NOTES

Introduction – The Truth about Science in the Middle Ages

1 Issac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1676, cited in Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 274.

2 Richard William Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1953), p. 203.

3 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York: Vintage, 1985), p. 102; William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 3; Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (London: William Heinemann, 2002), p. 328.

4 Thomas H. Huxley, Darwiniana, vol. 2; Essays by Thomas H. Huxley (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. 52.

5 Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 324.

6 Jean Le Rond D’Alembert (trans. Richard H. Schwarb), The Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopaedia of Diderot (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 62.

7 Colin A. Russell, ‘The Conflict of Science and Religion’, in Gary B. Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 10.

8 Girolamo Cardano, De subtilitate l. 3 in Opera vol. iii, p. 602 cited in Joseph Gies and Frances Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (London: Harper Perennial, 1995), p. 2.

9 Ibid., p. 246.

10 Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, p. 30.

11 Michael White, Leonardo: The First Scientist (London: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001).

12 Charles Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind (London: Allen Lane, 2004), p. 96.

13 Many of Leonardo’s inventions were not as original as often supposed. See Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 142.

14 Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York: Praeger Paperback, 1997), p. 65.

Chapter 1
– After the Fall of Rome: Progress in the Early Middle Ages

1 Angela Care Evans, The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial (London: British Museum Publications, 1986), p. 57.

2 Roger Collins, Early Medieval Europe, 300–1000, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), p. xxiii.

3 Jared M. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (London: Viking, 2005), p. 297.

4 Adapted from Ann Williams and G. H Martin (eds), Domesday Book: A Complete Translation (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 20.

5 Francis Pryor, Britain in the Middle Ages: An Archaeological History (London: HarperPress, 2006), p. 65. The heavy plough was known to the Romans but does not appear to have been widely adopted in northern Europe, where it is most suitable to be used, until the centuries after the Western Empire fell.

6 Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 43.

7 Ibid., p. 2.

8 Paul Gans, ‘The Medieval Horse Harness: Revolution or Evolution: A Case Study in Technological Change’, in Villard’s legacy: Studies in Medieval Technology, Science and Art in Memory of Jean Gimpel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 179.

9 Ibid., p. 184.

10 Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 40.

11 Ibid., p. 12.

12 Lynn White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 21.

13 Josiah Cox Russell, The Control of Late Ancient and Medieval Population (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1985), p. 36.

14 White, Medieval Religion and Technology, p. 14. Although White’s work has been developed by more recent scholars, his fundamental thesis still stands.

15 Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 225.

16 Ibid., p. 171.

17 Among works that exist only in the Arab version are Ptolemy’s Optics and the later books of Apollonius of Perga’s Conics.

18 Howard R. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 47.

19 Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, 2nd edn (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), p. 144.

20 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 336.

21 L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 94.

22 Ibid., p. 93.

23 Collins, Early Medieval Europe, 300-1000, ch. 20.

Chapter 2
– The Mathematical Pope

1 Horace K. Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, vol. 5 (London: Kegan Paul, 1910), p. 63. I have taken much of the story of Gerbert from Mann’s volume and Anna Marie Flusche, The Life and Legend of Gerbert of Aurillac: The Organbuilder who became Pope Sylvester II (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005).

2 Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 290.

3 An outstanding example is the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

4 Maurice Hugh Keen, The Penguin History of Medieval Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 42.

5 Richer of Saint Remi, Historiae, MGH Scriptores, vol. 38 (Hanover, 2000).

6 Gerbert of Aurillac (trans. Harriet Pratt Lattin), The Letters of Gerbert: with his Papal Privileges as Sylvester II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).

7 Gerbert, The Letters of Gerbert, p. 140.

8 D.J. Struik, ‘Gerbert’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 5 (New York: Scribner, 1970), 365.

9 Gerbert, The Letters of Gerbert, p. 184.

10 Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 177.

11 Ibid., p. 180.

12 William of Malmesbury (trans. R.A.B. Mynors), Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 295 [II:173].

13 Gerbert, The Letters of Gerbert, p. 45.

14 For a critical discussion of the term see Paolo Squatriti, ‘Pornocracy’, in Christopher Kleinhenz et al, eds, Medieval Italy: An Encyclopaedia (London: Routledge, 2004), vol. 2, p. 928.

15 Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, ‘Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 228.

16 Werner Telesko, The Wisdom of Nature: The Healing Powers and Symbolism of Plants and Animals in the Middle Ages (Munich: Prestel, 2001), p. 90. Among other things, lions were believed to sleep with their eyes open and to be stillborn, only waking from the dead three days after birth – the parallel with Jesus’s resurrection on the third day is obvious.

17 Anicius Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, revised edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 41.

18 Quoted in John Henry, Knowledge Is Power: How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision Inspired Francis Bacon to Create Modern Science (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2003), p. 85.

19 Naomi Reed Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought: The Hereford Paradigm (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2001), p. 13.

20 Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection (trans. John F. Healy), (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 41. The precise figure depends on the exact interpretation of the size of a stade (an ancient Greek measure of distance derived from the length of a stadium). See chapter 13 of the present book.

21 John Carey, ‘Ireland and the Antipodes: The Heterodoxy of Virgil of Salzburg’, Speculum 64, no. 1 (January 1989): p. 1. Sir Francis Bacon’s remarks, referred to above, may be based on a garbled recollection of this case.

22 These arguments were rehearsed in many ancient sources. See, for example, Ptolemy (trans. G.J. Toomer), Ptolemy’s Almagest (London: Duckworth, 1984), p. 45 [I:7].

23 Boethius referred to the ‘music of the world’, which we call the ‘music of the spheres’. Anicius Boethius, ed. G. Friedlein, De institutione arithmetica, libri duo: di institutione musica, libri quinque (Leipzig: Teubner, 1867), p. 187. The concept of the ‘music of the spheres’ is Pythagorean and many ancient commentators, including Aristotle, denied its existence. See On the Heavens in Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 479 [290b14].

24 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1979), p. 39.

25 The phrase is Dante’s from Dante Alighieri (trans. Robert M. Durling), Inferno (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 77 [IV: 131].

Chapter 3
– The Rise of Reason

1 Eadmer (trans. R.W. Southern), The Life of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 7.

2 Ibid., p. 37.

3 Adapted from St Anselm (trans. Benedicta Ward), Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm with the Proslogion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 245.

4 Ibid., p. 239.

5 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1961), p. 568.

6 Adapted from Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 25.

7 A.J. MacDonald, Berenger and the Reform of Sacramental Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1930), p. 304.

8 Michael T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 292.

9 Peter Abelard and Héloïse, The Letters of Abelard and Héloïse, revised (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 58.

10 Ibid., p. 78.

11 Clanchy, Abelard, p. 215.

12 Ibid., p. 91.

13 Ibid.

14 Abelard and Héloïse, The Letters of Abelard and Héloïse, p. 66.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., p. 67.

17 Ibid., p. 147.

18 Clanchy, Abelard, p. 199.

19 Ibid., p. 107.

20 Ibid., p. 322.

21 Ibid.,p. 318.

Chapter 4
– The Twelfth-Century Renaissance

1 The concept of the ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ originated with Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927).

2 Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), p. 60.

3 Plato (trans. Desmond Lee), Timaeus and Critias (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 42 [29].

4 M.-D. Chenu (trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little), Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968), p. 12.

5 Genesis 1:16.

6 Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 24.

7 Gilbert of La Porrée quoted in Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, p. 40.

8 Peter Dronke, ‘Thierry of Chartres’, in A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 367.

9 Hugh of St Victor quoted in Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 1.

10 Louise Cochrane, Adelard of Bath: The First English Scientist (London: British Museum Press, 1994), p. 32.

11 Michael Mahoney, ‘Mathematics’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 153.

12 Adelard of Bath (trans. Charles Burnett), Conversations with his Nephew, On the Same and the Different, Questions on Natural Science, and On Birds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 85–9.

13 Ibid., p. 169.

14 Anon, ‘A List of Translations Made From Arabic Into Latin in the Twelfth Century’, in A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 35.

15 David C. Lindberg, ‘Transmission of Greek and Arabic Learning’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 62.

16 Roger D. Masters, ‘The Case of Aristotle’s Missing Dialogues: Who Wrote the Sophist, the Statesman, and the Politics?’, in Political Theory vol. 5, no. 1 (February 1977): p. 32.

17 The phrase is Dante’s from Dante Alighieri (trans. Robert M. Durling), Inferno (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 77 [IV: 131].

18 Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World, vol. 10 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2002), p. 798.

19 Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 211.

20 Keith Dix, ‘Aristotle’s Peripatetic Library’, in Lost Libraries: the Destruction of the Great Book Collections Since Antiquity, ed. James Raven (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 59.

21 Ibid., p. 61.

22 Pearl Kibre and Nancy G. Siraisi, ‘The Institutional Setting: The Universities’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 120.

23 Olaf Pedersen, The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 211.

24 Ibid., p. 139.

25 Ibid., p. 161.

26 Kibre and Siraisi, ‘The Institutional Setting: The Universities’, p. 125.

27 Pedersen, The First Universities, p. 154.

28 Charles Talbot, ‘Medicine’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 400.

29 Richard William Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1953), p. 206.

30 Pedersen, The First Universities, p. 111.

Chapter 5
– Heresy and Reason

1 Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, eds, Heresies of the High Middle Ages: Selected Sources (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 258.

2 J.M.M.H. Thijssen, ‘Master Amalric and the Amalricians: Inquisitorial Procedure and the Suppression of Heresy at the University of Paris’, Speculum vol. 71, no. 1 (1996), p. 48.

3 Ibid., p. 54.

4 Ibid., p. 61.

5 Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 26.

6 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 122.

7 Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 78.

8 Anthony Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 43.

9 Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages, p. 40.

10 Ibid., p. 64.

11 M.-D. Chenu (trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little), Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968), p. 219.

12 Richard William Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 17.

13 Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 137.

14 Wakefield and Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, p. 129.

15 Jonathan Sumption, The Albigensian Crusade (London: Faber, 1978), p. 48.

16 Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 47ff.

17 Edward Peters, ed., Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe: Documents in Translation (London: Scolar Press, 1980), p. 197.

18 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 259.

19 Peters, Inquisition, p. 52. The investigating magistrates trying to combat corruption in Italy today are the direct descendants of the medieval inquisitors.

20 Ibid., pp. 58–67.

21 Ibid., ch. 5.

22 Olaf Pedersen, The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 97.

23 Peters, Inquisition, p. 117.

24 For example, Bernardo Gui burned 42 out of 930 cases in Toulouse whereas Jacques Fournier burned five from 114 cases in Pamiers. See James Buchanan Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline and Resistance in Languedoc(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 69 and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. xiv.

25 Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, p. 280.

26 Ibid., p. 296.

27 Maurice Hugh Keen, The Penguin History of Medieval Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 158.

28 Sumption, The Albigensian Crusade, p. 48.

29 Roger French and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars’ Natural Philosophy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), p. 120.

30 Augustine of Hippo (trans. Roger Green), De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 125 [II:144].

31 The classic statement of this point of view is in Thomas Aquinas, ed. Thomas Gilby, Summa Theologiae, vol. 1 (London: Blackfriars, 1964), p. 17 [Pt I, Q 1, Art 5].

Chapter 6
– How Pagan Science was Christianised

1 Ptolemy of Lucca quoted in Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), p. 522.

2 Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, 38 vols (Paris: Ludovicus Vives, 1890).

3 Paola Zambelli, The Speculum Astronomiae and Its Enigma: Astrology, Theology, and Science in Albertus Magnus and His Contemporaries (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1992).

4 Olaf Pedersen, The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 281.

5 Catholic University of America, New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 257.

6 Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 69 [2.2.1].

7 Bernardo Gui is notorious as the fanatical inquisitor played by F. Murray Abraham in the film adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

8 Kenelm Foster, ed., The Life of Thomas Aquinas: Biographical Documents (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1959), p. 30.

9 Ibid., p. 33.

10 Ibid., p. 32.

11 Ibid., p. 44.

12 Strictly speaking, these ideas may not fairly represent the views of Averröes but rather his Latin followers. See Willam Wallace, ‘The Philosophical Setting of Medieval Science’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 104. To some extent the reader is left to infer the heterodox opinions of Siger and his followers from the condemnations of their opponents. No one would be foolish enough to put down their most radical beliefs in writing. This lack of written evidence has led some scholars to claim that no one really believed the condemned opinions, but this neglects the central place of oral discussion and questioning at medieval universities. For a spirited defence of Siger as a philosophical moderate, see B. Carlos Bazan, ‘Siger of Brabant’, in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, eds Jorge J.E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2003), pp. 632–40.

13 Thomas Aquinas, ed. Timothy McDermott, Summa Theologiae, vol. 2 (London: Blackfriars, 1964), p. 13 [Pt 1, Q 2, Art 3].

14 Adapted from the analogy used in Patterson Brown, ‘Infinite Causal Regression’, Philosophical Review 75 (1966), pp. 510–25 The first of Aquinas’s five ways deals specifically with motion as understood by Aristotle, while the second argues from causes more generally.

15 Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 337.

16 Moses Maimonides (trans. M. Friedlander), Guide for the Perplexed, 2nd edn (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 2.

17 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 2, p. 11 [Pt 1, Q 2, Art 2].

18 Thomas Aquinas, ed. Thomas Gilby, Summa Theologiae, vol. 1 (London: Blackfriars, 1964), p. 7 [Pt 1, Q 1, Art 1].

19 Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 85.

20 J.M.M.H. Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 48.

21 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 110.

22 Dante Alighieri (trans. Robert and Jean Hollander), Paradiso (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 239 [X:136–8].

23 Adapted from Lerner and Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy, pp. 337–54.

24 Ibid., p. 352.

25 Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200–1400, p. 55.

26 R. Howgrave-Graham, The Cathedrals of France (London: Batsford, 1959), p. 118.

27 Lynn White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 233.

28 Judith Förstel and Aline Magnien (trans. Diana Fowles), Beauvais Cathedral (Amiens: Inventaire Général, 2005), p. 10.

29 Ibid., p. 2.

Chapter 7
– Bloody Failure: Magic and Medicine in the Middle Ages

1 A short but hard-hitting analysis of pre-modern medicine is found in David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

2 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 113.

3 Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, Canto edn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 15. There is a lot of debate as to how strictly this demarcation was observed in the Middle Ages. However, even if only made explicit in the sixteenth century, it is implied by much medieval comment on magic.

4 Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Polity, 1989), p. 20.

5 Books of folk cures, such as the English leech books, still survive. For some of the oldest see Linda Voigts, ‘Anglo-Saxon Plant Remedies and the Anglo-Saxons’, in The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and Middle Ages: Readings from Isis, ed. Michael Shank (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), p. 163.

6 Stanton J. Linden, ed., The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 137.

7 Bert Hansen, ‘Science and Magic’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 493.

8 P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed., The Occult in Mediaeval Europe, 500-1500: A Documentary History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 174.

9 John Henry, Knowledge Is Power: How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision Inspired Francis Bacon to Create Modern Science (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2003), p. 58.

10 Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 125.

11 Wootton, Bad Medicine, p. 17.

12 Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, p. 115.

13 Charles Talbot, ‘Medicine’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 400.

14 Ibid., p. 403.

15 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 73.

16 George Sarton, Galen of Pergamon (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1954), p. 23.

17 Archimatthaeus (fl. 12th century) quoted in Edward Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 743.

18 Wootton, Bad Medicine, p. 56.

19 Geoffrey Chaucer (trans. Nevill Coghill), The Canterbury Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), p. 36 [I(A) 414–21].

20 Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), p. 856.

Chapter 8
– The Secret Arts of Alchemy and Astrology

1 Cornelius Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, revised edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 210 [VI:21].

2 Acts 19:19.

3 Augustine (trans. R.W. Dyson), The City of God Against the Pagans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 197 [5:8].

4 Ptolemy (trans. F.E. Robbins), Tetrabiblos, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

5 Adelard of Bath (trans. Charles Burnett), Conversations with his Nephew, On the Same and the Different, Questions on Natural Science, and On Birds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 189.

6 Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), p. 828.

7 Dante Alighieri (trans. Robert M. Durling), Inferno (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 311 [XX:118].

8 Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 111.

9 Edward Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 657.

10 Thomas Aquinas, eds Thomas O’Meara and Michael Duffy, Summa Theologiae, vol. 40 (London: Blackfriars, 1968), p. 55 [Pt 2.2, Q 95, Art 5].

11 Ibid.

12 Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 350.

13 For example, the Paris condemnations of 1270 and 1398. See Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), pp. 80, 266.

14 See chapter eighteen.

15 S.J. Tester, A History of Western Astrology (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1987), p. 194.

16 A different but unsubstantiated source states that Cecco’s heresy was to claim that the virgin birth was a natural rather than a miraculous event. See Lynn Thorndike, ‘The Relations of the Inquisition to Peter Abano and Cecco d’Ascoli’, Speculum vol. 1, no. 3 (1926), p. 342.

17 Gerolamo Biscaro, Inquisitori ed eretici Lombardi, 1292–1318, vol. 19, Miscellanea di Storia Italiana 3 (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1922), p. 539.

18 G. Boffio, ‘Perchè fu condannato al fuoco l’astrologo Cecco d’Ascoli?’, Studi e Documenti di Storia e Diritto, vol. 20 (1899), p. 14.

19 Tester, A History of Western Astrology, p. 161.

20 Georg Agricola (trans. Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover), De Re Metallica (London: The Mining Magazine, 1912), p. xxviii.

21 Geoffrey Chaucer (trans. Nevill Coghill), The Canterbury Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), p. 482 [VIII (G) 862–7].

22 Stanton J. Linden, ed., The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 103.

23 P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed., The Occult in Mediaeval Europe, 500–1500: A Documentary History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 229.

24 Thomas Aquinas, ed. Marcus Lefébure, Summa Theologiae, vol. 38 (London: Blackfriars, 1975), p. 221 [Pt 2.1, Q 77, Art 3].

25 William Newman, ‘Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and Middle Ages: Readings from Isis, ed. Michael Shank (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), p. 276.

26 Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult in Mediaeval Europe, 500–1500, p. 226.

27 David Knight, Ideas in Chemistry: A History of the Science (London: The Athlone Press, 1995), p. 19.

28 Allen George Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 1 (New York: Science History Publications, 1977), p. 12.

29 Unsurprisingly, some Muslim scholars fiercely contest the idea that Christian alchemists should take credit for discoveries previously believed to have been made by the Arabs. However, to date, they have been unable to produce the original Arabic versions of the relevant Latin texts. This may change as more Middle Eastern libraries are explored and catalogued. See William Newman, The Summa Perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber: A Critical Edition, Translation and Study (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991), p. 61.

30 Knight, Ideas in Chemistry: A History of the Science, p. 18.

31 Robert P. Multhauf, ‘The Science of Matter’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 381.

Chapter 9
– Roger Bacon and the Science of Light

1 Alan B. Cobban, English University Life in the Middle Ages (London: UCL Press, 1999), p. 161.

2 John Peckham, ed. Charles Trice Martin, Registrum Epistolarum Fratris Johannis Peckham, Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores (Rolls Series), vol. 77 (London: Longman, 1882), p. 944.

3 Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. 507.

4 Jonathan Sumption, The Albigensian Crusade (London: Faber, 1978), p. 148.

5 Lynn White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 268.

6 Joseph Gies and Frances Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (London: Harper Perennial, 1995), p. 147.

7 Physics in Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 425 [254b12].

8 Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), p. 514.

9 Peter Peregrinus, ‘The Letter of Peregrinus’, in A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 376.

10 The Muslim garrison was disarmed but spared, whereas rebel Christians in the city were put to death. Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 124.

11 Peregrinus, ‘The Letter of Peregrinus’, p. 368.

12 Edward Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 824.

13 Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 130.

14 Richard William Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 294.

15 Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages, p. 129.

16 Roger Bacon (trans. Robert Belle Burke), The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928), p. 415.

17 David C. Lindberg, ‘Science as Handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the Patristic Tradition’, in The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Readings from Isis, ed. Michael Shank (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), p. 304.

18 Richard William Southern, Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 4.

19 Ibid., p. 65.

20 Daniel Angelo Callus, ‘Robert Grosseteste as Scholar’, in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop: Essays in Commemoration of the Seventh Centenary of His Death, ed. Daniel Angelo Callus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), p. 7.

21 James McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 208.

22 Jeremiah Hackett, ‘Roger Bacon: His Life, Career and Works’, in Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 19.

23 David C. Lindberg, ‘Medieval Science and Its Religious Context’, Osiris vol. 10, 2nd series (1995), p. 76.

24 Quoted in James Riddick Partington, A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder (Cambridge: Heffer, 1960), p. 78.

25 Roger Bacon (trans. Tenney Lombard Davis), Roger Bacon’s Letter Concerning the Marvelous Power of Art and of Nature and Concerning the Nullity of Magic (Easton: Chemical Publishing Company, 1923), p. 26.

26 Robert Record, The Pathway to Knowledge, facsimile (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terra, 1974), preface.

27 Bacon, The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, p. 582.

28 Southern, Robert Grosseteste, p. 136.

29 David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 58.

30 Ibid., p. 12.

31 Ibid., p. 109.

32 David C. Lindberg, ‘Light, Vision and the Universal Emanation of Force’, in Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden: Brill, 1997), p. 268.

33 Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler, p. 121.

34 Ibid., p. 118.

35 The regulations are not wholly unambiguous but are convincing evidence of spectacles. See Vincent Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007), p. 8.

36 White, Medieval Religion and Technology, p. 221.

37 On the spurious story of Salvino degli Armati see Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes, p. 15.

38 David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are so Rich and Some so Poor (London: Abacus, 1999), p. 47.

Chapter 10
– The Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford

1 John North, God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time (London: Hambledon & London, 2007), p. 22.

2 Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 78.

3 Richard William Southern, ‘From Schools to University’, in The Early Schools, ed. Jeremy Catto, The History of the University of Oxford vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 26.

4 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 459.

5 Southern, ‘From Schools to University’, p. 26.

6 Geoffrey Chaucer (trans. Nevill Coghill), The Canterbury Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), p. 33 [I (A) 285].

7 Thomas More, ed. Daniel Kinney, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 15 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 29.

8 Howard R. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 47.

9 Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 170.

10 Anicius Boethius, ed. Michael Masi, Boethian Number Theory: A Translation of the De Institutione Arithmetica (with Introduction and Notes) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983), p. 74.

11 Olaf Pedersen, The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 262.

12 Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 73.

13 North, God’s Clockmaker, p. 51.

14 Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 32.

15 North, God’s Clockmaker, p. 359.

16 Ibid., p. 361.

17 Ibid., p. 78.

18 Ibid., p. 153.

19 Joseph Gies and Frances Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (London: Harper Perennial, 1995), p. 211.

20 David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are so Rich and Some so Poor (London: Abacus, 1999), p. 48.

21 Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 164.

22 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1934), p. 17.

23 North, God’s Clockmaker, p. 100.

24 Ibid., p. 221.

Chapter 11
– The Merton Calculators

1 Frederick Charles Copleston, A History of Medieval Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 214.

2 David Luscombe, Medieval Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 127.

3 Copleston, A History of Medieval Philosophy, p. 227.

4 Ibid., p. 214.

5 William J. Courtenay, Ockham and Ockhamism: Studies in the Dissemination and Impact of His Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 98.

6 J.M.M.H. Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 14 and Courtenay, Ockham and Ockhamism, p. 101.

7 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1961), p. 432.

8 Copleston, A History of Medieval Philosophy, p. 243.

9 Anthony Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 57.

10 Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200–1400, p. 59.

11 Paul Vincent Spade, ‘Ockham’s Nomalist Metaphysics: Some Main Themes’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 101.

12 Physics in Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 367 [216a15].

13 Aristotle does not use the exact phrase ‘nature abhors a vacuum’, but his argument is clear. See Ibid., p. 369 [217b20].

14 Ibid., p. 407 [241b34].

15 Ibid., p. 445 [267a3].

16 Morris R. Cohen and I.E. Drabkin, A Source Book in Greek Science (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 223.

17 John E. Murdoch and Edith D. Sylla, ‘The Science of Motion’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 212 and note 14 on p. 251.

18 Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 544–63.

19 Copleston, A History of Medieval Philosophy, p. 259.

20 Geoffrey Chaucer (trans. Nevill Coghill), The Canterbury Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), p. 249 [VII:3242].

21 Posterior Analytics in Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, p. 122 [75a38].

22 A.G. Molland, ‘The Geometrical Background to the Merton School’, The British Journal for the History of Science vol. 4, no. 2 (1968), p. 110.

23 Anneliese Maier (trans. Steven D. Sargent), On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 157.

24 Carl B. Boyer, ed. Uta C. Merzbach, A History of Mathematics, 2nd edn (New York: Wiley, 1991), p. 348.

25 Quoted in Cohen and Drabkin, A Source Book in Greek Science, p. 220.

26 John North, God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time (London: Hambledon & London, 2007), p. 277.

27 M.A. Hoskin and A.G. Molland, ‘Swineshead on Falling Bodies: An Example of Fourteenth-Century Physics’, The British Journal for the History of Science vol. 3, no. 2 (1966), p. 154.

28 Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), p. 271.

Chapter 12
– The Apogee of Medieval Science

1 Anon, ‘A List of Translations Made From Arabic Into Latin in the Twelfth Century’, in A Source Book in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 35.

2 Ernest A. Moody, Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic: Collected Papers, 1933–1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 111.

3 Alexander Haggerty Krappe, ‘The Legend of Buridan and the Tour de Nesle’, The Modern Language Review vol. 23, no. 2 (1928), p. 216.

4 Ernest A. Moody, ‘Buridan, Jean’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 603.

5 Joël Biard, ‘The Natural Order in John Buridan’, in The Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy of John Buridan, eds J.M.M.H. Thijssen and Jack Zupko (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001), p. 93.

6 Ibid., p. 91.

7 The earliest medieval reference to impetus is in a theological commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard that was written by Francis de Marchia in 1320. The idea was fully developed by Buridan in the following centuries. See Anneliese Maier (trans. Steven D. Sargent), On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), pp. 80–81.

8 Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 95.

9 Maier, On the Threshold of Exact Science, p. 89.

10 Plato (trans. Desmond Lee), Timaeus and Critias (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 53 [38].

11 Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 527.

12 John North, God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time (London: Hambledon & London, 2007), p. 202.

13 Maier, On the Threshold of Exact Science, p. 89.

14 Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, p. 113.

15 Ptolemy (trans. G.J. Toomer), Ptolemy’s Almagest (London: Duckworth, 1984), p. 45 [I:7].

16 Marshall Clagett, ‘Oresme, Nicole’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 10 (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 223.

17 Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), p. 398.

18 Quoted in Edward Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 67.

19 John E. Murdoch and Edith D. Sylla, ‘The Science of Motion’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 240.

20 Ernest A. Moody, ‘Albert of Saxony’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 93.

21 Ibid., p. 94.

22 J.H. Randall Jr., ‘The Development of the Scientific Method in the School of Padua’, Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 1, no. 2 (1940), p. 181.

23 Charles Talbot, ‘Medicine’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 417.

24 Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), p. 651.

25 Moody, ‘Buridan, Jean’, p. 603.

26 Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science, p. 314.

27 Lambertus Marie de Rijk, ed., Nicholas of Autrecourt: His Correspondence with Master Giles and Bernhard of Arezzo: A Critical Edition from The Two Parisian Manuscripts (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), p. 3.

28 Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 224.

29 Rijk, Nicholas of Autrecourt, p. 181.

30 Moody, Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic, pp. 150–2.

31 Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science, p. 50.

32 Jean Gerson (trans. Brian Patrick McGuire), Jean Gerson: Early Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), p. 172.

33 North, God’s Clockmaker, p. 326.

Chapter 13
– New Horizons

1 J.E. Hofman, ‘Cusa, Nicholas of’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie (New York: Scribner, 1970), p, 515.

2 Ibid., p. 513.

3 Nicholas of Cusa (trans. Jasper Hopkins), ‘On Learned Ignorance’, in Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 2001), p. 90 [II:11].

4 Ibid., p. 96 [II:12].

5 Robert P. Multhauf, ‘The Science of Matter’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 386.

6 Laura Ackerman Smoller, History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 7.

7 He predicted that in 1789 ‘there will be many great and marvellous alterations and changes in the world, chiefly in respect to laws and sects.’ After this, he expected the Antichrist. See Ibid., p. 105.

8 Donald Engels, ‘The Length of Eratosthenes’ Stade’, American Journal of Philology vol. 106, no. 3 (1985), p. 310.

9 Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 122.

10 Ptolemy (trans. J.L. Berggren and Alexander Jones), Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 52.

11 Ptolemy believed that one degree of longitude at the equator was equal to 500 stades. Ibid., p. 71 [I:11].

12 John Mandeville (trans. C.W.R.D. Moseley), The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 129.

13 Meteorology in Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 587 [362a32].

14 Pliny the Elder (trans. H. Rackham), Natural History: With an English Translation in Ten Volumes, vol. 1 (London: Heinemann, 1938), p. 307 [II:68].

15 J.H. Parry, The Age of Reconaissance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963), p. 137.

16 Joseph Gies and Frances Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (London: Harper Perennial, 1995), p. 281.

17 Edward Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 635.

18 Ibid., p. 637.

19 Ibid., p. 638.

20 Parry, The Age of Reconaissance, p. 150.

21 Christopher Columbus (trans. John G. Cummins), The Voyage of Christopher Columbus: Columbus’ Own Journal of Discovery Newly Restored and Translated (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992), p. 26.

22 John Huxtable Elliott, The Old World and the New 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 29.

23 Robert Record, The Castle of Knowledge, Facsimile (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terra, 1975), p. 70.

24 Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 76.

25 Ibid., p. 78.

26 The Sultan’s gun is generally assumed to have been bronze, but it is more likely to have been of the same iron construction as Mons Meg. As it happened, Mehmet’s lighter artillery was more effective. See Charles William Chadwick Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, vol. 2, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1924), p. 357.

27 Robert D. Smith and Kelly DeVries, The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy 1363–1477 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2005), p. 262.

28 Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453, p. 144.

29 Joseph Gies and Frances Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel, p. 247.

30 Ibid.

31 Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 301.

32 Joseph Gies and Frances Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel, p. 244.

33 Colin Clair, A History of European Printing (London: Academic Press, 1976), p. 16.

34 Desiderius Erasmus, ed. Charles Garfield Nauert (trans. Alexander Dalzell), The Correspondence of Erasmus, vol. 11 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 27.

Chapter 14
– Humanism and the Reformation

1 David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 148.

2 Charles G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 1.

3 Jacob Burckhardt (trans. S.G.C. Middlemore), The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 98.

4 Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and its Sources (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 22.

5 Ibid., p. 29.

6 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 120.

7 Michael Reeve, ‘Classical Scholarship’, in Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 34.

8 Charles Trinkaus, ‘Marsilio Ficino’, in Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Peter G Bietenholz and Thomas B Deutscher, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 27.

9 Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and its Sources, p. 188.

10 Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall, eds, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Selections in Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 377.

11 Ibid., p. 381.

12 Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and its Sources, p. 191.

13 Michel de Montaigne (trans. M.A. Screech), The Essays of Michel De Montaigne (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 170.

14 For instance, anticipating infinite set theory. See Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 248.

15 J.S. Brewer, ed., Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII: Preserved in the Public Record Office, the British Museum, and Elsewhere in England, vol. 9 (London: Longman, Roberts & Green, 1862), no. 350.

16 John E. Murdoch and Edith D. Sylla, ‘Swineshead, Richard’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 13 (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 209.

17 James Farge, ‘Thomas Bricot’, in Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, eds Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 199.

18 Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), p. 638.

19 Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 110.

20 Adapted from Galileo Galilei (trans. Stillman Drake), Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: the Ptolemaic and Copernican (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), p. 107.

21 N.R. Ker, ‘The Provision of Books’, in A History of Oxford University: The Collegiate University, ed. James McConica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 466.

22 G.H. Martin, A History of Merton College, Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 79.

23 Alastair Hamilton, ‘Humanists and the Bible’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 107.

24 Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, p. 156.

25 Desiderius Erasmus (trans. Betty Radice), Praise of Folly (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1993), p. 88.

26 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 123.

27 Ibid., p. 131.

28 Ibid., p. 245.

29 Ibid., p. 679.

30 Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 114.

31 Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, p. 230.

32 Max Weber (trans. Stephen Kalberg), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

33 Robert K. Merton, ‘Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England’, Osiris vol. 4, no. 1 (1938), pp. 360–632.

34 Robert Record, The Castle of Knowledge, Facsimile (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terra, 1975), p. 284. Spelling modernised.

35 Henry Howard (Oxford, Bodleian Library, ‘MS Bodley 616’), fol. 5r. Spelling modernised.

36 Thomas Worcester, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 3.

37 Richard G. Olson, Science and Religion, 1450–1900: From Copernicus to Darwin (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 69.

38 James Hannam, ‘Teaching Natural Philosophy and Mathematics at Oxford and Cambridge 1500–1570’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2008), p. 213.

39 Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 161.

Chapter 15
– The Polymaths of the Sixteenth Century

1 Anna Rita Fantoni, ed. Lorenzo Crinelli, Treasures from the Italian Libraries (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 16.

2 Thomas Deutscher, ‘Gemitos Plethon’, in Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, eds Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 85.

3 D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, new edn (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), p. 62.

4 Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), p. 13.

5 Ibid., p. 11.

6 Angela Voss, ed., Marsilio Ficino (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2006), p. 192.

7 Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, p. 37.

8 Brian P. Copenhaver, trans., Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

9 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 434.

10 Ibid., p. 127.

11 John Dee, eds Wayne Shumaker and J.L. Heilbron, John Dee on Astronomy: ‘Propaedeumata Aphoristica’ (1558 and 1568) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 5.

12 Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 135.

13 Dee, John Dee on Astronomy, p. 64.

14 Mario Gliozzi, ‘Cardano, Girolamo’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 3 (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 64.

15 Girolamo Cardano (trans. Jean Stoner), The Book of My Life (New York: New York Review Books, 2002), p. 172.

16 Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 57.

17 Cardano, The Book of My Life, p. 38.

18 Gliozzi, ‘Cardano, Girolamo’, p. 66.

19 Cardano, The Book of My Life, p. 15.

20 Ibid., p. 87.

21 W.G. Waters, Jerome Cardan: A Biographical Study (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1898), p. 128.

22 Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, p. 112.

23 Ibid., p. 121.

24 P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed., The Occult in Early Modern Europe: A Documentary History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 83.

25 Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, p. 134.

26 Dee, John Dee on Astronomy, p. 52.

27 Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, p. 78.

28 Ibid., p. 151.

29 Stillman Drake and I.E. Drabkin, Mechanics in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Selections from Tartaglia, Benedetti, Guido Ubaldo, and Galileo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 27.

30 Gliozzi, ‘Cardano, Girolamo’, p. 66.

31 W. R. Laird, ‘Archimedes among the Humanists’, Isis vol. 82, no. 4 (1 January 1991), p. 635.

32 See the ‘Life of Marcellus’ in Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert), Makers of Rome: Nine Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 100 [15].

33 Laird, ‘Archimedes among the Humanists’, p. 628.

34 Drake and Drabkin, Mechanics in Sixteenth-Century Italy, p. 17.

35 Paul Lawrence Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics: Studies on Humanists and Mathematicians from Petrarch to Galileo (Geneva: Droz, 1975), p. 152.

36 Ibid., p. 153.

37 Drake and Drabkin, Mechanics in Sixteenth-Century Italy, p. 23.

38 Cardano, The Book of My Life, p. 83.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., p. 63.

41 Anthony Grafton in the Introduction to Ibid., p. xiii.

42 Laird, ‘Archimedes among the Humanists’, p. 635.

43 Waters, Jerome Cardan, p. 153.

44 Cardano, The Book of My Life, p. 38.

45 Waters, Jerome Cardan, p. 219.

Chapter 16
– The Workings of Man: Medicine and Anatomy

1 Charles Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 10.

2 P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed., The Occult in Early Modern Europe: A Documentary History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 198.

3 Charles Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time, p. 13.

4 Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (London: William Heinemann, 2006), p. 205.

5 Allen George Debus, The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 65.

6 Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Polity, 1989), p. 16.

7 Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 169.

8 Martha Teach Gnudi and Jerome Pierce Webster, The Life and Times of Gaspare Tagliacozzi: Surgeon of Bologna, 1545–1599. With a Documented Study of the Scientific and Cultural Life of Bologna in the Sixteenth Century (New York: H. Reichner, 1950), p. 118.

9 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 190.

10 Gnudi and Webster, The Life and Times of Gaspare Tagliacozzi, p. 114.

11 Ibid., p. 288.

12 James Longrigg, ‘Anatomy in Alexandria in the Third Century B.C.’, British Journal for the History of Science vol. 21, no. 4 (1988), p. 457.

13 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 75.

14 Emilie Savage-Smith, ‘Attitudes Toward Dissection in Medieval Islam’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences vol. 50, no. 1 (1 January 1995), p. 87.

15 R.K. French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 11.

16 Charles Talbot, ‘Medicine’, in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), p. 409.

17 Ball, The Devil’s Doctor, p. 56.

18 Edward Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 739.

19 David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 76.

20 J.B. de C.M. Saunders and Charles Donald O’Malley, The Anatomical Drawings of Andreas Vesalius: With Annotations and Translations, a Discussion of the Plates and Their Background, Authorship, and Influence, and a Biographical Sketch of Vesalius(New York: Bonanza Books, 1982), p. 28.

21 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 183.

22 Wootton, Bad Medicine, p. 83.

23 Andreas Vesalius (trans. William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman), On the Fabric of the Human Body, vol. 1 (Novato: Norman Publishing, 1998), p. 383.

24 Wootton, Bad Medicine, p. 91.

25 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 171.

26 C. Donald O’Malley, ‘Andreas Vesalius’ Pilgrimage’, Isis vol. 45, no. 2 (1 January 1954), p. 138.

27 C.D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 304.

28 Wootton, Bad Medicine, p. 102.

29 Michael Servetus (trans. C.D. O’Malley), Michael Servetus: A Translation of His Geographical, Medical, and Astrological Writings (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1953), p. 204.

30 Columbo is also held to have discovered the clitoris, which had presumably evaded detection by any man until this point. See Wootton, Bad Medicine, p. 117.

31 Savage-Smith, ‘Attitudes Toward Dissection in Medieval Islam’, p. 102.

32 Geoffrey Keynes, The Life of William Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 137.

33 Wootton, Bad Medicine, p. 98.

34 William Harvey (trans. Kenneth Franklin), Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals: An Anatomical Essay (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), p. 39.

35 Charles Webster, ‘William Harvey’s Conception of the Heart as a Pump’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine vol. 39 (1965), p. 510.

36 Harvey, Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals, p. 88.

37 Ibid., p. 59.

38 John Aubrey, ed. John Buchanan-Brown, Brief Lives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 144.

39 The story is engagingly told in Pete Moore, Blood and Justice: The Seventeenth-Century Parisian Doctor Who Made Blood Transfusion History (Chichester: John Wiley, 2002).

40 Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 303.

Chapter 17
– Humanist Astronomy and Nicolaus Copernicus

1 Judith Rice Henderson, ‘George of Trebizond’, in Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, eds Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 340.

2 Thomas Deutscher, ‘Bessarion’, in Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 142.

3 Anna Rita Fantoni, ed. Lorenzo Crinelli, Treasures from the Italian Libraries (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 20.

4 Paul Lawrence Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics: Studies on Humanists and Mathematicians from Petrarch to Galileo (Geneva: Droz, 1975), p. 91.

5 Ibid., p. 101.

6 C. Doris Hellman and John E. Murdoch, ‘Peurbach, Georg’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 15 (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 474.

7 Ibid.

8 Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics, p. 101.

9 John North, God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time (London: Hambledon & London, 2007), p. 334.

10 Ibid., p. 64.

11 C.M. Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein: A History of Mathematical Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 20.

12 For a thorough and lucid explanation see John Henry, Moving Heaven and Earth: Copernicus and the Solar System (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001), p. 32.

13 Moses Maimonides (trans. M. Friedlander), Guide for the Perplexed, 2nd edn (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 198.

14 Edward Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 525.

15 James M. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 78.

16 A popular English work put the figure at at least 117 million miles. See C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 98.

17 Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 3.

18 Robert S. Westman, ‘Proof, Poetics and Patronage: Copernicus’s Preface to De Revolutionibus’, in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 186.

19 For a more detailed explanation see Henry, Moving Heaven and Earth, pp. 87–90.

20 Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics, p. 119.

21 Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein, p. 121.

22 Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics, p. 99.

23 Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, p. 27.

24 Ibid., p. 6.

25 Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein, p. 121.

26 Angela Voss, ed., Marsilio Ficino (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2006), p. 192.

27 D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, new edn (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), p. 113.

28 Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, p. 25.

29 Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science, p. 67.

30 Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, p. 17.

31 Ernest A. Moody, Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic: Collected Papers, 1933–1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 442.

32 Paul W. Knoll, ‘The Arts Faculty at the University of Cracow’, in The Copernican Achievement, ed. Robert S. Westman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 150.

33 Nicholas of Cusa (trans. Jasper Hopkins), ‘On Learned Ignorance’, in Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Nicholas of Cusa, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 2001), p. 93 [II:12].

34 George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), p. 200.

35 Ibid., p. 196.

36 For some intriguing suggestions see Ibid., pp. 217–21.

37 Robert S. Westman, ‘The Copernicans and the Churches’, in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science, eds David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 82.

38 E.G. Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 249.

39 Ibid., p. 253.

40 It was previously thought that there had been ten true Copernicans before 1600, but this number has now been reduced to nine. See Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 122 note 118.

Chapter 18
– Reforming the Heavens

1 James M. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 44.

2 Meteorology in Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 563 [344a15].

3 Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 70.

4 Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo, p. 147.

5 Ibid., p. 151.

6 C. Doris Hellman, ‘Brahe, Tycho’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 401.

7 C.M. Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein: A History of Mathematical Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 154.

8 Hellman, ‘Brahe, Tycho’, p. 404.

9 Ibid., p. 402.

10 Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein, pp. 156, 163.

11 Ibid., p. 168.

12 Ibid., p. 162.

13 Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo, p. 206.

14 Ibid., p. 163.

15 Ibid., pp. 107, 206.

16 Stephen Pumfrey, Latitude & the Magnetic Earth (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001), p. 16.

17 Ibid., p. 38.

18 Edward Grant, ‘Peter Peregrinus’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 10 (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 538.

19 William Gilbert (trans. P. Fleury Mottelay), De Magnete (New York: Dover, 1991), p. 5.

20 Ibid., p. 170.

21 Max Caspar (trans. C. Doris Hellman), Kepler (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1959), p. 38.

22 Ibid., p. 46.

23 Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein, p. 172.

24 Caspar, Kepler, p. 121.

25 Ibid., p. 122.

26 Ibid., p. 311.

27 Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein, p. 181. The difference was not eight minutes of time, as is sometimes supposed.

28 Caspar, Kepler, p. 128.

29 Linton, From Eudoxus to Einstein, p. 170.

30 Psalm 19:1

31 Ibid., pp. 190, 192 and 197.

32 Ibid., p. 220.

33 Caspar, Kepler, p. 138.

34 David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 200.

35 Caspar, Kepler, p. 206.

36 Ibid., p. 152.

37 Ibid., p. 256.

38 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 87.

39 Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1995), p. 25.

40 William H. Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 16.

41 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 491.

42 Allen George Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 122.

43 Allen George Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, vol. 1 (New York: Science History Publications, 1977), p. 257.

44 Caspar, Kepler, p. 136.

Chapter 19
– Galileo and Giordano Bruno

1 Michael Sharratt, Galileo: Decisive Innovator (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 27.

2 Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 20, 416.

3 Sharratt, Galileo, p. 50. Attempts to repeat the experiment have shown that people unconsciously release the light object earlier and thus give it a head start. This does not explain how the heavy object can subsequently overtake the lighter one.

4 Paul Lawrence Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics: Studies on Humanists and Mathematicians from Petrarch to Galileo (Geneva: Droz, 1975), p. 154.

5 Stillman Drake and I.E. Drabkin, Mechanics in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Selections from Tartaglia, Benedetti, Guido Ubaldo, & Galileo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 152.

6 Ibid., p. 34.

7 Simon Stevin, ‘Appendix to the Art of Weighing’, in The Principal Works of Simon Stevin, ed. Ernst Crone (trans. C. Dikshoorn), vol. 1 (Amsterdam: C.V. Swets & Zeitlinger, 1955), p. 511.

8 Drake, Galileo at Work, p. 23.

9 Ernest A. Moody, ‘Galileo and Avempace: The Dynamics of the Leaning Tower Experiment’, Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 12, no. 2 (1951), p. 193. For a more recent criticism of Moody’s interpretation of Avempace’s physics see Abel B. Franco, ‘Avempace, Projectile Motion, and Impetus Theory’, Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 64, no. 4 (2003), pp. 521–46.

10 Willam Wallace, ‘Domingo de Soto and the Iberian Roots of Galileo’s Science’, in Hispanic Philosophy in the Age of Discovery, ed. Keven White (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), p. 113.

11 Ibid., p. 118.

12 Ibid., p. 113.

13 Ibid., p. 121.

14 Ibid., p. 122.

15 Sharratt, Galileo, p. 73.

16 J.H. Randall Jr., ‘The Development of the Scientific Method in the School of Padua’, Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 1, no. 2 (1940), pp. 177–206.

17 Sharratt, Galileo, p. 182.

18 Irving A. Kelter, ‘The Refusal to Accommodate: Jesuit Exegates and the Copernican System’, in The Church and Galileo, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), p. 40.

19 Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), p. 205.

20 Edward Grant, Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 203.

21 Giordano Bruno (trans. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner), The Ash Wednesday Supper (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1977), p. 18.

22 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 217.

23 Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, p. 213.

24 Hilary Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 88.

25 See, for instance, the disputation question at Andrew Clark, ed., Register of the University of Oxford: 1571–1622 (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 1887), p. 170.

26 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 228.

27 Maurice A. Finocchiaro, ‘Philosophy versus Religion and Science versus Religion: the Trials of Bruno and Galileo’, in Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance, ed. Hilary Gatti (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 55.

28 Ibid., p. 61.

29 In the 1960s, Frances Yates destroyed Bruno’s scientific credentials by showing him to be a Hermetic magus. Since then, a few scholars, mainly from Italy, have laboured to salvage his reputation, at least as a philosopher of note. See especially some of the essays in Hilary Gatti, ed., Giordano Bruno: Philosopher of the Renaissance. To date, they have not succeeded.

30 Annibale Fantoli, ‘The Disputed Injunction and its Role in Galileo’s Trial’, in The Church and Galileo, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), p. 125.

31 Ernan McMullin, ‘The Church’s Ban on Copernicanism, 1616’, in The Church and Galileo, p. 175.

32 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 85.

33 James Brodrick, Robert Bellarmine: Saint and Scholar (London: Burns & Oates, 1961), p. 105.

Chapter 20
– Galileo and the New Astronomy

1 Adapted from Michael Sharratt, Galileo: Decisive Innovator (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 2.

2 Albert Van Helden, ‘The Invention of the Telescope’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society vol. 67, no. 4, New Series (1977), p. 20.

3 The author wishes to thank Paul Newall for finding and translating this quotation and the next. Galileo Galilei, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, eds Antonio Giorgio Garbasso and Giorgio Abetti (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1929–39), vol. 11, p. 165.

4 Ibid., vol. 10, p. 484.

5 James M. Lattis, Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christoph Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 183.

6 Ibid., p. 190.

7 Ibid., p. 198.

8 Ernan McMullin, ‘Galileo’s Theological Venture’, in The Church and Galileo, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), p. 98.

9 Isaiah 11:12 and Revelation 7:1.

10 Galileo Galilei, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615)’, in The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, ed. Maurice A. Finocchiaro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 96.

11 Ibid., p. 114.

12 Ernan McMullin, ‘The Church’s Ban on Copernicanism, 1616’, in The Church and Galileo, p. 170.

13 Ibid., p. 179.

14 Robert Bellarmine, ‘Cardinal Bellarmine to Foscarini (1615)’, in The Galileo Affair, p. 68.

15 Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, pp. 146, 149.

16 Sharratt, Galileo, p. 135.

17 Galileo Galilei, ‘The Assayer’, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (trans. Stillman Drake) (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 237.

18 Sharratt, Galileo, p. 137.

19 Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, p. 201.

20 Mariano Artigas, Rafael Martínez, and William R. Shea, ‘New Light on the Galileo Affair?’, in The Church and Galileo, p. 222. Pietro Redondi’s thesis that the atomism espoused in Assayer was the real reason for Galileo’s trial has not won support among scholars.

21 Sharratt, Galileo, p. 144.

22 Michael Shank, ‘Setting the Stage: Galileo in Tuscany, the Veneto and Rome’, in The Church and Galileo, p. 75.

23 John M. Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 48.

24 Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), p. 407.

25 D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, new edn (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), p. 207.

Chapter 21
– The Trial and Triumph of Galileo

1 Galileo Galilei (trans. Stillman Drake), Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: the Ptolemaic and Copernican (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), p. 52.

2 Ibid., p. 144.

3 Michael Sharratt, Galileo: Decisive Innovator (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 168.

4 The tides argument still arouses controversy today and scholars continue to debate exactly how it was supposed to work. For a recent attempt to explain it, see Ron Naylor, ‘Galileo’s Tidal Theory’, Isis vol. 98, no. 1 (2007), pp. 1–22.

5 Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, p. 464.

6 Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 229.

7 Annibale Fantoli, ‘The Disputed Injunction and its Role in Galileo’s Trial’, in The Church and Galileo, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 132, 140.

8 Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, p. 287. There is no evidence that Galileo was ‘shown the instruments of torture’ as is often alleged.

9 Sharratt, Galileo, p. 185.

10 Ibid., p. 205.

11 Galileo Galilei (trans. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio), Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, (New York: Dover, 1954), p. 6.

12 Ibid., p. 12.

13 Ibid., p. 62.

14 Michael Wolff, ‘Philoponus and the Rise of Preclassical Dynamics’, in Philoponus: And the Rejection of Aristotelian Science, ed. Richard Sorabji (London: Duckwork, 1987), p. 92.

15 Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, p. 64.

16 Ibid., p. 153.

17 Even Stillman Drake, generally hostile to theories about Galileo’s medieval influences, admitted this. See Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 370.

18 Stillman Drake and I.E. Drabkin, Mechanics in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Selections from Tartaglia, Benedetti, Guido Ubaldo, and Galileo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 54.

19 Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, p. 153.

20 Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), p. 272.

21 Ibid., p. 344.

22 Christopher Lewis, The Merton Tradition and Kinematics in Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century Italy (Padua: Antenore, 1980), p. 124.

23 Translated from the Latin in Ibid., p. 294.

24 Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, p. 174.

25 Sharratt, Galileo, p. 199.

26 Marshall Clagett, Giovanni Marliani and Late Medieval Physics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 140.

27 Edward Grant, ‘Jordanus de Nemore’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 7 (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 173.

28 Paul Lawrence Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics: Studies on Humanists and Mathematicians from Petrarch to Galileo (Geneva: Droz, 1975), p. 153.

29 Drake and Drabkin, Mechanics in Sixteenth-Century Italy, pp. 16, 24.

30 Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, p. 244.

31 Mario Gliozzi, ‘Cardano, Girolamo’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 3 (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 66.

32 Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, p. 245.

Conclusion – A Scientific Revolution?

1 William Whewell, ‘Mrs Somerville on the Connexion of the Sciences’, The Quarterly Review vol. 51, no. 1 (1834), p. 59.

2 From the ‘General Scholium’ in Isaac Newton, ed. Florian Cajori (trans. Andrew Motte), Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and the System of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), p. 546.

3 Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, ‘De-Centring the “Big Picture”: The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science’, The British Journal for the History of Science vol. 26, no. 4 (1993), p. 410.

4 Steven Shapin memorably begins his book: ‘There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution and this is a book about it.’ Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 1.

5 Cunningham and Williams, ‘De-Centring the “Big Picture”’, p. 418.

6 David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 3.