Monks and Priests: Preservers--and Destroyers--of Learning

Medieval monks, as is widely known, collectively spent untold hours working in their scriptoria, copying and thus preserving the manuscripts of much literature. In this way some of the works of the classical writers, Greek and Roman, were preserved (although the Byzantines and their successors in a sense, the Islamic scholars, may have preserved even more).

However, on the other side of the issue, medieval monks also destroyed a lot of literature, especially anything they came across that, rightly or wrongly, they classed as "pagan." In this way much was lost--it's virtually a crime against culture.

When the Spanish conquered most of the New World, Spanish priests destroyed most of the written records of the Maya--again because it was "pagan" and, in their eyes, little short of Satanic and demonic.

There is no way of telling how much has been lost to posterity by this kind of destruction; but book burning, of course, is not unknown to more recent and supposedly more enlightened times.