History of Science

The Middle Ages, from about 500 to about 1600, are in the early twenty-first century recognized as a fertile period marking a transition from the dominance of a handful of ancient authorities to a broad range of theory and experiment. These developments took place throughout Europe, North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Asia. For the eventual rise of science in Renaissance Europe, developments in Islamic nations were especially important. For a comprehensive survey of this cultural transfer, see David Lindberg's The Beginnings of Western Science (1992), which traces the development of ideas within cultures and their transfer from one culture to another as well as the cultural contexts that enframed these developments. As an historian who pioneered studies of the close relationship between science and Christianity in the West, Lindberg is especially good at laying the "religion versus science" myth to rest. He does this in a number of ways, including explanations of support for science and medicine in the medieval church and the transfer of Greek science from Islam to Europe through Christian scholars such as St. Thomas Aquinas.