Dr. Thomas Madden

I don't know how.

I'm not a scientist.

I don't understand it.

But when I work in the archives in Venice, the documents they bring me are all original documents.

They're all 1,000 years old, and they're all parchment.

And they're fine.

So if you can get it on parchment, then you're good.

And that's what they did, particularly under the Carolingians.

You had this whole kind of movement to try to preserve what they could, even the profane texts.

Now, of course, they're doing this devotionally, so they're going to favor Augustine and one more Bible and things like that because they're monks.

But they also would do profane texts.

They do Cicero.

They would do even kind of bawdy stuff, you know, Plautus, Terence, you know, basically Roman sitcoms.

And these would be preserved.

So the only reason we have those pagan books is, again, because the Catholic Church preserved them.

We wouldn't have them otherwise.

Yeah, come to my website, thomasmadden.org.

You can find there all of my various books that I've written.

I have a new book actually coming out in June about a completely different subject.

It's about how republics fall, how historical republics fall.