Fall 2009
S. Livesey
HISTORY OF SCIENCE 5513
SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
This course is not intended for specialists in the middle ages or medieval science. Nor
will it by itself turn you into a specialist, if you even had the intention of becoming one.
Rather, its goal is to expose you to some of the (hopefully significant) literature in the
field, both so that in the short term you can begin to prepare for Masters comprehensive
examinations or Ph.D. qualifying examinations, and in the long term you can begin to see
some characteristics of medieval science that are either different from or similar to
whatever field becomes your special focus. And if, by chance, your eventual interest
becomes the middle ages, you will have some foundation on which to build.
Peter Lombard
composing the Sentences.
Troyes, BM 900, fol. 1r
The topics and the readings I have selected for this course may appear to be somewhat
broadly conceived. This choice springs from my belief that it is difficult in any period,
but perhaps especially so in premodern ones, to grasp the nature of science without
understanding the culture in which it developed. And so we will have occasion to
explore topics in the social structure of the middle ages, the evolution of legal and
political entities, medieval presuppositions and ideals of nature, man and society, and
several other topics while we examine their relationship to medieval developments in the
sciences.
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Books for the Course
Harold Joseph Berman, Law and revolution: the formation of the Western legal tradition.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe. A Short History. 9th edn. Boston: McGraw-Hill 2002.
Joel Kaye, Economy and nature in the fourteenth century : money, market exchange, and the
emergence of scientific thought. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press
1998.
Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth Century. New York: John Wiley &
Sons 1968.
David C. Lindberg, Science in the Middle Ages. Chicago: U Chicago Press 1978.
J. M. M. H. Thijssen, Censure & Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200-1400. Philadelphia: U.
Penn. 1998.
Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change. London: Oxford University Press
1962.
Schedule of Topics
August 24
Introduction to the Course
August 31
Science in the Patristic Period; Medieval Society
Readings: David C. Lindberg, “Science and the Early Church,” in God
and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity
and Science, ed. David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers (Berkeley 1986)
19-49; Karl Morrison, “Incentives for Studying the Liberal Arts,” in The
Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages, ed. David L. Wagner
(Bloomington, IN 1983) ch. 2; D. S. Wallace-Hadrill, The Greek
Patristic View of Nature (Manchester 1968) ch. 1, 5. Richard W.
Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven 1968) ch. 2;
Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe. A Short History. 7th edn. New
York: Wiley 1994.
September 7
No Class – Labor Day
September 14
Medieval Technology.
Readings: Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change
(Oxford 1962) esp. ch. 3; Lynn White, “The Historic Roots of Our
Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155(1967) 1203-1207; Lewis Moncrief, “The
Cultural Basis for Our Environmental Crisis,” Science 179(1970) 408512; Bert Hall, “Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change
After Thirty Years,” in Technological Change. Methods and Themes in
the History of Technology, ed. Robert Fox (Harwood Academic 1996)
85-101; Richard Holt, “Medieval Technology and the Historians: The
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Evidence for the Mill,” in Technological Change…., 103-121.
September 21
Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.
Readings: Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, ch. 3; Lindberg,
Science in the Middle Ages, chapter 2; Harold Berman, Law and
Revolution, chapters 1-5; Alexander Murray, “Nature and Man in the
Middle Ages,” in J. Torrance, ed., The Concept of Nature (Oxford 1992)
25-62; R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (New
York 1970) ch. 4, 5.
September 28
Universities in the Middle Ages.
Readings: Lindberg, ch. 4; Leff, ch. 1-2; Rainer Christoph Schwinges,
“The Medieval German University: Transformation and Innovation,”
Paedagogica Historica 34(1998) 374-388; selections from Alfonso
Maieru, University Training in Medieval Europe (Leiden 1994); Daniel
Hobbins, “The Schoolman as Public Intellectual. Jean Gerson and the
Late Medieval Tract,” American Historical Review 108(2003) 13081335.
Brunetto Latini, Le trésor
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ashb. 125, fol. 60r
October 5
Curriculum of Science; Books, Scriptoria and Libraries.
Readings: Lindberg, ch. 14; John Murdoch, “From Social into
Intellectual Factors: An Aspect of the Unitary Character of Late
Medieval Learning,” The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning, ed.
John Murdoch and Edith Sylla (Dordrecht, Holland 1975) 271-348; G.
Pollard, “The University and the Book Trade in Medieval Oxford,”
Miscellanea Mediaevalia 3, ed. Paul Wilpert (Berlin 1963) 336-344;
Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “The Book Trade at the
University of Paris, ca. 1250- ca. 1350,” La Production du livre
universitaire au moyen âge. Exemplar et pecia, ed. Louis J. Bataillon,
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Bertrand G. Guyot, and Richard H. Rouse. Paris 1988. pp. 41-114;
Charles Burnett, “Give him the White Cow: Notes and Note-Taking in
the Universities in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” History of
Universities 14(1995-96) 1-30.
October 12
Condemnations of 1277.
Readings: J. M. M. H. Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of
Paris 1200-1400. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1998.
esp. pp. 1-56, 113-117; John E. Murdoch, “1277 and late medieval
natural philosophy,” in Jan A. Aertsen, Andreas Speer, eds., Was ist
Philosophie im Mittelalter? = Qu'est-ce que la philosophie au Moyen
Âge? = What is Philosophy in the Middle Ages? : Akten des X.
Internationalen Kongresses für mittelalterliche Philosophie der Société
Internaionale pour l'Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale 25. bis 30.
August 1997 im Erfurt? Berlin: W. de Gruyter 1998. pp. 111-124.
October 19
God and Mammon: the Interface of Economics and Analysis of Nature
Reading: Joel Kaye, Economy and nature in the fourteenth century:
money, market exchange, and the emergence of scientific thought.
Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press 1998. Please read
the entire book for its general thesis, but focus more closely on the final
three chapters for the specific connections between economic theory and
scientific analysis.
October 26
Analytical Languages, Nominalism, Novelties in Late-Medieval Science.
Readings: John Murdoch, “The Analytic Character of Late Medieval
Learning: Natural Philosophy without Nature,” Approaches to Nature in
the Middle Ages, ed. Lawrence Roberts (Binghamton, NY 1984) 171213; William J. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century
England (Princeton 1987) ch. 6-9 (pp. 171-306); S. J. Livesey, “Divine
Omnipotence and First Principles: A Late Medieval Argument on the
Subalternation of the Science,” in Thinking Impossibilities: The
Intellectual Legacy of Amos Funkenstein, edited by Robert S. Westman
and David Biale. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. pp. 1333.
November 2
Mathematics and Optics.
Readings:
Lindberg, ch. 5, 10; selections from Edward Grant,
Sourcebook in Medieval Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard 1974.
November 9
Medicine and Natural History.
Readings: Lindberg, ch. 12-13; Park, Katherine, "Medicine and Society
in Medieval Europe, 500-1500," in Andrew Wear, ed., Medicine in
society: Historical essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1992. pp. 59-90;
Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago
1990); selections from Grant, Sourcebook.
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November 16
Cosmology and Astronomy.
Readings: Lindberg, ch. 8-9; O. Pedersen, “The Origins of the Theorica
planetarum,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 12(1981) 113-123;
Richard Lemay, “The Teaching of Astronomy in Medieval Universities,
Principally at Paris in the 14th Century,” Manuscripta 20(1976) 197-217;
selections from Grant, Sourcebook.
Albertus Magnus and the Cosmos
Universitätsbibliothek Salzburg M III 36, fol. 243v
November 23, 30
Motion in the Middle Ages.
Readings: Lindberg, ch. 6-7; Henri Hugonnard-Roche, “L'hypothétique
et la nature dans la physique parisienne du XIVe siècle,” in S. Caroti and
P. Souffrin, eds., La nouvelle physique du XIVe siècle. Florence: Olschki
1997. pp. 161-177; E. D. Sylla, “Transmission of the New Physics of the
Fourteenth Century from England to the Continent,” in S. Caroti and P.
Souffrin, pp. 65-110; Jürgen Sarnowsky, “God's Absolute Power,
Thought Experiments, and the Concept of Nature in the 'New Physics' of
XIVth Century Paris,” in S. Caroti and P. Souffrin, pp. 179-201; William
J. Courtenay, “The Debate over Ockham's Physical Theories at Paris,” in
S. Caroti and P. Souffrin, pp. 45-64; J. M. M. H. Thijssen, “LateMedieval Natural Philosophy: Some Recent Trends in Scholarship,”
Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales 67(2000) 158-190;
selections from Grant, Sourcebook.
December 7
The End of the Middle Ages.
Readings: William J. Courtenay, “The Effect of the Black Death on
English Higher Education,” Speculum 55(1980) 696-714; Courtenay,
Schools and Scholars ch. 11-12, Epilogue (pp. 327-382); E. D. Sylla,
“The Fate of the Oxford Calculatory Tradition,” in Chr. Wenin, ed.,
L’homme et son univers au moyen âge (Louvain-la-Neuve 1986) 692698; Elźbieta Jung-Palczewska, “Why was Medieval Mechanics
Doomed? The Failure to Substitute Mathematical Physics for
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Aristotelianism,” in J. A. Aertsen and M. Pickavé, eds., Herbst des
Mittelalters? Fragen zur Bewertung des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts.
Berlin-New York: de Gruyter 2004. pp. 495-511; S. J. Livesey,
“Accessus ad Lombardum: The Secular and the Sacred in Medieval
Commentaries on the Sentences,” Recherches de philosophie et théologie
médiévales 72(2005) 153-174.
Special Note
Any student in this course who has a disability that may prevent him or her from fully
demonstrating his or her abilities should contact me personally as soon as possible so that
we can discuss accommodations necessary to ensure full participation and facilitate your
educational opportunities.
Requirements
1. The most important requirement is, of course, the completion of the readings as assigned.
Because the course will not be a traditional lecture, but rather discussion punctuated by
and occasional brief presentation by one of us, it is imperative that everyone be able to
contribute.
2. Each student will prepare a substantial historiographical review focused on a topic chosen
by mutual agreement, to be submitted on December 7.
3. On December 7, I will distribute an essay topic structured around issues within the
course. Completed essays will be due December 14.
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