The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages

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 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.

ISBN 0521567629   Volumes 1 ISBN13 9780521567626 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 360 Publisher Cambridge University Press   Published in Cambridge Imprint Cambridge University Press   Series editor Basalla, George, Hannaway, Owen Format Paperback   Series title Cambridge Studies in the History of Science Publication date 28 Oct 1996   Previous ISBN 9780521561372 Library of Congress Q124.97 .G68 1996   Height (mm) 228 DEWEY 509.40902   Width (mm) 152 DEWEY edition DC21   Spine width (mm) 17 Pages 263   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

Preface; 1. The Roman Empire and the first six centuries of Christianity; 2. The new beginning: The age of translation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; 3. The medieval university; 4. What the Middle Ages inherited from Aristotle; 5. The reception and impact of Aristotelian learning and the reaction of the Church and its theologians; 6. What the Middle Ages did with its Aristotelian legacy; 7. Medieval natural philosophy, Aristotelians, and Aristotelianism; 8. How the foundations of early modern science were laid in the Middle Ages.

"This masterful study affirms the traditional view of the beginning of modern science -- with its emphasis upon experimentation, its concept of the progress and perpetuation of science, and its actual institutionalization -- in seventeenth-century Europe." Bradford B. Blaine, Historian

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