To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science Read Free

attached to cathedrals, such as those at Orléans, Reims, Laon, Cologne, Utrecht, Sens, Toledo, Chartres, and Paris.
    These schools trained the clergy not only in religion but also in a secular liberal arts curriculum left over from Roman times, based in part on the writings of Boethius and Martianus: the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and, especially at Chartres, the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Some of these schools went back to the time of Charlemagne, but in the eleventh century they began to attract schoolmasters of intellectual distinction, and at some schools there was a renewed interest in reconciling Christianity with knowledge of the natural world. As remarked by the historian Peter Dear, 2 “Learning about God by learning what He had made, and understanding the whys and wherefores of its fabric, was seen by many as an eminently pious enterprise.” For instance, Thierry of Chartres, who taught at Paris and Chartres and became chancellor of the school at Chartres in 1142, explained the origin of the world as described in Genesis in terms of the theory of the four elements he learned from the Timaeus.
    Another development was even more important than the flowering of the cathedral schools, though not unrelated to it. This was a new wave of translations of the works of earlier scientists.Translations were at first not so much directly from Greek as from Arabic: either the works of Arab scientists, or works that had earlier been translated from Greek to Arabic or Greek to Syriac to Arabic.
    The enterprise of translation began early, in the middle of the tenth century, for instance at the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoli in the Pyrenees, near the border between Christian Europe and Ummayad Spain. For an illustration of how this new knowledge could spread in medieval Europe, and its influence on the cathedral schools, consider the career of Gerbert d’Aurillac. Born in 945 in Aquitaine of obscure parents, he learned some Arab mathematics and astronomy in Catalonia; spent time in Rome; went to Reims, where he lectured on Arabic numbers and the abacus and reorganized the cathedral school; became abbot and then archbishop of Reims; assisted in the coronation of the founder of a new dynasty of French kings, Hugh Capet; followed the German emperor Otto III to Italy and Magdeburg; became archbishop of Ravenna; and in 999 was elected pope, as Sylvester II. His student Fulbert of Chartres studied at the cathedral school of Reims and then became bishop of Chartres in 1006, presiding over the rebuilding of its magnificent cathedral.
    The pace of translation accelerated in the twelfth century. At the century’s start, an Englishman, Adelard of Bath, traveled extensively in Arab countries; translated works of al-Khwarizmi; and, in Natural Questions , reported on Arab learning. Somehow Thierry of Chartres learned of the use of zero in Arab mathematics, and introduced it into Europe. Probably the most important twelfth-century translator was Gerard of Cremona. He worked in Toledo, which had been the capital of Christian Spain before the Arab conquests, and though reconquered by Castilians in 1085 remained a center of Arab and Jewish culture. His Latin translation from Arabic of Ptolemy’s Almagest made Greek astronomy available to medieval Europe. Gerard also translated Euclid’s Elements and works by Archimedes, al-Razi, al-Ferghani, Galen, Ibn Sina, and al-Khwarizmi. After Arab Sicily fell to theNormans in 1091, translations were also made directly from Greek to Latin, with no reliance on Arabic intermediaries.
    The translations that had the greatest immediate impact were of Aristotle. It was in Toledo that the bulk of Aristotle’s work was translated from Arabic sources; for instance, there Gerard translated On the Heavens, Physics , and Meteorology.
    Aristotle’s works were not universally welcomed in the church. Medieval Christianity had been far more influenced by Platonism and