Astrology, alchemy and the marvels reported from the East were not the enemies of early science but its companions. Volume II of Lynn Thorndike's great study follows both through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Volumes I and II of A History of Magic and Experimental Science appeared together in 1923; this second one opens with the early scholastics, Peter Abelard and Hugh of St Victor, and closes at the end of the thirteenth century with Cecco d'Ascoli. In between come Adelard of Bath, Hildegard of Bingen, Moses Maimonides, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon, the translators who carried Arabic learning into Latin, and the anonymous compilers of dream-books, books of secrets, and treatises on the properties of stones and plants.
Thorndike's case - that experiment grew out of the search for hidden powers rather than in opposition to it - changed how the medieval mind is read, and the volumes are still cited a hundred years on. He quotes his sources at length and in full, which is why the work remains the starting point for anyone reading in this field.
This edition features:The complete second volume of Thorndike's 1923 study of the first thirteen centuries
Book IV on the twelfth century, from Peter Abelard to the dream literature of the Latin West
Book V on the thirteenth century, from Michael Scot and Robert Grosseteste to Cecco d'Ascoli
Extensive notes and references to the manuscript sources Thorndike worked from
A foundational reference for readers of intellectual history and early natural philosophy