Contrary to prevailing opinion, the roots of modern science were planted in the ancient and medieval worlds long before the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Indeed, that revolution would have been inconceivable without the cumulative antecedent efforts of three great civilisations: Greek, Islamic, and Latin. With the scientific riches it derived by translation from Greco-Islamic sources in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Christian Latin civilisation of Western Europe began the last leg of the intellectual journey that culminated in a scientific revolution that transformed the world. The factors that produced this unique achievement are found in the way Christianity developed in the West, and in the invention of the university in 1200. As this 1997 study shows, it is no mere coincidence that the origins of modern science and the modern university occurred simultaneously in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages.
This is a powerful and a thrilling narrative history revealing the roots of modern science in the medieval world. The adjective 'medieval' has become a synonym for brutality and uncivilized behavior. Yet without the work of medieval scholars there could have been no Galileo, no Newton and no Scientific Revolution. In "God's Philosophers", James Hannam debunks many of the myths about the Middle Ages, showing that medieval people did not think the earth is flat, nor did Columbus 'prove' that it is a sphere; the Inquisition burnt nobody for their science nor was Copernicus afraid of persecution; no Pope tried to ban human dissection or the number zero. "God's Philosophers" is a celebration of the forgotten scientific achievements of the Middle Ages - advances which were often made thanks to, rather than in spite of, the influence of Christianity and Islam. Decisive progress was also made in technology: spectacles and the mechanical clock, for instance, were both invented in thirteenth-century Europe. Charting an epic journey through six centuries of history, "God's Philosophers" brings back to light the discoveries of neglected geniuses like John Buridan, Nicole Oresme and Thomas Bradwardine, as well as putting into context the contributions of more familiar figures like Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
The Not-So-Dark Dark Ages What they forgot to teach you in school: People in the Middle Ages did not think the world was flat The Inquisition never executed anyone because of their scientific ideologies It was medieval scientific discoveries, including various methods, that made possible Western civilization’s “Scientific Revolution” As a physicist and historian of science James Hannam debunks myths of the Middle Ages in his brilliant book The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution. Without the medieval scholars, there would be no modern science. Discover the Dark Ages and their inventions, research methods, and what conclusions they actually made about the shape of the world.
This concise introduction to the history of physical science in the Middle Ages begins with a description of the feeble state of early medieval science and its revitalization during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as evidenced by the explosion of knowledge represented by extensive translations of Greek and Arabic treatises. The content and concepts that came to govern science from the late twelfth century onwards were powerfully shaped and dominated by the science and philosophy of Aristotle. It is, therefore, by focussing attention on problems and controversies associated with Aristotelian science that the reader is introduced to the significant scientific developments and interpretations formulated in the later Middle Ages. The concluding chapter presents a new interpretation of the medieval failure to abandon the physics and cosmology of Aristotle and explains why, despite serious criticisms, they were not generally repudiated during this period. As detailed critical bibliography completes the work.
This magisterial book is an analysis of the course of Western intellectual history between A.D. 400 and 1400. The book is arranged in two parts: the first surveys the comparative modes of thought and varying success of Byzantine, Latin-Christian, and Muslim cultures, and the second takes the reader from the eleventh-century revival of learning to the high Middle Ages and beyond, the period in which the vibrancy of Western intellectual culture enabled it to stamp its imprint well beyond the frontiers of Christendom. Marcia Colish argues that the foundations of the Western intellectual tradition were laid in the Middle Ages and not, as is commonly held, in the Judeo-Christian or classical periods. She contends that Western medieval thinkers produced a set of tolerances, tastes, concerns, and sensibilities that made the Middle Ages unlike other chapters of the Western intellectual experience. She provides astute descriptions of the vernacular and oral culture of each country of Europe; explores the nature of medieval culture and its transmission; profiles seminal thinkers (Augustine, Anselm, Gregory the Great, Aquinas, Ockham); studies heresy from Manichaeism to Huss and Wycliffe; and investigates the influence of Arab and Jewish writing on scholasticism and the resurrection of Greek studies. Colish concludes with an assessment of the modes of medieval thought that ended with the period and those that remained as bases for later ages of European intellectual history.
Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a pioneering work of intellectual history that transformed our understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the development of science. Distinguished scholar Amos Funkenstein explores the metaphysical foundations of modern science and shows how, by the 1600s, theological and scientific thinking had become almost one. Major figures like Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, and others developed an unprecedented secular theology whose debt to medieval and scholastic thought shaped the trajectory of the scientific revolution. The book ends with Funkenstein’s influential analysis of the seventeenth century’s “unprecedented fusion” of scientific and religious language. Featuring a new foreword, Theology and the Scientific Imagination is a pathbreaking and classic work that remains a fundamental resource for historians and philosophers of science.
Histories of modern science often begin with the heroic battle between Galileo and the Catholic Church, which sparked the Scientific Revolution and led to the world-changing discoveries of Isaac Newton. In reality, more than a millennium before the Renaissance, a succession of scholars paved the way for the discoveries for which Galileo and Newton are credited. In Before Galileo, John Freely investigates the first European scientists, many of them monks, whose influence ranged far beyond the walls of their monasteries. He shows how science and religion coexisted, and places the great discoveries of the age in their rightful context.