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On the Continuity of Western Science from the Middle Ages: A. C. Crombie's Augustine toGalileoAuthor(s): Bruce S. EastwoodSource: Isis, Vol. 83, No. 1 (Mar., 1992), pp. 84-99Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/233995Accessed: 02/11/2010 03:16

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A SECOND LOOK

On the Continuity of Western

Science from the Middle Ages

A. C. Crombie's Augustine to Galileo

By Bruce S. Eastwood*

W ,Zhen Alistair Crombie first published Augustine to Galileo in 1952 there was, at least in English, no adequate one-volume history of the European

scientific tradition from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. This book was so successful that it was reissued in 1957 and then revised and much expanded in 1959, when it became Medieval and Early Modern Science. (This second edition was enlarged in 1961; it was republished in 1969 with some detailed corrections.) Subsequently translated into seven or eight different languages, Augustine to Ga- lileo combined with Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100-1700 (1953), to put its author in the forefront of the postwar school of historians of science claiming a continuity from medieval to seventeenth-century science.

It is at least of passing note that Crombie had completed not only his first degree in zoology (Melbourne, 1938) but also his doctorate, with a dissertation on population dynamics (Cambridge, 1942). It was only after a period of research in this area, where he published eleven research articles and provided the principal stimulus for the mid-1940s interest in interspecific competition, that Crombie made the remarkable move in 1946 to a lectureship in the history and philosophy of science at University College, London. In 1953, upon the appearance of his first two books, he was appointed Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at Oxford; he began teaching in that position the following year and remained there to his retirement in 1983. This briefest of outlines of Crombie's career at least indicates his indisputable scientific aptitude, his commitment both to science and to its history, his remarkable energy and vision, and his leading influence in two widely disparate fields in just over a decade after finishing his doctorate.

In a judicious, useful, and complimentary review of Augustine to Galileo, Mar- shall Clagett compared it to one of the very few prior attempts to survey medieval science in brief compass, Aldo Mieli's 1946 panorama (in Spanish) of Christian and Islamic science in the medieval world. Except for bibliography, which Crom-

* Committee for History of Medicine and Science, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506-0027.

ISIS, 1992, 83: 84-99 84

EASTWOOD ON CROMBIE 85

bie limited severely in his volume, the later work was clearly superior. In his opening paragraph Clagett remarked, "Crombie's analysis of the method of sci- ence in the medieval period, so penetrating and original, is completely lacking in any counterpart in the Mieli volume. Furthermore, we find in general a much surer summary of medieval scientific doctrines in the Crombie volume."I

Despite the volume's subtitle, "The History of Science A.D. 400-1650," an initial chapter of eighteen pages (virtually unchanged in the revised edition) is all we encounter on the period before the mid-twelfth century; in it we hear all we shall about Adelard of Bath, William of Conches, and what preceded them. Yet this is not really inappropriate, for Crombie's introductory chapter intends to lay down the idea of Augustinian science, if we may use that phrase, rather than to survey things scientific from Augustine to the twelfth century. Following this is a quick summary of "the reception of Greco-Arabic science" (Ch. 2), perhaps the most noteworthy part of which is the final section. This suggests the centrality of Christianity and Christian theological attitudes in setting problems and providing critical attitudes in European science after the twelfth century. The book's core is Chapters 3-5, which focus on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In the briefest of summaries, one can say that Crombie argues for new applications of mathematics, the invention of an experimental method, and the use of knowledge from newly created technologies in the experimental and mathematical develop- ments of the era. All of this stands as the necessary, even if not sufficient, back- ground for seventeenth-century science. My summary, however, conveys noth- ing of the enthusiasm and historical optimism of the book, which claimed-this wonderful statement is absent from the second edition-

The experimental science that was to reach maturity only in the early 17th century developed in a tradition that was different from either the Greek or the Arabic. It owes its origin to the marriage of the manual habits of technics with the rational habits of logic and mathematics that took place in 13th-century Christendom. It was nursed in 13th- and 14th-century Oxford, Paris, and Germany; it grew up in 15th- and 16th- century Italy; it burst from the constraining hands of its late scholastic guardians in the 17th century and conquered all Europe.2

The thesis, in other words, is that the methodology, even if not the physical theory, of the Scientific Revolution is indebted to the High Middle Ages for its creation. Continuity between the two eras, usually seen as intellectually opposed, found a new and strong advocacy in Crombie's view of medieval and early mod- ern science.

The reception of Augustine to Galileo was complicated by the immediate ap- pearance, in the next year, of Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimen- tal Science, 1100-1700, which retained the first book's concern with mathemat- ical sciences in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially in studies on light, but raised to clear dominance the theme of experimental method as the

1 Marshall Clagett, review of A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, in Isis, 1953, 44:398-403, on p. 398.

2 A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo: The History of Science A.D. 400-1650 (London: Falcon Educational Books, 1952), p. 218. The second edition appeared as A. C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, 2 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959). Subsequent references to these two works will be given in the text; editions and reprintings will be identified there as necessary.

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

crucial connecting link from medieval to early modern science. Furthermore, this shift in emphasis was accompanied by the message that the rise of medieval experimental method was essentially an academic development, and was not so heavily dependent upon medieval technology as Augustine to Galileo had sug- gested. While I do not intend to reflect in detail on both of Crombie's books, they were reviewed or discussed together in more than one place in the 1950s.3 For historians of science and even for medievalists, the two books reinforced each other over their first decade of existence. Clearly it was the second book that laid out in full detail, with specific focus on Grosseteste, the thesis with which Crom- bie became identified. But the foundations of that thesis are apparent already in the first book. James Haden's review (1954) saw Robert Grosseteste as a mature reflection of historical study on philosophy and science in interaction, and he recommended this kind of study to historians of philosophy. He also pointed out the similar thesis in Augustine to Galileo.4 Crombie recognized that the commit- ments of the thirteenth-century methodologists were not unchanged in the sev- enteenth-century scientists, but he was able to see the continuity all the same. While the thirteenth century sought true causes, the seventeenth century found it necessary to be satisfied with true descriptions of events. Both eras saw and worked from the strengths of the Greek geometrical method. Medieval commen- taries on medical works of Galen and on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, espe- cially that by Grosseteste, interwove inductive and experimental theory with mathematical statements and mathematical patterns of proof. The seventeenth- century scientists were able to draw upon the results of the earlier philosopher- scientists' elaborate treatments of basic concepts like "resolution" and "compo- sition" when discussing the logic of demonstration of causes and effects. What Crombie saw and clearly expressed is that an idea or methodology need not be copied exactly or without variation in order to establish the claim of continuity with its successor.

Crombie's thesis was thoroughly controversial, whether seen in the broader and less detailed argument of Augustine to Galileo or in the revised, sharpened, and more fully documented version of Robert Grosseteste. Complimented by Haden for its challenge to philosophers of science and founded largely on Crom- bie's careful reading and reemphasis of Grosseteste's commentary on the Poste- rior Analytics, the methodology thesis encountered serious disagreement among its earliest reviewers. While admiring Crombie's forceful advancement of the thesis, Clagett proposed,

Crombie by no means proves, either here or in his brilliant recent volume on Grosseteste, . . . that the experimental and mathematical methods developed in cer- tain scientific treatises of the thirteenth century were a result of a theoretical discus- sion of the methods of science. The cart is probably before the horse. The authors of the most interesting of the scientific work of the thirteenth century . . . seem to have been men who were not all interested in discussing the Posterior Analytics. .. . In

3 Examples are James Haden, "The Challenge of the History of Science: Part II," Review of Metaphysics, 1953-1954, 7:262-272; and Alexandre Koyre, "The Origins of Modem Science: A New Interpretation," Diogenes, Winter 1956, 16:1-22.

4 Haden, "Challenge of the History of Science," pp. 263-264.

EASTWOOD ON CROMBIE 87

short, I think it is highly debatable that the theoretical discussion of the nature of science was the crucial stimulus to the development of science.

The same objection was voiced in more elegant fashion only a decade ago by James McEvoy in writing about the philosophical career of Grosseteste.s

The most vigorous demurral, however, was raised by Alexandre Koyre in his 1956 review essay. After praising the depth, subtlety, and historical documenta- tion of Crombie's methodology thesis, he asked simply "whether we can consider his thesis as proven" and answered in the negative, suggesting that the evidence goes a long way to proving just the opposite view. Pointing to another aspect of the thesis, he said: "Dr. Crombie explains the rise of the experimental science of the Medievals, which he opposes to the purely theoretical science of the Greeks, by the conjunction of theory with praxis, the outcome of the activist inspiration of the Christian civilization in contradistinction to the attitude of passivity which characterizes that of Antiquity." At the general level he pointed out that most medieval inventions, such as the plough or the crank, had nothing to do with scientific advancement. Remarkable inventions like late medieval clocks were neither causes nor results of scientific theory. In fact, Koyre claimed, the whole medieval tradition of experimental methodology was, as far as modern (seven- teenth-century) science is concerned, a dead end. Insofar as it led to mathemat- ical formulations drawn from observational data and away from a commitment to identifying underlying reality, this sort of empiricism cleared away much medi- eval metaphysical creation without replacing it with anything that could help build a new science. Thus Ockhamism, for example, did not leave a successful scientific legacy. On the other hand, Koyre maintained, the concern of Galileo for finding true causes, tied to methodological discussions, involved the recognition that the mathematical entities from which he deduced effects could not be dis- covered by severely experimental approaches. And Crombie admitted this! Yet he then went on to say that Galileo's realistic goal was impossible and was cor- rected by the thoroughgoing empiricism of Locke and Newton. (This appears as clearly in Augustine to Galileo as in Robert Grosseteste.) Crombie's story, issu- ing in an early modern revision of the medieval tradition to make it a method of description rather than a way of finding causes, was set aside by Koyre as being itself unrealistic, though tremendously erudite. He closed his review with the remark, "Yet there are many mansions in the Kingdom of God, and many ways of dealing with history. Let us say, therefore, that in the Kingdom of History, Dr. Crombie has built a very beautiful mansion."6

When we settle down to read Augustine to Galileo rather than the reviews, the result is rather interesting. For comprehension of the thesis the first edition is eminently preferable. It is not only shorter; it is bolder and without the many complicating, though valuable, additions and qualifications found in the second edition. What Crombie set out to do, as the preface to the 1957 reprinting em- phasized, was to bring out "the most striking result of recent scholarship, the

S Clagett, rev. of Augustine to Galileo (cit. n. 1), p. 399; and James J. McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 207, in a section entitled "Experimenter, Mathematician, or Metaphysician?"

6 Koyre, "Origins of Modem Science" (cit. n. 3), pp. 11, 22.

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

essential continuity of the Western scientific tradition from Greek times to the 17th century and, therefore, to our own day" (p. xii). The significance of the Greek scientific tradition for seventeenth-century and modern science was as- sumed. The kind of science that we identify with today had been, and still is, considered to have appeared with Galileo. While the problem of the connection between the two had already been addressed by Pierre Duhem and others who argued for continuity, it had not been settled to the satisfaction of most scholars. Duhem's Systeme du monde revealed a great deal of eye-opening scientific thought from the Latin Middle Ages, but this in no way proved continuity with the succeeding period. As one later observer nicely put it:

The view for which Duhem is famous, and to the demonstration of which he devoted his vast historical erudition, is open to the objection that it rests upon a convention- alist philosophy of science, i.e., it represents the conviction that science cannot and should not hope to be anything more than an approximate ordering of phenomena in function of non-hypothetical principles, whose justification lies precisely in the com- plex process of their historical maturation; and Duhem failed to rally the majority of philosophers of science to his support.7

The problem in the late 1940s and the early 1950s was to discover the key to the full continuity of the Western scientific tradition, which had come to take so central a position in our culture. After World War II science was not only a sign of Western power, not only something that was supposed to work the same way in any political system, but also something that might provide a greater sense of the wholeness or integrity of Western culture. While Crombie did not commit himself explicitly, and perhaps not even consciously, to identifying science as the key to Western values, it seems implicit in the project of Augustine to Galileo.

Not simply a textbook on medieval and early modern science, but rather a "short history" with a strong thesis, Augustine to Galileo cast a wide conceptual net over its material. The Greeks invented nature as "a permanent, uniform, abstract order from which the changing order of observations could be deduced." Greek rationalism combined with Christian symbolism at the end of the ancient world in the Christian and Augustinian idea of "nature as sacramental, symbolic of spiritual truths." In the thirteenth century there emerged a sort of menage a trois of Aristotelian philosophy, Greek mathematical reason, and medieval tech- nics and empiricism, which made up "a new conscious empirical science seeking to discover the rational structure of nature" (1952, p. xiv).

If Augustine to Galileo was not simply a textbook, it nonetheless was able to serve in that role. The bibliography, seen from the vantage point of 1950, was extremely useful for beginners, as it presented mostly English and French mate- rials without devoting itself to highly specialized studies; the sections on philos- ophy and scientific method were especially full. After getting Greek philosophy and science into the Latin West in two succinct opening chapters, Crombie sur- veyed science (and philosophy) and technology in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in a most suggestive way. A chapter entitled "The System of Scientific Thought in the 13th Century" opened with a section on the explanation of change and the conception of substance in the Aristotelian tradition. The use and limita- tions of mathematics in Aristotle's concept of science, since mathematics ab-

7McEvoy, Philosophy of Grosseteste (cit. n. 5), p. 207.

EASTWOOD ON CROMBIE 89

stracted from change and therefore from causal conditions, was set up as the critical problem in the development of natural philosophy. The subject of change, apparent or real, became the explicit point of reference as he introduced each area of thirteenth-century science separately (cosmology and astronomy, meteo- rology and optics, mechanics and magnetism, geology, chemistry, biology). While some of these areas, notably optics, showed much progress in the appli- cation of mathematics to the physical world, the overall impression after the opening part of the chapter is of a survey of achievements. As such it was highly successful, but it did not firmly link either mathematics or experimental method to all or most of these achievements. In the last three parts (geology, chemistry, biology) the array of achievements became almost bewildering. Regarding all these thirteenth-century developments, Clagett, as well placed as anyone in the early 1950s to evaluate the correctness and essential completeness of this chap- ter, found relatively little to correct or add.8

Crombie's fourth chapter, "Technics and Science in the Middle Ages," opened with a discussion of technics and education that related a wide variety of medi- eval inventions and techniques to measurement and mathematics and thence to the mathematical concerns of university scholars. Ranging from commerce to music and beyond, he emphasized the intersections of scholarly and practical interests. He then presented a comprehensive survey of developments in agricul- ture, mechanization of industry, industrial chemistry, and medicine. It is notable that this is the only one of the three central chapters that was not much revised or amplified in the second edition. No reviewer of Augustine to Galileo had much to say on the contents or strategy of the chapter, and, while it is not now fashion- able to claim a direct relationship between technology and natural philosophy (or scientific method) in the Middle Ages, it would be worthwhile to raise the ques- tion again, even if from a very different perspective than Crombie's in this book. As recently as 1990 the chapter has been recommended at the head of a list of works "for a good overview of medieval technology and its effects on medieval life."9

The fifth chapter focused most sharply on what would be the theme of Robert Grosseteste. Entitled "Criticism of Aristotle in the Later Middle Ages," it opened with a major section on the scientific method of the later scholastics, especially Grosseteste, followed by three shorter sections on matter and space, terrestrial and celestial dynamics, and mathematics in physics. Of the three focal chapters, this was the shortest in the first edition. It was the longest in the second edition, almost double its original length. Many of the additions and changes responded directly to suggestions in Clagett's 1953 review.10 By the time of the second edition this chapter had not only grown but also changed its character, as indi- cated by its new name: "Scientific Method and Developments in Physics in the Later Middle Ages." This is not simply a more useful descriptive heading; it reflected Crombie's tremendous expansion of the section on scientific method and pointed to important qualifications of the thesis so ardently advanced in 1952. The idea of a steady development of Aristotelian science, through continual crit-

8 Clagett, rev. of Augustine to Galileo (cit. n. 1), pp. 399-400. 9 Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth

Century (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 80[l]) (Philadelphia, 1990), p. 3, n. 6. 10 Clagett, rev. of Augustine to Galileo (cit. n. 1), pp. 400-402.

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

icism and modification, all the way to Galileo was maintained but was partially submerged under a large amount of new information about developments in phys- ics, not all of which fit comfortably within the conceptual framework. Initially no more than a peroration on continuity between the eras had seemed necessary; about ten pages were added on this subject for the 1959 version. Finally, on the crucial hypothesis about experimental methodology Crombie felt compelled to say something quite new in 1959:

It must not be supposed that this philosophical conception of experimental science, developed largely in commentaries on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and the prob- lems found in it, was accompanied by a single-minded reliance on the experimental method such as is found in the 17th century. Medieval science remained in general within the framework of Aristotle's theory of nature, and deductions from that theory were by no means always rejected even when contradicted by the results of the new mathematical, logical, and experimental procedures. Even in the midst of otherwise excellent work, medieval scientists sometimes showed a strange indifference to pre- cise measurements, and could be guilty of misstatements of fact, often based on purely imaginary experiments copied from early writers, which the simplest observa- tion would have corrected. Nor must it be supposed that when the new experimental and mathematical methods were applied to scientific problems, this was always the result of the theoretical discussions of method. [After this retrenchment Crombie still held on to a limited version of his thesis by saying,] ... in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, discussions of method and actual scientific investigations belonged to two separate streams, even though their waters were so often and so profoundly mingled, as certainly they were [in the later Middle Ages]. (Vol. 2, pp. 10-11)11

Yet in both the first and second editions Crombie held a vast amount of infor- mation together under the umbrella of his capacious thesis. Among its great vir- tues was his insistence that Aristotelianism was not necessarily an enemy of seventeenth-century science, a view by no means widely held when he first wrote. By emphasizing the ability of Aristotelians to revise their teachings from the thirteenth to the late sixteenth century, Crombie brought to a wide audience arguments previously circulated only in a small scholarly circle. The main shift from one era to the next, as he saw it, was the change from philosophers who wanted to clarify the status and form of philosophizing about nature to philoso- phers who wanted to clarify nature in its empirical and mathematical details.

Augustine to Galileo was in one sense simply a participant in a long history, begun much earlier and carried on long afterward, of discussion of the relation- ship of Galileo to the Middle Ages. Crombie's innovation was his focus on Grosseteste's commentary on the Posterior Analytics as a source for scientific methodology up to and including Galileo. At the beginning of the century Ernst Cassirer had already pointed to the scholastic logic of Jacopo Zabarella in the late sixteenth century as a method of finding causes remarkably similar to Galileo's. While the connection of Zabarella to Galileo remains dubious, the same sort of connection was drawn from the late medieval scholastics by John Herman Ran- dall, whose study of the Paduan school from the fourteenth to the sixteenth

" For the second printing of Robert Grosseteste Crombie added a similar comment in the preface, withdrawing support for some "exaggerated" expressions he had written in "a moment of enthusi- asm": A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100-1700 (Ox- ford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. v.

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century-from Pietro d'Abano through a long list of intermediates down to Za- barella, commenting especially on Galenic medical works and using Aristotelian methodological concepts-claimed a direct influence upon Galileo. Randall's the- sis of a continuous Paduan school of scientific methodology was criticized by Neal Gilbert's claim that the meanings Galileo gave to the terms analysis, reso- lution, and composition were drawn from Greek mathematics, not from a late medieval tradition of medical-logical commentary. In response, W. F. Edwards defended the Randall thesis with the conclusion that Galileo was only the culmi- nation of a tradition that brought together the mathematical and methodological theories within the framework of medical commentaries. Edwards argued that the meaning of analysis was picked up from the geometers and identified with Ga- len's use of the word by the medieval commentators.12

During the last two decades the question of the methodological backgrounds of Galileo has been attacked with renewed interest. Predictably, as with other areas of Galilean studies, the results of this research have not tended to consensus. Without pretending to represent all that this work has revealed, I think a few points relevant to Augustine to Galileo can be noted. Even the purpose of the Posterior Analytics, which inspired much of the medieval and Renaissance meth- odological writing under debate, has remained in question. Whether it was a program for research or intended for something like classroom instruction has been controversial. Jonathan Barnes argued rather convincingly that book 1 of that work uses demonstration in the pedagogical sense for knowledge already gained and now to be presented. This is not a research procedure. Nor is it a way of gaining certitude, since that has been achieved prior to such demonstration.'3

If the intentions and meaning of Aristotle are still up for revision, assuredly those of Galileo are as well. One generally agreed-upon desire of Galileo was to find secure and certain knowledge of the principles of his science of motion. But how to do so, and how Galileo expected at different times in his career to do so, has been less than certain. At least one commentator has put forth Galileo's De motu as a paradigm case of an Aristotelian mixed science and remarked that his view of proof showed a clear Aristotelian influence; precisely what sort of influ- ence is not specified. While Galileo may have believed that Aristotle aimed for certain knowledge, it is not clear that Galileo considered Aristotle successful. Winifred Wisan's survey of Galileo's scientific method concluded that Galileo himself was unable to achieve the certitude he required for the principles of a demonstrative science of motion.14

12 Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1906), Vol. 1, pp. 134-141; John Herman Randall, Jr., "The Development of Scientific Method in the School of Padua," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1940, 1:177-206, rpt., with the addition of the Latin texts in notes, as the first of three studies in Randall, The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padua: Antenore, 1961), pp. 13-68; Neal W. Gilbert, "Galileo and the School of Padua," Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1963, 1:223-231; and William F. Edwards, "Randall on the Development of Scientific Method in the School of Padua-a Continuing Reappraisal," in Naturalism and Historical Understanding, ed. John P. Anton (Buffalo: State Univ. New York Press, 1967), pp. 53-68.

13 Jonathan Barnes, "Aristotle's Theory of Demonstration," Phronesis, 1969, 14:123-152. See also the introductory section of Nicholas Jardine, "Galileo's Road to Truth and the Demonstrative Re- gress," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1976, 7:277-318, for a discussion of the Poste- rior Analytics.

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

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

Nonetheless, it was Galileo who reoriented the physics of motion to make it a fully geometrical mechanics whose consequences were to be developed mathe- matically, even though the evident truth of its principles remained problematic for him. The backgrounds of Galileo's mathematization of motion have been in dispute. Edith Sylla concluded that, while some of Galileo's concepts appear indebted to the medieval Oxford school, he reinvented much, drew some scat- tered elements from the common scholastic intellectual property of his day, and actually rejected the basic techniques and methods of the analytical languages of the Oxford calculatores. He simply substituted mathematics for these languages. Furthermore, he went beyond the calculatorial approach by conceiving his de- ductive system as a guide for future research.15

Crombie's interest in Galileo's scientific methodology has not been without suggestive and important results itself. In 1975 he made available to scholars at large a first report of extensive researches, made in conjunction with Adriano Carugo, into the early scientific writings of Galileo. They discovered, beginning in 1968-1969, that Galileo drew his ancient and medieval sources in three of his early works largely from textbooks written by three prominent contemporary Jesuit professors of philosophy at the Collegio Romano: Benedictus Pereira, Franciscus Toletus, and Christopher Clavius. Of these three Galilean treatises, Crombie gave some details about the Disputationes de praecognitionibus et de demonstratione, an account of Aristotle's theory of truly scientific demonstration in the Posterior Analytics. Crombie showed that Galileo maintained there were two truly scientific demonstrative processes, that from effect to cause (demon- stration quia) and that from cause to effect (demonstration propter quid). In the physical sciences he held that a "demonstrative regress" took place from effect to cause and then from cause to effect, and that this was not circular reasoning. In mathematical sciences like astronomy there are no truly scientific demonstra- tions, since they must proceed ex suppositione from principles assumed from mathematics. Crombie summed up the Galilean position:

I should argue that Galileo aimed in the end at total certainty, that it was Aristotle and no other who provided him with this ideal of truly scientific certain knowledge, and that he retained this ideal from his earliest to his latest writings, even as he rejected the methods and destroyed the content of Aristotle's physics, and even when he recognized that demonstration truly scientific by Aristotelian criteria eluded his grasp. 16

In the wake of the striking Crombie-Carugo discoveries there has been much

William A. Wallace (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 29-51, esp. p. 30 (Augustine to Galileo is at the head of a list of confirming references); and Winifred L. Wisan, "Galileo's Scien- tific Method: A Reexamination," in New Perspectives on Galileo, ed. Robert E. Butts and Joseph C. Pitt (Boston: Reidel, 1978), pp. 1-57, e.g., p. 43.

15 Edith Sylla, "Galileo and the Oxford Calculatores: Analytical Languages and the Mean-Speed Theorem for Accelerated Motion," in Reinterpreting Galileo, ed. Wallace, pp. 53-108.

16 A. C. Crombie, "Sources of Galileo's Early Natural Philosophy," in Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution, ed. M. L. Righini Bonelli and W. R. Shea (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), pp. 157-175, 303-305, 158-159 (quotation); see pp. 160-170 for details of the historical discovery, p. 170 for a statement of priority of discovery, pp. 171-173 for details about the work "On Demonstration." See also Adriano Carugo and A. C. Crombie, "The Jesuits and Gal- ileo's Ideas of Science and of Nature," Annali dell' Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 1983, 8(2):10-12, esp. n. 11.

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new work done on Galileo's manuscripts, especially by William A. Wallace. In two books dealing directly with Galileo's debt to the Jesuits of the Collegio Ro- mano, as well as in a number of other studies, Wallace has argued that the Jesuits influenced Galileo and that he drew much detailed information from them. 17 Be- yond this, Wallace has developed the argument that Galileo's special debt to his medieval predecessors was much more to those of a Thomistic, realistic turn of mind in questions of scientific methodology than to those of an Ockhamistic, positivistic view. The specific tool that Galileo drew from the Thomists was rea- soning ex suppositione, a scholastic approach quite different from reasoning ex hypothesi, which can be equated with hypothetico-deductive method. Reasoning ex suppositione, Wallace has claimed, was viewed by Galileo as a means of true demonstration in science not only in his earlier works but also in his Two New Sciences, the last and most mature of his scientific works.18

Another twist added by Wallace was his emphasis on a historical leap back- ward by the Jesuit philosophers of the Collegio Romano, the tutors of Galileo in scientific methodology. At one point Wallace summarized:

Aristotelianism, particularly when conceived as defending the text of Aristotle and that alone, did constitute an impediment to scientific inquiry. Aristotle had to be approached with a "critical temper," . . . if progress was to be made in the under- standing of nature. . . . [This critical temper] was already present in the Christian philosophers of the High Middle Ages, in Grosseteste and Albert and Aquinas and Giles of Rome, who were far from being disposed to seeing Aristotle as a god. The same mentality . . . is apparent in the reportationes of the philosophers of the Colle- gio Romano. They were teaching natural philosophy in its entirety, but they were also preparing students to be theologians, and they could not aford to be uncritical in evaluating Aristotelian doctrine. The same unfortunately cannot be said of the Aver- roists at Padua and elsewhere, ... who turned out to be the slaves of Aristotle.... [And so, Wallace could conclude] Whenever Galileo spoke of science and demonstra- tion . . . his was the hard-headed notion of scientia [of the thirteenth, not the four- teenth, century].19

Wallace's exposition of reasoning ex suppositione as Galileo's way to true certitude in science has not necessarily satisfied the questions posed by Wisan and others with regard to Galileo's doubts about the certainty of his own argu- ments. Wisan pointed out, "Unfortunately the new science [of motion] required principles which were not immediately evident in the sense required [for scien- tific certitude] and could not be made so." However, his more fundamental con- tribution, uncovering the extent of Galileo's debt to the Jesuit philosophers of the Collegio Romano, remains. The question of Galileo's use of Jesuit texts and of ex

17 His first major publication on the subject was William A. Wallace, Galileo's Early Notebooks: The Physical Questions (Notre Dame, Ind.: Univ. Notre Dame Press, 1977); see esp. pp. v-viii regarding Wallace vs. Crombie-Carugo. For the Jesuit influence on Galileo see ibid., and Wallace, Galileo and His Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Galileo's Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984); his other relevant studies are listed ibid., pp. 361-362.

18 William A. Wallace, "Galileo and Reasoning ex suppositione: The Methodology of the Two New Sciences," in PSA 1974: Proceedings of the 1974 Biennial Meeting, Philosophy of Science Associa- tion, ed. R. S. Cohen et al. (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 32) (Boston: Reidel, 1975), pp. 79-104.

l9 William A. Wallace, Prelude to Galileo: Essays on Medieval and Sixteenth-Century Sources of Galileo's Thought (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 62) (Boston: Reidel, 1981), pp. 316-317, in an essay entitled "Pierre Duhem: Galileo and the Science of Motion."

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suppositione reasoning has been put in the larger context of Aristotelian philos- ophy as such and decided negatively by Gary Hatfield. He has accepted the facts of Galileo's use of the Jesuits at points while arguing persuasively that Galileo's reasoning is straightforwardly mathematical and not Aristotelian.20

Through the studies of Crombie and Wallace on Galileo's logical tract on dem- onstration, outlining his views about scientific certitude, we have been given evidence of an Aristotelian influence on Galileo-an influence based both in Ar- istotle and in scholastic commentaries. This Aristotelian thread in Galileo's work does not diminish the greater importance of mathematical techniques and exper- imental methods therein. Furthermore, the issue of Aristotelianism in the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries is a highly complex one. Clearly Galileo did not follow the Aristotelian textual orthodoxy found in many Italian universities of his time. In fact, there were many Aristotelianisms around, and Galileo found some amenable to his scientific tendencies and others contrary.

The unfolding picture of Renaissance Aristotelianisms has been due especially to the writings and influence of Charles Schmitt.21 In a 1975 essay Schmitt ex- plained the revival of Aristotelianism after the humanist attacks of the early six- teenth century by pointing to the return to disciplined theological instruction in the universities after the Council of Trent, when both Protestants and Catholics found Aristotle's works and their commentaries the most familiar and comfort- able vehicle for philosophical exposition.22 For over twenty years Schmitt's stud- ies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science and philosophy focused on the various positions taken by Aristotelian philosophers with regard to such ques- tions as void space, the motion of free fall, and other themes important in the new science of the seventeenth century. Schmitt disagreed with Randall's argument for an intellectual school of Padua and expressed skepticism regarding his thesis of Aristotelian methodological influences on Galileo. He also surveyed the broader, nonscientific interests of Aristotelian thinkers. Following in a similar vein, and concentrating upon cosmological matters, Edward Grant has also shown both the variety and the longevity of Aristotelian schools of thought through the Renaissance.23 Thus the work of Randall and Crombie in the 1940s and 1950s has been endorsed in certain of its intellectual tendencies, if not in its

20 Winifred L. Wisan, "The New Science of Motion: A Study of Galileo's De motu locali," Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1974, 13:103-306, e.g., pp. 124-125; Wisan, "Galileo's Scientific Method" (cit. n. 14), p. 43 (quotation); and Gary Hatfield, "Metaphysics and the New Science," in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cam- bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 93-166, esp. pp. 126-127. For a later summary of Wal- lace's position see his "The Certitude of Science in Late Medieval and Renaissance Thought," His- tory of Philosophy Quarterly, 1986, 3:281-291.

21 Primarily in two of his collections of essays published by Variorum Reprints in London, Studies in Renaissance Philosophy and Science (1981) and The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Uni- versities (1984), as well as his overview presented in Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983). See also, in general, the essay of Brian Copenhaver, "Science and Philosophy in Early Modern Europe: The Historiographical Significance of the Work of Charles B. Schmitt," Annals of Science, 1987, 44:507-517.

22 Schmitt, Studies, Ch. 5, pp. 512-514. For the sixteenth-century emphasis on Aristotle even in optics see Thomas Frangenberg, "Egnatio Danti's Optics: Cinquecento Aristotelianism and the Me- dieval Tradition," Nuncius, 1988, 3:3-38.

23 Edward Grant, Much Ado about Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981); Grant, In Defense of the Earth's Centrality and Immobility: Scholastic Reaction to Copernicanism in the Seventeenth Century (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 74[4]) (Philadelphia, 1984); and Grant, "Ways

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substantive theses, by the more recent discoveries of viable and thriving Aristo- telian traditions in the latter half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seven- teenth centuries. But the extent of the influence of these upon Galileo remains in question.

Almost lost in scholarly discussion of Crombie's methodology thesis and the subsequent debate over Galileo's methodological debts was consideration of the chapter on technology. In his first approach to the material Crombie saw a rap- prochement between scientific empiricism and technological development from the twelfth century onward. In his revised view much greater emphasis was put upon the academic and intellectual framework of the medieval interest in empir- ical validation. The second edition of Augustine to Galileo made it very explicit that the focus of the medieval discussions was the status of the knowledge of the physical world, not the details of the content of knowledge of the physical world (1959, Vol. 2, pp. 114-116). Yet as a general history of medieval (and early modern) science, the book had much to offer with this summary of medieval technical achievements, as I have already noted. It is perhaps salutary to recall that even Crombie's second edition predated the well-known and stimulating work by Lynn White on the stirrup, the plough, horsepower, and mechanical power in general.24 Yet Crombie had much earlier work by Bloch, Lefebvre des Noettes, and others to build upon, as his bibliographies show. In any event, his view of technology was put to the service of the methodology thesis; and so medieval technology has seemed a bit difficult to relate to "science" after the reorientation of that thesis more toward academic treatises on empirical method than toward manipulation or measurement of the physical world. From the ex- tensive list of works relevant to medieval European technology I would like to cite a very few that have seemed suggestive to me.

An especially nice selection of significant texts on the appreciation and theo- retical validation of technology in the Latin Middle Ages appeared in Friedrich Klemm's History of Western Technology, a work that has been in and out of print and should be available for student use. Conceptual orientations useful for think- ing about the value and significance attached to manual techniques and mechan- ical technologies have been elaborated by Hannah Arendt, who has argued for a separation between work and labor.25 Jacques Le Goff has proposed interpreta- tions of the value of work and trades, generally finding manual work to have been of low value until the High Middle Ages, when a positive "theology of labor" appeared with the growth of towns and consequent sociotheological shifts. Re- cently George Ovitt has surveyed medieval, especially monastic, attitudes to-

to Interpret the Terms 'Aristotelian' and 'Aristotelianism' in Medieval and Renaissance Natural Phi- losophy," History of Science, 1987, 25:335-358.

24 Lynn White, jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Reviews of this controversial and important book appeared, among other places, in Endeavor, 1963, 22:52; History, 1963, 48:199-200; Hist. Sci., 1963, 2:130-135; Isis, 1963, 54:418-420; Past and Present, April 1963, 24:90-100; Speculum, 1964, 39:359-365; and Technology and Culture, 1963, 4:62-65.

25 Friedrich Klemm, A History of Western Technology, trans. D. W. Singer (New York: Scrib- ner's, 1959), pp. 55-74 for the texts mentioned (the German original appeared in 1954); and Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1958), Chs. 3 ("Labor") and 4 ("Work") for useful distinctions and discussions of these topics in classical antiquity and since the seventeenth century; Arendt does not discuss the Middle Ages.

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ward labor, progress, and redemption. Unlike Le Goff (and contrary to the en- thusiasms of Lynn White), Ovitt concludes that the High Middle Ages saw a decline in the standing of labor as it became secularized.26

One topic that has not always been sufficiently demarcated from the larger consideration of labor and technology is the mechanical arts in the Middle Ages. That they clearly had a place and some sort of relationship to the medieval liberal arts is evident in the ninth-century insertion of these presumably irrelevant sub- jects into Martianus Capella's Marriage of Philology and Mercury. In this late ancient text containing a handbook of the liberal arts, the introductory allegory has the god Mercury present the seven liberal arts as his wedding gift to the maiden Philology; the ninth-century commentator makes her respond to Mercury with a gift of the seven mechanical arts.27

A useful, if narrowly focused, study of the mechanical arts is Peter Sternagel's catalogue of medieval references to and classifications of the artes mechanicae. Extremely helpful on the changing conception and evaluation of the mechanical arts is Elspeth Whitney's recent monograph Paradise Restored, which con- cludes: "The mechanical arts were given moral and intellectual sanction either by placing them within the context of man's efforts to restore himself to his pre- lapsarian condition ... or by defining them as applied science.... By the close of the thirteenth century, the mechanical arts had come to be regarded as a necessary and often highly valued category of knowledge." Whitney has held many of Lynn White's views up to critical examination and doubt. Her conclu- sions differ from Ovitt's in being about university-based intellectuals rather than monastic writers. And she notes the intellectualization of the mechanical arts by thinkers of the thirteenth century and later. The late thirteenth and early four- teenth centuries seem to have been a period of sharp debate and intellectual reformulations, if William Newman's recent article on alchemy is a dependable index. He shows how alchemical theorists drew upon traditional theories of the elements and proceeded to claim an unusually high status for alchemy as applied science, of higher standing than technology, since the alchemist alone can change species through his knowledge of the true principles and causes of things.28

From this work on medieval technology since Crombie's book, many clarifica- tions and basic new insights have emerged. These writers have refocused our views of the writings of philosophers and theologians upon such subjects as the mechanical arts and upon the special, and perhaps suspect, claims of a discipline like alchemy. This constitutes a historiographic reorientation not unlike that of Crombie himself, as he went from the first to the second edition of Augustine to

26 Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1980), in the five essays on pp. 53-97 and 107-121; George Ovitt, Jr., The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rut- gers Univ. Press, 1987) (many other intriguing and valuable insights appear in this book as well); and Lynn White, jr., Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1978).

27 Remigius of Auxerre, Remigii Autissiodorensis commentum in Martianum Capellam, ed. C. E. Lutz (Leiden: Brill, 1962), Vol. 1, p. 208 (commentary on p. 79, line 11, in Adolf Dick's edition).

28 Peter Sternagel, Die artes mechanicae im Mittelalter: Begriffs- und Bedeutungsgeschichte bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts (Kallmiinz: Lassleben, 1966) (more useful for the period up to the twelfth century than for the thirteenth century); Whitney, Paradise Restored (cit. n. 9), pp. 147 (quotation), 147-149; and William Newman, "Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages," Isis, 1989, 80:423-445.

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Galileo, regarding the place of actual experimentation in scientific methodology. Intellectualization and academic philosophical concerns seem to have claimed more and more attention. The outlook of those actually engaged in skilled labor or ".applied science" was not always available nor always relevant to discussions of empirical methodology.

In 1952 the works of Anneliese Maier on late medieval science had only re- cently become widely known, many of them having been published during World War II in regions controlled by Germany or Italy. Maier held a doctorate in philosophy and had left Germany in 1935. In 1949 it was considered appropriate for E. J. Dijksterhuis to publish a note in Isis about her first three books on medieval science, produced from 1939 to 1943, when she held a position at the Vatican Library.29 In 1949 the first edition of her important book on fourteenth- century forerunners of Galileo appeared to detailed reviews, both critical and complimentary, by Dijksterhuis and Koyre.30 In conjunction with her earlier studies, this work virtually replaced the views of Pierre Duhem, attacking his tendency always to find medieval sources for concepts espoused by seventeenth- century physicists. Maier's studies were models of meticulous care in reporting and explaining scholastic natural philosophy. Crombie made good use of this invaluable body of research in the 1952 edition of Augustine to Galileo. It was, of course, the material on late medieval physics in his book that received the most suggestions for addition and correction in Clagett's review. And this is also the area of medieval science that has been most developed since Crombie wrote. To try to suggest the advances since 1952 would be out of place here. Suffice it to say that the work of Maier, Clagett, E. A. Moody, and many others has expanded the field tremendously. To take only one example, Duhem found in medieval nomi- nalism fundamental bases of seventeenth-century physics. Among these bases was, supposedly, Ockham's development of something approaching the modern concept of inertia. Maier cleared away much of this Duhemian construction and showed that Ockham's contribution was essentially a negative one at this point, a contribution upon which it was not easy to build. Yet Ockham may have opened up more opportunities than Maier's precise delimitation allowed. Writing about Ockham's physical ideas, one historian has recently maintained that "he delin- eated the precise boundaries of a logically sound philosophical formulation of the problem. By this accomplishment, empirical research and mathematical formula- tions . .. were given direction and a theoretical basis. "31 Here we can see the continuing interest within much more recent scholarship of the basic themes that Crombie focused on.

29 The note appeared in Isis, 1949, 40:120-121; it also mentioned six of her more important articles published during and after the war. Selections from Maier's many valuable works on medieval natural philosophy appear in Steven D. Sargent, ed. and trans., On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1982).

30 Anneliese Maier, Die Vorlaufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert: Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spdtscholastik (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1949). This work was reviewed by Dijkster- huis in Isis, 1950, 41:207-210, and by Koyre in Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, 1951, 4:769-783.

31 Andre Goddu, The Physics of William of Ockham (Leiden: Brill, 1984), p. 220. Crombie dis- cussed Ockham's contribution to the concept of inertia briefly and quite positively in the first edition of Augustine to Galileo, pp. 248-249. By 1959 he was much more guarded and reticent in crediting Ockham with an approach to the concept of inertia: Medieval and Early Modern Science, Vol. 2, pp. 62-66.

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Another nominalist foundation of seventeenth-century physics, according to Duhem, was the medieval impetus theory of Jean Buridan. Ernest Moody took up this subject in two different stages and argued that Galileo's dynamics had roots not only in the Latin Middle Ages but in an earlier Greco-Arabic tradition as well. In elegantly clear terms Moody maintained that both Maier and Koyre had misinterpreted Buridan and that Galileo's mature dynamics bore formal com- parison with Buridan's impetus theory. At the same time he pointed out that there was no fourteenth-century science of mechanics as such, for the various ideas there were quite discrete, mixed with others that were not compatible. Only in Galileo did a single, consistent science of mechanics appear.32 With nominal- ism, as with so many other topics, there has been a remarkable amount of study and reinterpretation in the past few decades. The problems involved in finding connections from the medievals to the seventeenth century have become quite clear and widely known. The result, since Augustine to Galileo, has been for scholars to study more carefully just what the medievals did say, without looking for impacts in the Scientific Revolution.33 Moody and others since the 1950s have created a much more sophisticated and complex picture of the fourteenth-century natural philosophers.34

In the forty years since Crombie set out his challenging "short history," much has changed in the writing of the history of science. However, those changes have occurred more in some fields and less in others. Because of the relative lack of source materials for the social history of medieval science-a virtual absence by comparison with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-treatment of philo- sophical and institutional frameworks has been as far as most recent study of the Middle Ages has been able to go. While Crombie was already aware of this-in a way it was essential even for Duhem at the beginning of the century-it has become more and more obvious that an understanding of the full philosophical and theological framework is needed for comprehension of the issues that the medievals wanted to discuss. In fact, the shift signaled by Anneliese Maier has now become the rule. Rather than trying to find modern, or seventeenth-century, science in some sort of embryonic form in the Middle Ages, scholars now try to show us what it was that interested the medievals. In this there is a challenge not exactly anticipated at midcentury.

When Crombie wrote, the debates seemed to be about the exact nature of the debt of early modern science to the Middle Ages. This can be seen as well in Herbert Butterfield's The Origins of Modern Science, published in 1949. Another remarkable book concerned with continuity and discontinuity, produced at about

32 Ernest A. Moody, "Galileo and Avempace: The Dynamics of the Leaning Tower Experiment," J. Hist. Ideas, 1951, 12:163-193, 375-422. For a revised view see Moody, "Galileo and His Precur- sors," in Galileo Reappraised, ed. Carlo Golino (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1966), pp. 23-43.

33 A very useful and clear exposition is Ernan McMullin, "Medieval and Modern Science: Conti- nuity or Discontinuity?" International Philosophical Quarterly, 1965, 5:103-129, a piece occasioned at least in part by the appearance of Crombie's second edition.

34 A fundamental paper by Moody was his reinterpretation concerning "Empiricism and Metaphys- ics in Medieval Philosophy," Philosophical Review, 1958, 67:145-163. Various important papers ap- pear in Moody, Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic: Collected Papers, 1933-1969 (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1975). Further development of important themes appears in articles by John Murdoch; see, e.g., "The Analytic Character of Late Medieval Learning: Natural Philosophy without Nature," in Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages, ed. Lawrence D. Roberts (Bingham- ton: State Univ. New York Press, 1982), pp. 171-213.

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the same time as Crombie's, was Dijksterhuis's Mechanization of the World Pic- ture, which first appeared in Dutch in 1950; it followed its theme through antiq- uity and the Middle Ages (often in Maier's terms) to the seventeenth century.35 With the historiographic debates set off by Thomas Kuhn (also Joseph Agassi et al.) at the beginning of the 1960s, the distance from the Middle Ages to the early modem period seemed to grow tremendously. Yet no survey of medieval science has appeared to replace Crombie's work. On the face of it, this is amazing. However, the recognized need for much new information has been one reason. Despite all that we have learned from Crombie's intelligent placement of medi- eval science and its early modem successors within a philosophical framework, preeminently an Aristotelian one, the need for a new formulation has become painfully obvious. Fuller discussions of Aristotelian foundations and of medieval modifications are required. Even more, the identification of distinctively medi- eval interests-neither a methodology thesis nor any other single issue will now hold together a history of medieval science-will require that we tread the dan- gerous path of paying primary attention to medieval, not modern, interests. A few examples are astronomy and astrology, medicine as an integral part of me- dieval science, and vernacular technical literature.36

We can now reasonably hope for an up-to-date textbook on medieval science in David Lindberg's forthcoming survey of ancient and medieval science in philo- sophical and institutional framework.37 When such a text sees the light of day, it will be even more apparent how useful Augustine to Galileo has been. Initially a straightforward thesis about continuity "from Augustine to Galileo," in revised form a combination of thesis and textbook, this volume has remained a standard point of reference. But after forty years it does no disservice to the book to say that it has completed a useful life. Like an old friend, it can still be consulted- but now for different reasons. It remains a connection to historical controversies and philosophical commitments of our disciplinary past.

35 Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (London: Bell, 1949) (the first chapter was entitled "The Historical Importance of a Theory of Impetus"); and E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).

36 On astronomy see, e.g., John North, Chaucer's Universe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); North, Stars, Minds, and Fate: Essays in Ancient and Medieval Cosmology (London: Hambledon Press, 1989); North, The Universal Frame: Historical Essays in Astronomy, Natural Philosophy, and Scientific Method (London: Hambledon Press, 1989); and the useful survey in Jim Tester, A History of Western Astrology (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1987), Ch. 5. On medicine in medieval science see, e.g., Nancy G. Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981); and the survey in Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: Univ. Chi- cago Press, 1990), Ch. 3; excellent material on medieval medicine appears in Michael R. McVaugh and Nancy G. Siraisi, eds., Renaissance Medical Learning: Evolution of a Tradition, Osiris, 2nd Ser., 1990, 6. On medieval technology see the examples listed in the notes to Bert S. Hall, "Editing Texts in the History of Early Technology," in Editing Texts in the History of Science and Medicine, ed. Trevor H. Levere (New York: Garland, 1982), pp. 69-100; see also Linda Ehrsam Voigts, "Editing Middle English Medical Texts," ibid., pp. 39-68. Especially suggestive among Voigts's publications is "Anglo-Saxon Plant Remedies and the Anglo-Saxons," Isis, 1979, 70:250-268. On Fachprosa, espe- cially in pharmacy and medicine, see Gerhard Baader and Gundolf Keil, eds., Medizin im mittel- alterlichen Abendland (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982); and Gundolf Keil et al., eds., Fachprosa-Studien: Beitrage zur mittelalterlichen Wissenschafts- und Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1982).

37 Forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press at the time of this writing.