God's Philosophers How the Medieval World laid the foundations of modern science

Reviewed by Tom Kennedy on 18 Nov 2009

The Dark Ages were not so gloomy, and the Renaissance was not so bright as we have been led to believe. In a fascinating exploration of the Medieval world, the author of this book, James Hannam, shows just how wrong it is to accept all the old popular myths about decay and ignorance.

It is often been assumed that the decline of Rome led to the collapse of order and learning, but the evidence suggests that there was, instead, a flowering of thought and innovation. Rome rule was extremely rigid, and from what we know of its schooling, creative thinking was definitely not encouraged.

The political landscape, as always, was undoubtedly a mess, but as James Hannam points out, "the compass, paper, printing, stirrups and gunpower, all appeared in western Europe between AD 500 and AD 1500", and to this we can add spectacles, the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the blast furnace.

Spectacles, which made their first appearance in 1300, rapidly spread from Venice to the rest of Europe, and no doubt this new invention helped to accelerate the explosive spread of printing in the following century. Thousands of manuscripts found their way into print and scholars no longer had to worry so much about failing eyesight.

One of the reasons why the Middle Ages got a bad name is that the Humanists, who came later, completely rejected scholasticism, an approach that attempted to reconcile belief with classical philosophy. Such was the contempt they held for earlier works, that they either burnt the old manuscripts or used them for binding new, more acceptable, books.

The Humanists, writes James Hannam, were "incorrigible reactionaries," and apart from rubbishing some of the finest deductive thinking of preceding centuries, they helped to create a myth, gleefully seized on later by popular trendies such as Thomas Huxley, that the church stood in the way of progress.

How many of us still think that the church opposed dissection, and that Galelio was forced to recant? As James Hannam explains, the church did not in fact ban dissection, but they did forbid boiling of bodies. That particular prohibition began in a bid to stop a rather peculiar practice during the Crusades, when bones, rather than rotting bodies, had to be sent back for burial at home. The church did not approve, so when doctors, curious to know what went on inside the body, began disections, they could not "cook" limbs to make removal of skin easier.

As for Galileo, the row had less to do with science than Roman politics. The pope, Urban VIII, appears to have been quite indifferent to Galileo and the Copernicanism view of the Earth circling the Sun, until put in an embarrasing situation by being questioned in public. Galileo had warned the pope, who was a great believer in hocus-pocus, not to make the central position of the Earth a matter of faith, because the church would be made look very foolish if Copernicanism was shown to be true.

There the matter might have rested if Galileo had not made this into such an issue by humiliating a power hungry pope in public. Up to then his views had been looked on as interesting, but not alarming, and, in all probability, if he had stuck to the science, he have been left alone. As James Hannam explains, the church, which had been inclined to hold that the Earth was off centre, because it would not be right for it to be too close to God, had no real reason to challenge Galileo.

The truth, as is often the case, can be a bit more complicated than the stories suggest, and the flat earth idea is another myth that the author is keen to demolish. The realisation that the Earth is round goes way back into antiquity, but instead of constructing complicated maps, early navigators made flat charts that were much easier to follow. Later commentators, eager to reinforce their ill-informed views, saw these charts as further evidence of how little people knew about anything in the Middle Ages.

There were wars, there was corruption, and as the great cathedral of Notre Dame was being build, ten heritics, who refused to back down from their belief that God and the Universe were one, were burnt alive in the next street. There were also terrible plagues that left towns empty, but are these things really more awful than the horrors we see every day on the news now?

It is all to easy to see the dark side, and forget that universities, free from interference, already existed in the 13th century, the concept of zero completely transformed mathematics, gothic arches enabled buildings to soar far higher than they had ever been before, and alchemists were not just concerned about gold, but were laying down the foundation for chemistry.

As the author convincingly argues, we really need to revise a big and significant hunk of our history.