God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science [Paperback]

This book is an excellent discovery. Thanks to previous reviewers on here who recommended it. Having just read it, is my turn to recommend it now.

There are several reasons to recommend this book. Firstly it is a good historical drama with a rich cast of interesting characters and contexts. The author is a good narrator and takes us through the stories briskly and thoroughly. He gives enough detail to make the point, and if you need further evidence there is a useful reference list as well.

Secondly this book is good at separating the events that happened during the middle ages from the myths and pejorative labels that have been attached to the middle ages by later observers for their own purposes. This book shows that there were never many believers in a flat earth. This book shows that the Christian milieu provided a fertile growing ground for science and was not opposed to science. Conflicts between a literal reading of the bible and science were resolved sensibly and quickly.

The people living in the middle ages did not know they were in the middle of anything. They were humans with their own strengths and weaknesses trying to make sense of the world they found themselves in. They struggled with this as well as they could do and made huge intellectual and technological progress, which we in turn have built on. This book is a glorious story of people and how they used knowledge to better their understanding of the world. It is a glorious example of a historian writing to explore and understand how the world appeared to his subjects, rather than to impose his modern views on a past people.

This book increases our respect for the great medieval scholars and their work, and its role in helping us to get to where we are now. It is a great rehabilitation exercise on an often unjustly mocked period of history. I can recommend it highly to other readers.

What did the Middle Ages ever do for us--for science in particular? Not a lot, I hear you say? The Greeks laid the foundations, and then, after the fall of Rome, a great darkness descended on the intellectual world for about a thousand years. During this time no major advances were made, and any attempts to make progress were swiftly suppressed by the dominant ecclesiastical establishment. Then, finally, the light began to dawn, the classics were rediscovered, reason broke free from tradition, and the modern era was born.

Right?

Not at all, says James Hannam in his recent and highly accessible book (with a wealth of highly inaccessible contemporary scholarship to back him up). God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science (Icon Books, 2009) seeks to do away with the simplistic and inaccurate view the most people (myself included) have tended to have concerning intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages.

But how could such a misrepresentation arise? Quite easily, in fact. History can easily been rewritten, or re-spun, to give the impression that all that went before was insignificant ("Middle Ages") and repressive ("Dark Ages"), but that now we have life ("Renaissance"), light ("Enlightenment"), progress ("Modern") and real transformation ("Reformation" and "revolution", even "scientific revolution"). Anyone with an axe to grind against their predecessors will soon pile in to reinforce the stereotypes.

So what did these "Middle Ages" do for modern science? The rest of the book takes us on a remarkably enjoyable whistle-stop tour of the period to find out, as we meet one "giant" after another. There's Boethius (480-525) who, in his hugely influential The Consolation of Philosophy, provided the Latin-speaking world with continued access to Greek scholarship, even after the language faded from use. Then there's Gerbert of Aurillac (c.940-1003), "the most learned man in Europe", who introduced some of the riches of Muslim scholarship to a Christian audience before becoming Pope Sylvester II, the "Mathematical Pope". And so it continues, as discussions about mathematics and science, the nature of physical reality, the use of dissection and great technological advances are mingled with the colourful life stories of many remarkable individuals. Amongst them are Anselm (1033-1109), Peter Abelard (1079-1142), Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), Roger Bacon (1214-92), Richard of Wallingford (1292-1336), William of Ockham (c.1287-1347), the 14th-century Merton Calculators, John Buridan (c.1300-c.1361), and Nicole Oresme (c.1325-82), who gave arguments to show that the earth was rotating (everyone knew it was round, of course). (The book's List of Key Characters came in handy for writing that bit!)

Particularly interesting to me, as someone largely ignorant of the subject, were the five chapters on the origins of modern astronomy, with Nicolaus Copernicus (1472-1543), Johann Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and their buddies.

The notion that the Middle Ages were an era of superstition, ignorance and of religious dogma preventing scientific development is without doubt incorrect, and largely down to a number of writers from the Victorian period onwards who were vehemently hostile to religion, painting a very biased picture of the past. On the contrary, it was a period of great scientific advancement. The church was in no way against this; by delimiting what could be established by religion, the church effectively ring fenced a vast area of intellectual development which could be addressed by science and philosophy without interference.

Even going beyond such boundaries, going "against" the church's doctrine would not in itself rouse its ire so long as such science was regarded as purely speculative rather than asserted to be true. And unlike the popular perception, heretics were treated relatively gently and given plenty of opportunity to return to orthodoxy without suffering any consequences. It took a rather bloody-minded type to repeatedly provoke the church to go as far as to hand over such to the secular authorities for burning.

Nor was the Renaissance quite the awakening we have been led to believe. As Hannam notes, "The desire to look back to Greece and Rome was the true mark of the Renaissance, which in many ways was a conservative movement attempting to recapture an imaginary past rather than march forward. It was a time when, in order to be up to date in writing or architecture, artists had to model their work on a prototype that was over 1,000 years old."

This return-to-antiquity approach had many negative effects; for example the renewed interest in Aristotle led to the throwing out of much of the scientific progress which had been made since, quite literally - libraries were even cleared out, and it was fortunate that the invention of printing had ensured that sufficient copies of medieval works survived to prevent this knowledge from being permanently lost, and science potentially being put back hundreds of years as a result. Again, the humanists' desire to restore the language of Cicero simply resulted in killing off Latin as a living and evolving language and ultimately rendering it stone dead (on this particular aspect, see also Ostler's excellent Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin).

In covering several hundred years of history in a paperback, the coverage of each personality and his ideas is sadly necessarily relatively brief; this is however a timely and important book, a first step in restoring a true view of both the Middle Ages and Renaissance.