The History of Science Society

On the Continuity of Western Science from the Middle Ages: A. C. Crombie's Augustine to
Galileo
Author(s): Bruce S. Eastwood
Source: Isis, Vol. 83, No. 1 (Mar., 1992), pp. 84-99
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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A SECOND LOOK
On

the

Science

Continuity
from

the

of

Middle

Western
Ages

A. C. Crombie's Augustine to Galileo

By Bruce S. Eastwood*
W
,Zhen
Alistair Crombie first published Augustine to Galileo in 1952 there
was, at least in English, no adequateone-volumehistory of the European
scientific traditionfrom late antiquityto the seventeenth century. This book was
so successful that it was reissued in 1957and then revised and much expandedin

1959, when it became Medieval and Early Modern Science. (This second edition

was enlargedin 1961;it was republishedin 1969with some detailed corrections.)

Subsequentlytranslatedinto seven or eight differentlanguages,Augustine to Galileo combined with Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science,

1100-1700 (1953), to put its author in the forefront of the postwar school of
historiansof science claiminga continuityfrom medievalto seventeenth-century
science.

It is at least of passing note that Crombie had completed not only his first
degree in zoology (Melbourne,1938)but also his doctorate,with a dissertationon
populationdynamics (Cambridge,1942).It was only after a period of research in
this area, where he publishedeleven researcharticles and providedthe principal
stimulus for the mid-1940s interest in interspecific competition, that Crombie
made the remarkablemove in 1946to a lectureshipin the history and philosophy
of science at University College, London. In 1953, upon the appearanceof his
first two books, he was appointed Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at
Oxford;he began teaching in that position the following year and remainedthere
to his retirementin 1983. This briefest of outlines of Crombie's career at least
indicates his indisputablescientificaptitude,his commitmentboth to science and
to its history, his remarkableenergy and vision, and his leading influencein two
widely disparatefields in just over a decade after finishinghis doctorate.
In a judicious, useful, and complimentaryreview of Augustine to Galileo, Marshall Clagettcomparedit to one of the very few priorattemptsto survey medieval
science in brief compass, Aldo Mieli's 1946 panorama(in Spanish) of Christian
and Islamic science in the medievalworld. Except for bibliography,which Crom* Committee for History of Medicine and Science, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky
40506-0027.

ISIS, 1992, 83: 84-99

84

EASTWOODON CROMBIE

85

bie limited severely in his volume, the later work was clearly superior. In his
opening paragraphClagett remarked,"Crombie'sanalysis of the method of science in the medieval period, so penetratingand original,is completely lackingin
any counterpartin the Mieli volume. Furthermore,we find in general a much
surer summaryof medieval scientific doctrines in the Crombievolume."I
Despite the volume's subtitle, "The History of Science A.D. 400-1650," an
initial chapterof eighteen pages (virtuallyunchangedin the revised edition) is all
we encounter on the period before the mid-twelfthcentury; in it we hear all we
shall about Adelardof Bath, Williamof Conches, and what preceded them. Yet
this is not really inappropriate,for Crombie'sintroductorychapterintends to lay
down the idea of Augustinianscience, if we may use that phrase, ratherthan to
survey things scientificfrom Augustineto the twelfth century. Followingthis is a
quick summaryof "the reception of Greco-Arabicscience" (Ch. 2), perhaps the
most noteworthypart of which is the finalsection. This suggests the centralityof
Christianityand Christiantheologicalattitudesin setting problemsand providing
criticalattitudesin Europeanscience afterthe twelfth century.The book's core is
Chapters 3-5, which focus on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the
briefest of summaries,one can say that Crombieargues for new applicationsof
mathematics,the inventionof an experimentalmethod, and the use of knowledge
from newly created technologies in the experimentaland mathematicaldevelopments of the era. All of this stands as the necessary, even if not sufficient,backgroundfor seventeenth-centuryscience. My summary,however, conveys nothing of the enthusiasm and historical optimismof the book, which claimed-this
wonderfulstatement is absent from the second editionThe experimentalscience that was to reach maturityonly in the early 17th century
developed in a traditionthat was differentfromeitherthe Greekor the Arabic.It owes
its originto the marriageof the manualhabits of technics with the rationalhabits of
logic and mathematicsthat took place in 13th-centuryChristendom.It was nursed in
13th- and 14th-centuryOxford, Paris, and Germany;it grew up in 15th- and 16thcentury Italy; it burst from the constraininghands of its late scholastic guardiansin
the 17th century and conqueredall Europe.2
The thesis, in other words, is that the methodology, even if not the physical

theory, of the Scientific Revolution is indebted to the High Middle Ages for its
creation. Continuitybetween the two eras, usually seen as intellectuallyopposed,
found a new and strong advocacy in Crombie'sview of medieval and early modern science.
The reception of Augustine to Galileo was complicatedby the immediateappearance, in the next year, of Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimen-

tal Science, 1100-1700, which retainedthe first book's concern with mathematical sciences in the thirteenthand fourteenthcenturies, especially in studies on
light, but raised to clear dominance the theme of experimentalmethod as the
1 MarshallClagett,review of A. C. Crombie,Augustineto Galileo, in Isis, 1953,44:398-403,on p.
398.
2

A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo: The History of Science A.D. 400-1650 (London: Falcon

EducationalBooks, 1952), p. 218. The second edition appearedas A. C. Crombie,Medieval and

EarlyModernScience, 2 vols. (GardenCity, N.Y.: Doubleday,1959).Subsequentreferencesto these
two works will be given in the text; editions and reprintingswill be identifiedthere as necessary.

86

A SECOND LOOK-ISIS, 83: 1 (1992)

crucialconnectinglink from medievalto early modernscience. Furthermore,this

shift in emphasis was accompanied by the message that the rise of medieval
experimentalmethod was essentially an academic development, and was not so
heavily dependent upon medieval technology as Augustine to Galileo had suggested. While I do not intendto reflect in detail on both of Crombie'sbooks, they
were reviewed or discussed together in more than one place in the 1950s.3For
historians of science and even for medievalists, the two books reinforced each
other over their firstdecade of existence. Clearlyit was the second book that laid
out in full detail, with specific focus on Grosseteste, the thesis with which Crombie became identified. But the foundationsof that thesis are apparentalready in
the first book. James Haden's review (1954)saw Robert Grosseteste as a mature
reflection of historical study on philosophy and science in interaction, and he
recommendedthis kind of study to historiansof philosophy. He also pointed out
the similarthesis in Augustine to Galileo.4 Crombierecognized that the commitments of the thirteenth-centurymethodologistswere not unchangedin the seventeenth-centuryscientists, but he was able to see the continuity all the same.
While the thirteenthcentury sought true causes, the seventeenthcenturyfound it
necessary to be satisfied with true descriptions of events. Both eras saw and
worked from the strengthsof the Greek geometricalmethod. Medieval commentaries on medical works of Galen and on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, especially that by Grosseteste, interwove inductive and experimental theory with
mathematicalstatements and mathematicalpatterns of proof. The seventeenthcentury scientists were able to draw upon the results of the earlierphilosopherscientists' elaboratetreatmentsof basic concepts like "resolution"and "composition" when discussing the logic of demonstrationof causes and effects. What
Crombie saw and clearly expressed is that an idea or methodology need not be
copied exactly or without variationin order to establish the claim of continuity
with its successor.
Crombie's thesis was thoroughly controversial, whether seen in the broader
and less detailed argumentof Augustine to Galileo or in the revised, sharpened,
and more fully documented version of Robert Grosseteste. Complimentedby
Haden for its challenge to philosophersof science and founded largely on Crombie's careful readingand reemphasisof Grosseteste's commentaryon the Posterior Analytics, the methodologythesis encounteredserious disagreementamong
its earliest reviewers. While admiringCrombie's forceful advancement of the
thesis, Clagett proposed,
Crombie by no means proves, either here or in his brilliant recent volume on
Grosseteste, . . . that the experimentaland mathematicalmethods developed in certain scientifictreatises of the thirteenthcenturywere a result of a theoreticaldiscussion of the methods of science. The cart is probablybefore the horse. The authorsof
the most interestingof the scientificwork of the thirteenthcentury . . . seem to have
been men who were not all interested in discussing the Posterior Analytics. .. . In
3 Examples are James Haden, "The Challengeof the History of Science: Part II," Review of
Metaphysics, 1953-1954,7:262-272;and AlexandreKoyre, "TheOriginsof Modem Science: A New
Interpretation,"Diogenes, Winter1956,16:1-22.
4 Haden, "Challengeof the History of Science," pp. 263-264.

EASTWOODON CROMBIE

87

short, I think it is highly debatablethat the theoretical discussion of the nature of

science was the crucial stimulusto the developmentof science.

The same objection was voiced in more elegant fashion only a decade ago by
James McEvoy in writingabout the philosophicalcareer of Grosseteste.s
The most vigorous demurral,however, was raised by Alexandre Koyre in his
1956review essay. After praisingthe depth, subtlety, and historicaldocumentation of Crombie'smethodologythesis, he asked simply "whetherwe can consider
his thesis as proven" and answered in the negative, suggestingthat the evidence
goes a long way to provingjust the opposite view. Pointingto anotheraspect of
the thesis, he said: "Dr. Crombieexplains the rise of the experimentalscience of
the Medievals, which he opposes to the purely theoreticalscience of the Greeks,
by the conjunctionof theory with praxis, the outcome of the activist inspiration
of the Christiancivilizationin contradistinctionto the attitudeof passivity which
characterizesthat of Antiquity." At the general level he pointed out that most
medieval inventions, such as the plough or the crank, had nothing to do with
scientific advancement. Remarkableinventions like late medieval clocks were
neither causes nor results of scientific theory. In fact, Koyre claimed, the whole
medieval traditionof experimentalmethodology was, as far as modern (seventeenth-century)science is concerned, a dead end. Insofaras it led to mathematical formulationsdrawnfrom observationaldata and away from a commitmentto
identifyingunderlyingreality, this sort of empiricismcleared away much medieval metaphysical creation without replacing it with anything that could help
build a new science. Thus Ockhamism,for example, did not leave a successful
scientificlegacy. On the other hand, Koyre maintained,the concern of Galileofor
findingtrue causes, tied to methodologicaldiscussions, involved the recognition
that the mathematicalentities from which he deduced effects could not be discovered by severely experimentalapproaches. And Crombieadmittedthis! Yet
he then went on to say that Galileo's realistic goal was impossible and was corrected by the thoroughgoingempiricismof Locke and Newton. (This appearsas
clearly in Augustine to Galileo as in Robert Grosseteste.) Crombie's story, issu-

ing in an early modernrevision of the medieval traditionto make it a method of

descriptionratherthan a way of findingcauses, was set aside by Koyre as being
itself unrealistic, though tremendously erudite. He closed his review with the
remark, "Yet there are many mansions in the Kingdomof God, and many ways
of dealingwith history. Let us say, therefore,that in the Kingdomof History, Dr.
Crombiehas built a very beautifulmansion."6
When we settle down to readAugustine to Galileo ratherthan the reviews, the
result is rather interesting. For comprehensionof the thesis the first edition is
eminently preferable. It is not only shorter; it is bolder and without the many
complicating,though valuable, additions and qualificationsfound in the second
edition. What Crombie set out to do, as the preface to the 1957 reprintingemphasized, was to bring out "the most strikingresult of recent scholarship, the
S Clagett, rev. of Augustine to Galileo (cit. n. 1), p. 399; and James J. McEvoy, The Philosophy of
Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 207, in a section entitled "Experimenter,
Mathematician, or Metaphysician?"
6 Koyre, "Origins of Modem Science" (cit. n. 3), pp. 11, 22.

A SECOND LOOK-ISIS,

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83: 1 (1992)

essential continuity of the Western scientific tradition from Greek times to the
17th century and, therefore, to our own day" (p. xii). The significance of the
Greek scientific tradition for seventeenth-century and modern science was assumed. The kind of science that we identify with today had been, and still is,
considered to have appeared with Galileo. While the problem of the connection
between the two had already been addressed by Pierre Duhem and others who
argued for continuity, it had not been settled to the satisfaction of most scholars.
Duhem's Systeme du monde revealed a great deal of eye-opening scientific
thought from the Latin Middle Ages, but this in no way proved continuity with
the succeeding period. As one later observer nicely put it:
The view for which Duhem is famous, and to the demonstrationof which he devoted
his vast historicalerudition,is open to the objectionthat it rests upon a conventionalist philosophy of science, i.e., it representsthe conviction that science cannot and
should not hope to be anythingmore than an approximateorderingof phenomenain
function of non-hypotheticalprinciples,whose justificationlies precisely in the complex process of their historicalmaturation;and Duhem failed to rally the majorityof
philosophersof science to his support.7
The problem in the late 1940s and the early 1950s was to discover the key to the
full continuity of the Western scientific tradition, which had come to take so
central a position in our culture. After World War II science was not only a sign
of Western power, not only something that was supposed to work the same way
in any political system, but also something that might provide a greater sense of
the wholeness or integrity of Western culture. While Crombie did not commit
himself explicitly, and perhaps not even consciously, to identifying science as the
key to Western values, it seems implicit in the project of Augustine to Galileo.
Not simply a textbook on medieval and early modern science, but rather a
"short history" with a strong thesis, Augustine to Galileo cast a wide conceptual
net over its material. The Greeks invented nature as "a permanent, uniform,
abstract order from which the changing order of observations could be deduced."
Greek rationalism combined with Christian symbolism at the end of the ancient
world in the Christian and Augustinian idea of "nature as sacramental, symbolic
of spiritual truths." In the thirteenth century there emerged a sort of menage a
trois of Aristotelian philosophy, Greek mathematical reason, and medieval technics and empiricism, which made up "a new conscious empirical science seeking
to discover the rational structure of nature" (1952, p. xiv).
If Augustine to Galileo was not simply a textbook, it nonetheless was able to
serve in that role. The bibliography, seen from the vantage point of 1950, was
extremely useful for beginners, as it presented mostly English and French materials without devoting itself to highly specialized studies; the sections on philosophy and scientific method were especially full. After getting Greek philosophy
and science into the Latin West in two succinct opening chapters, Crombie surveyed science (and philosophy) and technology in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries in a most suggestive way. A chapter entitled "The System of Scientific
Thought in the 13th Century" opened with a section on the explanation of change
and the conception of substance in the Aristotelian tradition. The use and limitations of mathematics in Aristotle's concept of science, since mathematics ab7McEvoy,

Philosophy of Grosseteste (cit. n. 5), p. 207.

EASTWOOD ON CROMBIE

89

stracted from change and therefore from causal conditions, was set up as the
criticalproblemin the developmentof naturalphilosophy.The subjectof change,
apparentor real, became the explicit point of reference as he introducedeach
area of thirteenth-centuryscience separately(cosmology and astronomy, meteorology and optics, mechanics and magnetism, geology, chemistry, biology).
While some of these areas, notably optics, showed much progress in the application of mathematics to the physical world, the overall impression after the
openingpart of the chapteris of a survey of achievements.As such it was highly
successful, but it did not firmlylink either mathematicsor experimentalmethod
to all or most of these achievements. In the last three parts (geology, chemistry,
biology) the array of achievements became almost bewildering. Regardingall
these thirteenth-centurydevelopments, Clagett, as well placed as anyone in the
early 1950s to evaluate the correctness and essential completeness of this chapter, found relatively little to correct or add.8
Crombie'sfourthchapter, "Technicsand Science in the MiddleAges," opened
with a discussion of technics and educationthat related a wide variety of medieval inventions and techniques to measurementand mathematicsand thence to
the mathematicalconcerns of university scholars. Ranging from commerce to
music and beyond, he emphasized the intersections of scholarly and practical
interests. He then presenteda comprehensivesurvey of developmentsin agriculture, mechanizationof industry,industrialchemistry, and medicine. It is notable
that this is the only one of the three centralchaptersthat was not much revised or
amplifiedin the second edition. No reviewer of Augustine to Galileo had much to
say on the contents or strategy of the chapter, and, while it is not now fashionable to claim a direct relationshipbetween technology and naturalphilosophy(or
scientific method) in the Middle Ages, it would be worthwhileto raise the question again, even if from a very differentperspective than Crombie'sin this book.
As recently as 1990 the chapter has been recommendedat the head of a list of
works "for a good overview of medieval technology and its effects on medieval
life."9
The fifth chapterfocused most sharplyon what would be the theme of Robert
Grosseteste. Entitled "Criticismof Aristotlein the Later MiddleAges," it opened
with a major section on the scientific method of the later scholastics, especially
Grosseteste, followed by three shorter sections on matter and space, terrestrial
and celestial dynamics, and mathematicsin physics. Of the three focal chapters,
this was the shortest in the first edition. It was the longest in the second edition,
almost double its originallength. Many of the additionsand changes responded
directly to suggestions in Clagett's 1953 review.10 By the time of the second
edition this chapter had not only grown but also changed its character,as indicated by its new name: "ScientificMethod and Developments in Physics in the
Later Middle Ages." This is not simply a more useful descriptive heading; it
reflected Crombie's tremendous expansion of the section on scientific method
and pointedto importantqualificationsof the thesis so ardentlyadvancedin 1952.
The idea of a steady developmentof Aristotelianscience, throughcontinualcrit8 Clagett, rev. of Augustine to Galileo (cit. n. 1), pp. 399-400.
9 Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth
Century (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 80[l]) (Philadelphia, 1990), p. 3, n. 6.
10 Clagett, rev. of Augustine to Galileo (cit. n. 1), pp. 400-402.

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icism and modification, all the way to Galileo was maintained but was partially
submerged under a large amount of new information about developments in physics, not all of which fit comfortably within the conceptual framework. Initially no
more than a peroration on continuity between the eras had seemed necessary;
about ten pages were added on this subject for the 1959 version. Finally, on the
crucial hypothesis about experimental methodology Crombie felt compelled to
say something quite new in 1959:
It must not be supposed that this philosophicalconception of experimentalscience,
developed largely in commentarieson Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and the problems found in it, was accompaniedby a single-mindedreliance on the experimental
method such as is found in the 17th century. Medieval science remainedin general
withinthe frameworkof Aristotle'stheory of nature,and deductionsfrom that theory
were by no means always rejected even when contradictedby the results of the new
mathematical,logical, and experimentalprocedures.Even in the midst of otherwise
excellent work, medieval scientists sometimes showed a strangeindifferenceto precise measurements, and could be guilty of misstatementsof fact, often based on
purelyimaginaryexperimentscopied from early writers, which the simplest observation would have corrected. Nor must it be supposedthat when the new experimental
and mathematicalmethods were applied to scientific problems, this was always the
result of the theoreticaldiscussions of method. [Afterthis retrenchmentCrombiestill
held on to a limited version of his thesis by saying,] ... in the Middle Ages, as in
other periods, discussions of method and actual scientificinvestigationsbelonged to
two separate streams, even though their waters were so often and so profoundly
mingled,as certainlythey were [in the later MiddleAges]. (Vol. 2, pp. 10-11)11
Yet in both the first and second editions Crombie held a vast amount of information together under the umbrella of his capacious thesis. Among its great virtues was his insistence that Aristotelianism was not necessarily an enemy of
seventeenth-century science, a view by no means widely held when he first
wrote. By emphasizing the ability of Aristotelians to revise their teachings from
the thirteenth to the late sixteenth century, Crombie brought to a wide audience
arguments previously circulated only in a small scholarly circle. The main shift
from one era to the next, as he saw it, was the change from philosophers who
wanted to clarify the status and form of philosophizing about nature to philosophers who wanted to clarify nature in its empirical and mathematical details.
Augustine to Galileo was in one sense simply a participant in a long history,
begun much earlier and carried on long afterward, of discussion of the relationship of Galileo to the Middle Ages. Crombie's innovation was his focus on
Grosseteste's commentary on the Posterior Analytics as a source for scientific
methodology up to and including Galileo. At the beginning of the century Ernst
Cassirer had already pointed to the scholastic logic of Jacopo Zabarella in the late
sixteenth century as a method of finding causes remarkably similar to Galileo's.
While the connection of Zabarella to Galileo remains dubious, the same sort of
connection was drawn from the late medieval scholastics by John Herman Randall, whose study of the Paduan school from the fourteenth to the sixteenth
" For the second printingof RobertGrossetesteCrombieaddeda similarcommentin the preface,
withdrawingsupportfor some "exaggerated"expressions he had writtenin "a momentof enthusiasm": A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100-1700 (Ox-

ford: ClarendonPress, 1962),p. v.

EASTWOOD ON CROMBIE

91

century-from Pietro d'Abano througha long list of intermediatesdown to Zabarella, commentingespecially on Galenic medical works and using Aristotelian
methodologicalconcepts-claimed a direct influenceupon Galileo. Randall'sthesis of a continuous Paduan school of scientific methodology was criticized by
Neal Gilbert's claim that the meaningsGalileo gave to the terms analysis, resolution, and composition were drawn from Greek mathematics, not from a late
medieval traditionof medical-logicalcommentary.In response, W. F. Edwards
defended the Randallthesis with the conclusion that Galileo was only the culmination of a traditionthat broughttogether the mathematicaland methodological
theories withinthe frameworkof medicalcommentaries.Edwardsarguedthat the
meaning of analysis was picked up from the geometers and identifiedwith Galen's use of the word by the medieval commentators.12
Duringthe last two decades the question of the methodologicalbackgroundsof
Galileo has been attackedwith renewed interest. Predictably,as with other areas
of Galilean studies, the results of this research have not tended to consensus.
Without pretendingto represent all that this work has revealed, I think a few
points relevant to Augustine to Galileo can be noted. Even the purpose of the
PosteriorAnalytics, which inspiredmuch of the medievaland Renaissancemethodological writing under debate, has remained in question. Whether it was a
programfor research or intended for something like classroom instructionhas
been controversial. JonathanBarnes argued rather convincingly that book 1 of
that work uses demonstrationin the pedagogical sense for knowledge already
gained and now to be presented. This is not a researchprocedure.Nor is it a way
of gainingcertitude, since that has been achieved priorto such demonstration.'3
If the intentions and meaning of Aristotle are still up for revision, assuredly
those of Galileo are as well. One generallyagreed-upondesire of Galileo was to
find secure and certain knowledge of the principlesof his science of motion. But
how to do so, and how Galileo expected at differenttimes in his career to do so,
has been less than certain. At least one commentatorhas put forth Galileo's De
motu as a paradigmcase of an Aristotelianmixed science and remarkedthat his
view of proof showed a clear Aristotelianinfluence;precisely what sort of influence is not specified. While Galileo may have believed that Aristotle aimed for
certain knowledge, it is not clear that Galileo considered Aristotle successful.
Winifred Wisan's survey of Galileo's scientific method concluded that Galileo
himself was unable to achieve the certitude he requiredfor the principles of a
demonstrativescience of motion.14
12

Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit

(Berlin:BrunoCassirer,1906),Vol. 1, pp. 134-141;JohnHermanRandall,Jr., "TheDevelopmentof

ScientificMethodin the School of Padua,"Journalof the Historyof Ideas, 1940,1:177-206,rpt., with
the additionof the Latin texts in notes, as the first of three studies in Randall,The School of Padua
and the Emergenceof ModernScience (Padua:Antenore, 1961),pp. 13-68; Neal W. Gilbert,"Galileo
and the School of Padua,"Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1963, 1:223-231;and WilliamF.
Edwards, "Randallon the Developmentof ScientificMethodin the School of Padua-a Continuing
Reappraisal," in Naturalism and Historical Understanding, ed. John P. Anton (Buffalo: State Univ.

New York Press, 1967),pp. 53-68.

13 JonathanBarnes, "Aristotle'sTheoryof Demonstration,"
Phronesis, 1969,14:123-152.See also
the introductorysection of Nicholas Jardine,"Galileo'sRoad to Truthand the DemonstrativeRegress," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1976, 7:277-318, for a discussion of the Posterior Analytics.
14

James G. Lennox, "Aristotle,Galileo, and 'Mixed Sciences,' " in ReinterpretingGalileo, ed.

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A SECOND LOOK-ISIS, 83: 1 (1992)

Nonetheless, it was Galileo who reoriented the physics of motion to make it a

fully geometrical mechanics whose consequences were to be developed mathematically, even though the evident truth of its principles remained problematic
for him. The backgrounds of Galileo's mathematization of motion have been in
dispute. Edith Sylla concluded that, while some of Galileo's concepts appear
indebted to the medieval Oxford school, he reinvented much, drew some scattered elements from the common scholastic intellectual property of his day, and
actually rejected the basic techniques and methods of the analytical languages of
the Oxford calculatores. He simply substituted mathematics for these languages.
Furthermore, he went beyond the calculatorial approach by conceiving his deductive system as a guide for future research.15
Crombie's interest in Galileo's scientific methodology has not been without
suggestive and important results itself. In 1975 he made available to scholars at
large a first report of extensive researches, made in conjunction with Adriano
Carugo, into the early scientific writings of Galileo. They discovered, beginning
in 1968-1969, that Galileo drew his ancient and medieval sources in three of his
early works largely from textbooks written by three prominent contemporary
Jesuit professors of philosophy at the Collegio Romano: Benedictus Pereira,
Franciscus Toletus, and Christopher Clavius. Of these three Galilean treatises,
Crombie gave some details about the Disputationes de praecognitionibus et de
demonstratione, an account of Aristotle's theory of truly scientific demonstration
in the Posterior Analytics. Crombie showed that Galileo maintained there were
two truly scientific demonstrative processes, that from effect to cause (demonstration quia) and that from cause to effect (demonstration propter quid). In the
physical sciences he held that a "demonstrative regress" took place from effect to
cause and then from cause to effect, and that this was not circular reasoning. In
mathematical sciences like astronomy there are no truly scientific demonstrations, since they must proceed ex suppositione from principles assumed from
mathematics. Crombie summed up the Galilean position:
I shouldarguethat Galileo aimedin the end at total certainty,that it was Aristotleand
no other who provided him with this ideal of truly scientific certain knowledge, and
that he retainedthis ideal from his earliest to his latest writings, even as he rejected
the methods and destroyed the content of Aristotle's physics, and even when he
recognized that demonstrationtruly scientific by Aristotelian criteria eluded his
grasp.16
In the wake of the striking Crombie-Carugo discoveries there has been much
WilliamA. Wallace(Washington,D.C.: CatholicUniv. Press, 1986),pp. 29-51, esp. p. 30 (Augustine
to Galileo is at the head of a list of confirmingreferences);and WinifredL. Wisan, "Galileo'sScientific Method:A Reexamination,"in New Perspectiveson Galileo, ed. RobertE. Butts and Joseph C.
Pitt (Boston: Reidel, 1978),pp. 1-57, e.g., p. 43.
15 Edith Sylla, "Galileoand the Oxford Calculatores:AnalyticalLanguagesand the Mean-Speed
Theoremfor AcceleratedMotion,"in ReinterpretingGalileo, ed. Wallace, pp. 53-108.
16 A. C. Crombie, "Sources of Galileo's Early NaturalPhilosophy,"in Reason, Experiment,and
Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M. L. Righini Bonelli and W. R. Shea (New York: Science

HistoryPublications,1975),pp. 157-175,303-305, 158-159(quotation);see pp. 160-170for details of

the historicaldiscovery, p. 170for a statementof priorityof discovery, pp. 171-173for details about
the work "On Demonstration."See also AdrianoCarugoand A. C. Crombie,"The Jesuits and Galileo's Ideas of Science and of Nature," Annali dell' Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di

Firenze, 1983,8(2):10-12, esp. n. 11.

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new work done on Galileo's manuscripts, especially by William A. Wallace. In

two books dealing directly with Galileo's debt to the Jesuits of the Collegio Romano, as well as in a number of other studies, Wallace has argued that the Jesuits
influenced Galileo and that he drew much detailed information from them. 17 Beyond this, Wallace has developed the argument that Galileo's special debt to his
medieval predecessors was much more to those of a Thomistic, realistic turn of
mind in questions of scientific methodology than to those of an Ockhamistic,
positivistic view. The specific tool that Galileo drew from the Thomists was reasoning ex suppositione, a scholastic approach quite different from reasoning ex
hypothesi, which can be equated with hypothetico-deductive method. Reasoning
ex suppositione, Wallace has claimed, was viewed by Galileo as a means of true
demonstration in science not only in his earlier works but also in his Two New
Sciences, the last and most mature of his scientific works.18
Another twist added by Wallace was his emphasis on a historical leap backward by the Jesuit philosophers of the Collegio Romano, the tutors of Galileo in
scientific methodology. At one point Wallace summarized:
Aristotelianism,particularlywhen conceived as defendingthe text of Aristotle and
that alone, did constitute an impedimentto scientific inquiry. Aristotle had to be
approachedwith a "criticaltemper," . . . if progress was to be made in the understandingof nature. . . . [This critical temper] was already present in the Christian
philosophersof the High Middle Ages, in Grosseteste and Albert and Aquinas and
Giles of Rome, who were far from being disposed to seeing Aristotle as a god. The
same mentality . . . is apparentin the reportationes of the philosophersof the Collegio Romano.They were teachingnaturalphilosophyin its entirety,but they were also
preparingstudents to be theologians, and they could not aford to be uncriticalin
evaluatingAristoteliandoctrine. The same unfortunatelycannot be said of the Averroists at Paduaand elsewhere, ... who turnedout to be the slaves of Aristotle....
[And so, Wallacecould conclude]WheneverGalileospoke of science and demonstration . . . his was the hard-headednotion of scientia [of the thirteenth,not the fourteenth, century].19
Wallace's exposition of reasoning ex suppositione as Galileo's way to true
certitude in science has not necessarily satisfied the questions posed by Wisan
and others with regard to Galileo's doubts about the certainty of his own arguments. Wisan pointed out, "Unfortunately the new science [of motion] required
principles which were not immediately evident in the sense required [for scientific certitude] and could not be made so." However, his more fundamental contribution, uncovering the extent of Galileo's debt to the Jesuit philosophers of the
Collegio Romano, remains. The question of Galileo's use of Jesuit texts and of ex
17 His first majorpublicationon the subject was WilliamA. Wallace, Galileo's Early Notebooks:
The Physical Questions (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. Notre Dame Press, 1977); see esp. pp. v-viii
regardingWallace vs. Crombie-Carugo.For the Jesuit influenceon Galileo see ibid., and Wallace,

Galileo and His Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Galileo's Science (Princeton, N.J.:

PrincetonUniv. Press, 1984);his other relevantstudies are listed ibid., pp. 361-362.
18 WilliamA. Wallace, "Galileoand Reasoningex suppositione:The Methodologyof the TwoNew
Sciences," in PSA 1974: Proceedings of the 1974 Biennial Meeting, Philosophy of Science Associa-

tion, ed. R. S. Cohen et al. (Boston Studiesin the Philosophyof Science, 32) (Boston:Reidel, 1975),
pp. 79-104.
l9 William A. Wallace, Prelude to Galileo: Essays on Medieval and Sixteenth-Century Sources of

Galileo's Thought(Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 62) (Boston: Reidel, 1981), pp.
316-317, in an essay entitled "PierreDuhem:Galileo and the Science of Motion."

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suppositione reasoning has been put in the largercontext of Aristotelianphilos-

ophy as such and decided negativelyby Gary Hatfield.He has accepted the facts
of Galileo's use of the Jesuits at points while arguingpersuasively that Galileo's
reasoningis straightforwardlymathematicaland not Aristotelian.20
Throughthe studies of Crombieand Wallaceon Galileo's logical tract on demonstration, outlining his views about scientific certitude, we have been given
evidence of an Aristotelianinfluenceon Galileo-an influencebased both in Aristotle and in scholastic commentaries.This Aristotelianthreadin Galileo's work
does not diminishthe greaterimportanceof mathematicaltechniques and experimental methods therein. Furthermore,the issue of Aristotelianismin the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a highly complex one. ClearlyGalileo did not
follow the Aristoteliantextual orthodoxyfound in many Italianuniversitiesof his
time. In fact, there were many Aristotelianismsaround, and Galileo found some
amenableto his scientific tendencies and others contrary.
The unfoldingpicture of Renaissance Aristotelianismshas been due especially
to the writings and influence of Charles Schmitt.21In a 1975 essay Schmitt explained the revival of Aristotelianismafter the humanistattacks of the early sixteenth century by pointing to the returnto disciplinedtheological instructionin
the universities after the Council of Trent, when both Protestantsand Catholics
found Aristotle's works and their commentariesthe most familiarand comfortable vehicle for philosophicalexposition.22For over twenty years Schmitt's studies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuryscience and philosophyfocused on the
various positions taken by Aristotelianphilosophers with regard to such questions as void space, the motion of free fall, and other themes importantin the new
science of the seventeenth century. Schmitt disagreedwith Randall's argument
for an intellectualschool of Paduaand expressed skepticismregardinghis thesis
of Aristotelian methodological influences on Galileo. He also surveyed the
broader, nonscientific interests of Aristotelian thinkers. Following in a similar
vein, and concentrating upon cosmological matters, Edward Grant has also
shown both the variety and the longevity of Aristotelian schools of thought
throughthe Renaissance.23Thus the work of Randalland Crombiein the 1940s
and 1950s has been endorsed in certain of its intellectualtendencies, if not in its
20 Winifred L. Wisan, "The New Science of Motion: A Study of Galileo's De motu locali," Archive
for History of Exact Sciences, 1974, 13:103-306, e.g., pp. 124-125; Wisan, "Galileo's Scientific
Method" (cit. n. 14), p. 43 (quotation); and Gary Hatfield, "Metaphysics and the New Science," in
Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 93-166, esp. pp. 126-127. For a later summary of Wallace's position see his "The Certitude of Science in Late Medieval and Renaissance Thought," History of Philosophy Quarterly, 1986, 3:281-291.
21 Primarily in two of his collections of essays published by Variorum Reprints in London, Studies
in Renaissance Philosophy and Science (1981) and The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities (1984), as well as his overview presented in Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983). See also, in general, the essay of Brian Copenhaver, "Science
and Philosophy in Early Modern Europe: The Historiographical Significance of the Work of Charles
B. Schmitt," Annals of Science, 1987, 44:507-517.
22 Schmitt, Studies, Ch. 5, pp. 512-514. For the sixteenth-century emphasis on Aristotle even in
optics see Thomas Frangenberg, "Egnatio Danti's Optics: Cinquecento Aristotelianism and the Medieval Tradition," Nuncius, 1988, 3:3-38.
23 Edward Grant, Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages
to the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981); Grant, In Defense of the
Earth's Centrality and Immobility: Scholastic Reaction to Copernicanism in the Seventeenth Century
(Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 74[4]) (Philadelphia, 1984); and Grant, "Ways

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95

substantivetheses, by the more recent discoveries of viable and thrivingAristotelian traditionsin the latter half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries. But the extent of the influenceof these upon Galileo remainsin
question.
Almost lost in scholarly discussion of Crombie's methodology thesis and the
subsequentdebate over Galileo's methodologicaldebts was considerationof the
chapter on technology. In his first approachto the materialCrombiesaw a rapprochement between scientific empiricismand technological development from
the twelfth century onward. In his revised view much greateremphasis was put
upon the academic and intellectualframeworkof the medieval interest in empirical validation. The second edition of Augustine to Galileo made it very explicit
that the focus of the medieval discussions was the status of the knowledgeof the
physical world, not the details of the content of knowledgeof the physical world
(1959, Vol. 2, pp. 114-116). Yet as a general history of medieval (and early
modern) science, the book had much to offer with this summary of medieval
technical achievements, as I have already noted. It is perhaps salutaryto recall
that even Crombie's second edition predated the well-known and stimulating
work by Lynn White on the stirrup, the plough, horsepower, and mechanical
power in general.24Yet Crombiehad much earlierwork by Bloch, Lefebvre des
Noettes, and others to build upon, as his bibliographiesshow. In any event, his
view of technology was put to the service of the methodology thesis; and so
medieval technology has seemed a bit difficultto relate to "science" after the
reorientationof that thesis more toward academic treatises on empiricalmethod
than toward manipulationor measurementof the physical world. From the extensive list of works relevant to medieval Europeantechnology I would like to
cite a very few that have seemed suggestive to me.
An especially nice selection of significanttexts on the appreciationand theoretical validation of technology in the Latin Middle Ages appearedin Friedrich
Klemm's History of WesternTechnology,a work that has been in and out of print
and should be availablefor studentuse. Conceptualorientationsuseful for thinking about the value and significanceattachedto manualtechniques and mechanical technologies have been elaboratedby HannahArendt, who has arguedfor a
separationbetween work and labor.25Jacques Le Goff has proposed interpretations of the value of work and trades, generallyfindingmanualwork to have been
of low value until the High Middle Ages, when a positive "theology of labor"
appearedwith the growth of towns and consequent sociotheological shifts. Recently George Ovitt has surveyed medieval, especially monastic, attitudes toto Interpret the Terms 'Aristotelian' and 'Aristotelianism' in Medieval and Renaissance Natural Philosophy," History of Science, 1987, 25:335-358.
24 Lynn White, jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
Reviews of this controversial and important book appeared, among other places, in Endeavor, 1963,
22:52; History, 1963, 48:199-200; Hist. Sci., 1963, 2:130-135; Isis, 1963, 54:418-420; Past and
Present, April 1963, 24:90-100; Speculum, 1964, 39:359-365; and Technology and Culture, 1963,
4:62-65.
25 Friedrich Klemm, A History of Western Technology, trans. D. W. Singer (New York: Scribner's, 1959), pp. 55-74 for the texts mentioned (the German original appeared in 1954); and Hannah
Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1958), Chs. 3 ("Labor") and 4
("Work") for useful distinctions and discussions of these topics in classical antiquity and since the
seventeenth century; Arendt does not discuss the Middle Ages.

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ward labor, progress, and redemption.Unlike Le Goff (and contrary to the enthusiasms of Lynn White), Ovitt concludes that the High Middle Ages saw a
decline in the standingof labor as it became secularized.26
One topic that has not always been sufficientlydemarcatedfrom the larger
considerationof labor and technology is the mechanicalarts in the Middle Ages.
That they clearly had a place and some sort of relationshipto the medievalliberal
arts is evident in the ninth-centuryinsertionof these presumablyirrelevantsubjects into Martianus Capella's Marriage of Philology and Mercury. In this late

ancient text containinga handbookof the liberal arts, the introductoryallegory

has the god Mercury present the seven liberal arts as his wedding gift to the
maidenPhilology;the ninth-centurycommentatormakes her respondto Mercury
with a gift of the seven mechanicalarts.27
A useful, if narrowlyfocused, study of the mechanicalarts is Peter Sternagel's
catalogue of medieval references to and classificationsof the artes mechanicae.
Extremely helpful on the changingconception and evaluationof the mechanical
arts is Elspeth Whitney's recent monographParadise Restored, which concludes: "The mechanicalarts were given moraland intellectualsanctioneither by
placing them within the context of man's efforts to restore himself to his prelapsariancondition ... or by definingthem as applied science.... By the close
of the thirteenth century, the mechanical arts had come to be regarded as a
necessary and often highly valued category of knowledge." Whitney has held
many of Lynn White's views up to critical examinationand doubt. Her conclusions differfrom Ovitt's in being about university-basedintellectualsratherthan
monastic writers. And she notes the intellectualizationof the mechanicalarts by
thinkers of the thirteenthcentury and later. The late thirteenthand early fourteenth centuries seem to have been a period of sharp debate and intellectual
reformulations,if WilliamNewman's recent article on alchemy is a dependable
index. He shows how alchemicaltheorists drew upon traditionaltheories of the
elements and proceeded to claim an unusuallyhigh status for alchemy as applied
science, of higherstandingthan technology, since the alchemistalone can change
species throughhis knowledge of the true principlesand causes of things.28
From this work on medieval technology since Crombie'sbook, many clarifications and basic new insights have emerged. These writers have refocused our
views of the writings of philosophersand theologiansupon such subjects as the
mechanicalarts and upon the special, and perhapssuspect, claims of a discipline
like alchemy. This constitutes a historiographicreorientationnot unlike that of
Crombiehimself, as he went from the first to the second edition of Augustine to
26 Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago:
Univ. Chicago Press, 1980), in the five essays on pp. 53-97 and 107-121; George Ovitt, Jr., The
Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987) (many other intriguing and valuable insights appear in this book as well); and
Lynn White, jr., Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: Univ. California
Press, 1978).
27 Remigius of Auxerre, Remigii Autissiodorensis commentum in Martianum Capellam, ed. C. E.
Lutz (Leiden: Brill, 1962), Vol. 1, p. 208 (commentary on p. 79, line 11, in Adolf Dick's edition).
28 Peter Sternagel, Die artes mechanicae im Mittelalter: Begriffs- und Bedeutungsgeschichte
bis
zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts (Kallmiinz: Lassleben, 1966) (more useful for the period up to the
twelfth century than for the thirteenth century); Whitney, Paradise Restored (cit. n. 9), pp. 147
(quotation), 147-149; and William Newman, "Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle
Ages," Isis, 1989, 80:423-445.

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Galileo, regardingthe place of actual experimentationin scientific methodology.

Intellectualizationand academic philosophical concerns seem to have claimed
more and more attention. The outlook of those actually engaged in skilled labor
or ".appliedscience" was not always availablenor always relevantto discussions
of empiricalmethodology.
In 1952 the works of Anneliese Maier on late medieval science had only recently become widely known, many of them havingbeen publishedduringWorld
War II in regions controlled by Germany or Italy. Maier held a doctorate in
philosophy and had left Germanyin 1935. In 1949it was considered appropriate
for E. J. Dijksterhuisto publish a note in Isis about her first three books on
medieval science, produced from 1939 to 1943, when she held a position at the
Vatican Library.29In 1949the first edition of her importantbook on fourteenthcentury forerunnersof Galileo appeared to detailed reviews, both critical and
complimentary, by Dijksterhuis and Koyre.30 In conjunction with her earlier
studies, this work virtually replaced the views of Pierre Duhem, attacking his
tendency always to find medieval sources for concepts espoused by seventeenthcentury physicists. Maier's studies were models of meticulous care in reporting
and explaining scholastic natural philosophy. Crombie made good use of this
invaluablebody of researchin the 1952edition of Augustine to Galileo. It was, of
course, the materialon late medieval physics in his book that received the most
suggestions for addition and correction in Clagett's review. And this is also the
area of medieval science that has been most developed since Crombiewrote. To
try to suggest the advances since 1952would be out of place here. Sufficeit to say
that the work of Maier, Clagett,E. A. Moody, and manyothers has expandedthe
field tremendously.To take only one example, Duhem found in medieval nominalism fundamentalbases of seventeenth-centuryphysics. Among these bases
was, supposedly, Ockham's developmentof somethingapproachingthe modern
concept of inertia. Maier cleared away much of this Duhemianconstructionand
showed that Ockham'scontributionwas essentially a negative one at this point, a
contributionupon which it was not easy to build. Yet Ockhammay have opened
up more opportunitiesthan Maier's precise delimitationallowed. Writingabout
Ockham's physical ideas, one historianhas recently maintainedthat "he delineated the precise boundariesof a logically sound philosophicalformulationof the
problem. By this accomplishment,empiricalresearchand mathematicalformulations . .. were given direction and a theoretical basis."31 Here we can see the
continuinginterest within much more recent scholarshipof the basic themes that
Crombiefocused on.
29
The note appearedin Isis, 1949,40:120-121;it also mentionedsix of her more importantarticles
publishedduringand afterthe war. SelectionsfromMaier'smanyvaluableworkson medievalnatural

philosophy appear in Steven D. Sargent, ed. and trans., On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected
Writings on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
30 Anneliese Maier, Die Vorlaufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert: Studien zur Naturphilosophie der

Spdtscholastik(Rome: Edizionidi Storia e Letteratura,1949).This work was reviewed by Dijksterhuis in Isis, 1950, 41:207-210, and by Koyre in Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences,
1951, 4:769-783.
31 Andre Goddu, The Physics of William of Ockham (Leiden: Brill, 1984), p. 220. Crombie dis-

cussed Ockham'scontributionto the concept of inertiabrieflyand quite positivelyin the firstedition

of Augustine to Galileo, pp. 248-249. By 1959 he was much more guarded and reticent in crediting

Ockhamwith an approachto the concept of inertia:Medievaland EarlyModernScience, Vol. 2, pp.

62-66.

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Another nominalist foundation of seventeenth-centuryphysics, according to

Duhem, was the medieval impetus theory of Jean Buridan. Ernest Moody took
up this subject in two differentstages and argued that Galileo's dynamics had
roots not only in the Latin Middle Ages but in an earlier Greco-Arabictradition
as well. In elegantly clear terms Moody maintainedthat both Maier and Koyre
had misinterpretedBuridanand that Galileo's maturedynamicsbore formalcomparison with Buridan's impetus theory. At the same time he pointed out that
there was no fourteenth-centuryscience of mechanics as such, for the various
ideas there were quite discrete, mixed with others that were not compatible.Only
in Galileo did a single, consistent science of mechanics appear.32With nominalism, as with so many other topics, there has been a remarkableamountof study
and reinterpretationin the past few decades. The problems involved in finding
connections from the medievals to the seventeenth century have become quite
clear and widely known. The result, since Augustine to Galileo, has been for
scholars to study more carefullyjust what the medievals did say, without looking
for impacts in the ScientificRevolution.33Moody and others since the 1950shave
created a much more sophisticatedand complex pictureof the fourteenth-century
natural philosophers.34

In the forty years since Crombieset out his challenging"shorthistory," much

has changed in the writing of the history of science. However, those changes
have occurredmore in some fields and less in others. Because of the relative lack
of source materialsfor the social history of medieval science-a virtualabsence
by comparisonwith the nineteenthand twentieth centuries-treatment of philosophical and institutionalframeworkshas been as far as most recent study of the
MiddleAges has been able to go. While Crombiewas alreadyaware of this-in a
way it was essential even for Duhem at the beginning of the century-it has
become more and more obvious that an understandingof the full philosophical
and theological frameworkis needed for comprehensionof the issues that the
medievals wanted to discuss. In fact, the shift signaled by Anneliese Maier has
now become the rule. Ratherthan tryingto find modern,or seventeenth-century,
science in some sort of embryonicform in the Middle Ages, scholars now try to
show us what it was that interestedthe medievals. In this there is a challengenot
exactly anticipatedat midcentury.
When Crombiewrote, the debates seemed to be about the exact natureof the
debt of early modern science to the Middle Ages. This can be seen as well in
HerbertButterfield'sThe Originsof ModernScience, publishedin 1949.Another
remarkablebook concernedwith continuityand discontinuity,producedat about
32 Ernest A. Moody, "Galileoand Avempace:The Dynamicsof the LeaningTower Experiment,"
J. Hist. Ideas, 1951, 12:163-193,375-422. For a revised view see Moody, "Galileoand His Precursors," in Galileo Reappraised,ed. CarloGolino (Berkeley:Univ. CaliforniaPress, 1966),pp. 23-43.
33 A very useful and clear exposition is ErnanMcMullin,"Medievaland ModernScience: Continuity or Discontinuity?"InternationalPhilosophicalQuarterly,1965,5:103-129, a piece occasioned
at least in partby the appearanceof Crombie'ssecond edition.
34 A fundamentalpaperby Moody was his reinterpretation
concerning"Empiricismand Metaphysics in MedievalPhilosophy,"PhilosophicalReview, 1958,67:145-163.Variousimportantpapersap-

pear in Moody, Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic: Collected Papers, 1933-1969

(Berkeley:Univ. CaliforniaPress, 1975).Furtherdevelopmentof importantthemesappearsin articles

by JohnMurdoch;see, e.g., "TheAnalyticCharacterof Late MedievalLearning:NaturalPhilosophy
without Nature," in Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages, ed. Lawrence D. Roberts (Bingham-

ton: State Univ. New York Press, 1982),pp. 171-213.

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the same time as Crombie's,was Dijksterhuis'sMechanizationof the WorldPicture, which first appearedin Dutch in 1950;it followed its theme throughantiquity and the Middle Ages (often in Maier's terms) to the seventeenth century.35
With the historiographicdebates set off by Thomas Kuhn (also Joseph Agassi et
al.) at the beginningof the 1960s, the distance from the MiddleAges to the early
modem period seemed to grow tremendously.Yet no survey of medieval science
has appeared to replace Crombie's work. On the face of it, this is amazing.
However, the recognized need for much new informationhas been one reason.
Despite all that we have learned from Crombie's intelligentplacement of medieval science and its early modem successors within a philosophicalframework,
preeminentlyan Aristotelian one, the need for a new formulationhas become
painfullyobvious. Fuller discussions of Aristotelianfoundationsand of medieval
modificationsare required. Even more, the identificationof distinctively medieval interests-neither a methodologythesis nor any other single issue will now
hold together a history of medieval science-will requirethat we tread the dangerous path of paying primaryattention to medieval, not modern, interests. A
few examples are astronomy and astrology, medicine as an integralpart of medieval science, and vernaculartechnical literature.36
We can now reasonablyhope for an up-to-datetextbook on medievalscience in
David Lindberg'sforthcomingsurvey of ancient and medieval science in philosophical and institutionalframework.37When such a text sees the light of day, it
will be even more apparenthow useful Augustine to Galileo has been. Initiallya
straightforwardthesis about continuity "fromAugustine to Galileo," in revised
form a combinationof thesis and textbook, this volume has remaineda standard
point of reference. But after forty years it does no disservice to the book to say
that it has completed a useful life. Like an old friend, it can still be consultedbut now for differentreasons. It remainsa connection to historicalcontroversies
and philosophicalcommitmentsof our disciplinarypast.
35 HerbertButterfield,The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (London:Bell, 1949)(the first
chapterwas entitled "The HistoricalImportanceof a Theory of Impetus");and E. J. Dijksterhuis,

The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
36

On astronomy see, e.g., John North, Chaucer's Universe (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1988);

North, Stars, Minds, and Fate: Essays in Ancient and Medieval Cosmology (London: Hambledon
Press, 1989); North, The Universal Frame: Historical Essays in Astronomy, Natural Philosophy, and

ScientificMethod(London:HambledonPress, 1989);and the useful survey in JimTester, A History

of WesternAstrology (Woodbridge,Suffolk:Boydell Press, 1987),Ch. 5. On medicine in medieval
science see, e.g., Nancy G. Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of Italian

MedicalLearning(Princeton,N.J.: PrincetonUniv. Press, 1981);and the survey in Siraisi,Medieval

and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: Univ. Chi-

cago Press, 1990), Ch. 3; excellent materialon medievalmedicineappearsin MichaelR. McVaugh

and Nancy G. Siraisi, eds., Renaissance Medical Learning: Evolution of a Tradition, Osiris, 2nd Ser.,

1990,6. On medievaltechnologysee the exampleslisted in the notes to Bert S. Hall, "EditingTexts

in the History of Early Technology," in Editing Texts in the History of Science and Medicine, ed.

Trevor H. Levere (New York: Garland,1982),pp. 69-100; see also Linda EhrsamVoigts, "Editing
MiddleEnglishMedicalTexts," ibid., pp. 39-68. EspeciallysuggestiveamongVoigts's publicationsis
"Anglo-SaxonPlantRemediesand the Anglo-Saxons,"Isis, 1979, 70:250-268.On Fachprosa, especially in pharmacyand medicine, see GerhardBaader and GundolfKeil, eds., Medizin im mittelalterlichenAbendland(Darmstadt:WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft,1982);and GundolfKeil et
al., eds., Fachprosa-Studien: Beitrage zur mittelalterlichen Wissenschafts- und Geistesgeschichte

(Berlin:E. Schmidt, 1982).

37 Forthcomingfrom the Universityof ChicagoPress at the time of this writing.