Although Rene didn't phrase this as a question, and says that he doesn't understand (or 'has a problem with') the term "Latin Christian, I'll suppose the problem he has is lack of understanding, and that although no question was asked, he would like to understand it.
There is a substantial difficulty in attempting to speak about the culture within western Europe (i.e. not including Constantinople, Dalmatia etc.) without having to cope with anachronistic ideas about the difference between nationality, geography, vernacular languages, the shifting boundaries of the territories claimed by a particular ruler at a particular time.
That problem is a habit of imagining that the medieval world had "nationality" in the way we think of it today, and imagining that a person born in one region mustn't have access to the culture of any other. There's a sort of "either or" mentality which is anachronistic for the medieval period.
But this means that while people are perfectly happy to speak generally about "Byzantine Greek" culture of "Islamic/Arabic" culture (say about medicine), they get horribly tangled up when referring to the equivalent phenomenon in western (Latin Christian) Europe.
That is to say, that just as the lands under Muslim government had Arabic as their common tongue of education and religion, and this permitted a unified intellectual culture from one end of the domain to the other, regardless of the variety of peoples and places; and just as a similar common language of education and diplomacy (Greek) united the multiplicity of people under Byzantine rule, just so in medieval western Europe (exclusive of Muslim Spain, or Byzantine region) were united by a common religious culture - western Christianity, and the common language of that religion, of education and diplomacy: Latin.
So "Latin Europe" refers to the equivalent of "Islamic India" or "Byzantine Armenia" - that is, not the whole of the landmass, but that which shared the culture defined chiefly by the common language and, in fact, by he religion common to a majority of the people and the rulers.
However, we also have to be able to indicate when a group of people - such as Saracens in Sicily, or Jews in France, lived within that general territory but were not themselves Christian. So we may speak of the Jews of Latin Europe, or the Jews of Byzantine Europe, or the Jews of Islamic Europe (an area which once extended well into what is now France.)
I hope that clarifies the point adequately. It is one which better and more accurately represents the situation in medieval Europe before the rise of nation states, when the common language was replaced by parochial vernacular, the once-shared religious culture broken into parochial/national churches, and so forth. That is when a man born in lands owned by the King of France started to find he might not have a common language with which to speak to someone from, say, Hungary or Sicily.
D.
(27-08-2016, 01:43 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If to adopt the terminology of "micro" vs "macro", then I'd say we are all going into micro with the course of time, due to increasing specialisation in science (engineering etc.) The institute of macro-experts probably expired with Diderot or even Kircher
Collaboration of a huge number of "micros" is what the modern tendence is toward.
Anton, you are absolutely right about the tendency to have a large number of 'micros' collaborate.
It has it's problems though. One is that each of the specialists in a specific part of a specific subject (to call them 'micro-' specialists is no insult, but I accept that it may be jargon that others here haven't heard before) .. tend to see any given problem in terms of their own area of expertise, or interest.
Experience has shown, at least in my field, that it's best to call in a 'macro-' first, to evaluate the overall problem and identify which particular areas of specialisation are needed to fill in the details of the original broader outline.
I guess it's a bit like getting the architect in to design the house, and then calling in brick-layers, plumbers and electricians. One will say that you can't build a chimney of that shape, you need to add a bit here, or put it somewhere else. Then he plumber will say you could save thousands by switching that bedroom for the bathroom next to it.. and so on. Fairly small changes and lots of new details, but very important to getting the whole thing right.
Probably not a great analogy, but I hope you get the idea.
No-body knows everything, which is precisely why Kircher made such big mistakes. He never seems to have listened or wanted to learn from anyone else.