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Reaching back 400 years before Copernicus, Thomas Goldstein
explores the beginnings of modern science in the mystic arts of alchemy and astrology
and the incipient rational inquiry of the Middle Ages. He highlights the historic
conflict overshadowing the birth of modern science, between the sensual perception
of nature and the traditional ban on natural studies imposed by Saint Augustine
after the fall of Rome. Showing how each culture has
colored science with its own characteristic hues, the author brings to life such
seminal figures as the Ionian exile Pythagoras, who developed the mathematical
vocabulary by which we apprehend the intrinsic order of nature; al-Khwarizmi,
court mathematician in the ninth century who developed the Arabic numerals; the
masters of the School of Chartres -- Thierry and William of Conches -- who in
the twelfth century formulated the basic philosophical premises for modern Western
science; Roger Bacon, the Franciscan teacher and thinker and alchemy's most brilliant
exponent, who foresaw the machine age with stunning, prophetic vision; Dominican
Albertus Magnus, whose thirteenth-century studies of plant and animal life --
made during long travels barefoot across northern Europe -- laid the foundations
of major empirical sciences; Paolo Toscanelli, astronomer and geographer of the
Florentine Renaissance theories Christopher Columbus put to the test; Leonardo
da Vinci, dual genius of science and art, who personifies the essence of Renaissance
culture, its fascination with life itself. Under this
long range view an unexpected unity emerges between the Medieval and Renaissance
experience of science and the modern experience: across the differences of culture
and across the centuries, Thomas Goldstein reveals the same human mind struggling
to grasp nature's laws and enjoying nature's dual challenge to the intellect and
the senses. Yet Goldstein also makes clear how the early modern world turned the
eyes from the limitless orbits of the divine universe to a cautiously limited,
specific reality verifiable by mathematical proof. As
members of the first civilization to be centered on science, readers today may
gain a new understanding of a phenomenon originally conceived by people for their
enjoyment but endowed with an inflated intellectual prestige during crucial historic
conflicts. Thomas Goldstein is an authority on Medieval
history with special expertise in the Italian Renaissance and its connections
to the Age of Discoveries. The author of numerous scholarly articles and the translator
of several books from the German, Dr. Goldstein lives in New York and teaches
at the City College of New York. |
