The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution

Abstract

1st Regnery ed. Originally published: 2nd ed. London : Icon Books, 2010. If you were taught that the Middle Ages were a time of intellectual stagnation, superstition, and ignorance, you were taught a myth that has been utterly refuted by modern scholarship. As a physicist and historian of science, James Hannam shows in The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, without the scholarship of the "barbaric" Middle Ages, modern science simply would not exist. The Middle Ages were a time of one intellectual triumph after another. As Dr. Hannam writes, "The people of medieval Europe invented spectacles, the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the blast furnace by themselves. Lenses and cameras, almost all kinds of machinery, and the industrial revolution itself all owe their origins to the forgotten inventors of the Middle Ages." The truth about science in the Middle Ages -- After the Fall of Rome : progress in the early Middle Ages -- The mathematical pope -- The rise of reason -- The Twelfth-century Renaissance -- Heresy and reason -- How pagan science was Christianized -- Bloody failure : magic and medicine in the Middle Ages -- The secret arts of alchemy and astrology -- Roger Bacon and the science of light -- The clockmaker : Richard of Wallingford -- The Merton calculators -- The apogee of medieval science -- New horizons -- Humanism and the Reformation -- The polymaths of the Sixteenth Century -- The workings of man : medicine and anatomy -- Humanist astronomy and Nicolaus Copernicus -- Reforming the heavens -- Galileo and Giordano Bruno -- Galileo and the new astronomy -- The trial and triumph of Galileo -- A scientific revolution?