100 books like The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages

If there’s only one that I could recommend, it’s this brilliant, beautiful, and vexing book by María Rosa Menocal, Sterling Professor at Yale University. In a compelling and artful manner, Menocal tells the story of medieval Spain from the arrival of the first Umayyad rulers to Cervantes. Beyond being a useful introduction to the fascinating history, Menocal makes the argument that a culture of tolerance existed in medieval Spain, one that transcended religious and ethnic differences. The principal engine of this culture, she suggests, was the Arabic language. Menocal’s book has received as much praise as criticism, a testament to its enduring power and the contentious quality of medieval Spain.

The Cloister: A Novel by James Carroll (Anchor, 2019) is a gripping, magical novel that dramatizes the connections between the medieval and modern worlds. Father James Kavanaugh meets Rachel Vedette at the Cloisters, the famous museum and gallery in upper Manhattan dedicated to the art of the Middle Ages. He is a parish priest with doubts and worries; she is a Holocaust survivor; and their relationship brilliantly conjures up the forbidden love affair between the medieval philosopher and “rock star,” Peter Abelard, and Heloise, an immensely talented nun. James Carroll, a former priest, is also the author of Constantine’s Sword, a memorable non-fiction book about the history of the Church and the Jews. The Cloister paints convincing pictures of Abelard and Heloise and creatively blurs the line between modernity and religious tradition.    

Etienne Gilson was the leading intellectual historian of the medieval Church in France, and this is the clearest, most lucid exposition of St. Thomas Aquinas’s thinking that I have read. Perhaps because the Roman Catholic Church has often used Aquinas’s thinking to justify conservative positions, we often forget that he was a world-class genius who radicalized religious and ethical thought in the Middle Ages, and whose work helped inspire later movements of reform like the Vatican II Council. Gilson’s sympathetic treatment of Aquinas restored this understanding of his thinking and helped produce the modern neo-Thomist movement. It is worth reading – and it is readable!

Readers seriously interested in the continuing influence of Aristotle on Western and global thinking will find the short book of Sir Anthony Kenney’s essays both useful and enjoyable. The author, a well-known authority on the history of Western philosophy, Thomas Aquinas, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, writes with panache on a wide variety of topics relevant to Aristotelian thought and modern intellectual and social life.      

The popular view is that “mediaeval science” is a contradiction in terms, but this is… well, nonsense, really. The mediaeval world did not have “scientists” (the term was only invented in the 1830s), but it did have “natural philosophers” who studied the world about them with great care and interest.

True, they worked within a totally different framework from later scientists, and that made the kind of leaps forward that were made in the 17th century impossible. But nevertheless, they thought logically, examined carefully, reasoned well, and even sometimes experimented successfully.

James Hannam’s book is a great introduction to a world that seems very alien to us but is closer than we might think.

I find this book outstanding for its various rare and extraordinary features: its expert coverage of the cleverly termed subject of ‘information overload’ in historical and modern contexts, the information explosion of Renaissance Europe, and the information revolution of our own time. 

It contains engaging accounts of knowledge collection and management in the comparative context of experiences from premodern Chinese, Byzantine, Islamic, and European cultures; fascinating illustrations capturing the book’s rich content;  and a wealth of primary and secondary sources, manuscripts and printed works, further enhanced by a comprehensive Index.

But above all, it is the book’s historically sensitive perspective that makes it literally ‘outstanding’: one not identifying a single factor, whether a technology, an institution, or cultural tradition, in explaining the nature and fate of our common heritage of knowledge transmission. 

This survey of ancient and medieval Western science delves into theological, philosophical, social, and institutional aspects of developments in the physical and biological sciences, and in medicine.

Its illustrations are beautiful and apt, and the well-written exposition reflects the knowledge and erudition of one of my favorite teachers during my graduate study at the University of Wisconsin, a leading scholar of medieval science during the latter 20th and early 21st centuries.

Shapin makes the audacious claim that there never really was a scientific revolution in Early Modern Europe, despite the fact that “the scientific revolution” has been a central organizing idea in the history of science and the history of Western culture more generally.

His provocative book provides a useful and engaging assessment of the utility of the concept of “the scientific revolution” for making sense of developments in the history of science.  He challenges us to think about the place of radical changes in the history of science, and whether the claims scientists make about such changes are merely rhetorical constructions.

Despite Shapin’s arguments, I am inclined to think something very significant happened in the sciences in the 16th and 17th Centuries, something that deserves to be called “revolutionary”. But Shapin’s book will certainly make readers reflect on what they mean by scientific revolution.

I appreciate this book because it provides an excellent historical overview of an important aspect of science, i.e., the occurrence of scientific revolutions from the 17th to the 20th century, and it does not include psychoanalysis.

Cohen’s book proposes an interesting "theory" of scientific revolutions which inspired me to develop a philosophical model of scientific revolutions, which I dubbed the "chain-of-reasoning" model.

Cohen was a renowned historian of science. His book is very well written and does not require technical knowledge of particular theories. It is very long but it can be studied selectively. 

This is a trilogy of historical fiction about, among many other things, the invention of the modern monetary system and the Scientific Revolution. Yes, it’s a heavy lift, as it’s nearly three thousand pages long, but it’s an incredible read. And if you want to get a sense of the sheer weirdness of the early days of science—both the people involved in it, as well as the ideas that they were playing with—these books are absolutely fantastic.