation. Much of the intellectual energy of medieval times was spent not in the creation of new intellectual values but in the transmission of older ones. Knowledge was won not by fresh and independent investigation but by translation, chiefly from Arabic. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 458

Categorization

• CANDY: A clean debunking of the ‘Dark Ages as stagnation’ or ‘medieval originality’ narratives: the era’s intellectual energy was transmission.
• XREF: connects to: Medieval hermeneutics functioned both doctrinally and as cultural assimilation