A dull grey day, and the postman brings an envelope containing a review copy of James Hannam’s God’s philosophers: how the medieval world laid the foundations of modern science. Drat my luck. I open the envelope and a big lump of paper, over 400 pages, almost nine inches tall and an inch thick hits the table with a loud thud. Nice cover, but why oh why did I agree to read all this when I have so much to do? I never review books, unless very angry. I feel quite sorry for myself.
The book is about science and religion. All of us are taught at school and on the mass media that science is good, religion is bad, and that religion — by which they don’t mean Islam, or Buddhism! — has always obstructed science and “progress”, and that in the Middle Ages no-one did any because of the Church. But it’s not true, at least not put that baldly. JH did his doctorate on the subject, and is trying to get people to realise that this is a myth, and one that grew up from mostly anti-clerical propaganda. The reality is far more complex. Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that will be easy going, tho.
Still, it’s raining, and I promised, so I settle down with this monster. Probably it will look smaller in paperback. I hope so, for who will read a book for a general reader of such length? The introduction does nothing to dispel my gloom; it’s a bit hard going. At least he’s not going to pester me with CE and BCE, it turns out — how I hate the elitist Christophobes who’re running that racket. He’s not going to tell me that the Roman collapse didn’t happen either, I learn, although clearly he wants to avoid getting drawn into arguing about that nasty piece of revisionism. Quite right too. No footnotes either; all banished to the end, probably by the publisher. I pull down two bookmarks and resign myself to flipping to and fro. Then there’s a discussion of what is in the chapters, and I set it aside and go off to walk down by the beach, in the hope of acquiring some motivation. I hate big books.
When I pick it up again and start with chapter 1, there is a nice surprise. The style changes completely into an engaging anecdotal style. More to the point, he’s telling me things that I don’t know. He’s giving estimates on population in the Roman world, and how this changes by 1000 AD — upwards, surprisingly. The book is plainly aimed at the educated layman, and so intended to be easy to read and interesting. And it is. I wince, tho, when I read in a very quick scene-setter that Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire in chapter 1. Of course he legalised it and favoured it, but paganism remained the official state religion until Theodosius I. His chapter on “progress in the early middle ages” is thankfully brief and doesn’t attempt revisionism of what was, after all, a nasty period of history. But then we get into the medieval period.
Much of this is interesting to readers of this blog. After all, we tend to have a fairly good idea about when the literary works of antiquity became known, but most people are much hazier on when the technical handbooks became available in the west. The book is good on this, and gives a very nice overview of what was going on.
Then into the university scene, and the university of Paris. I was a little surprised to find no mention of the pecia system; the book mentions how students made notes, but not how textbooks were rented out in pieces (pecia) so that the students could copy them and make their own copy. Possibly this is just too much detail; and omission of unnecessary detail is probably a critically important thing to do in a book like this, which is anyway rather long. Abelard makes his appearance, and the book discusses how the universities interacted with the civil and religious power. Then onto heresy trials.
I’m 83 pages in, so far, in the middle of chapter 4. I’m slimming down my library at the moment, and I made clear that I would probably return the review copy, to avoid cluttering my floor. But it is telling that I am already beginning to wonder whether I was too hasty, and whether I should hold onto it. The references aren’t heavy, but there is usually a lead into the secondary literature, and the points made are often very interesting indeed.
More later. Maybe a steak will help me read my way through this!
Postscript: the steak did help, and I read another hundred pages. There’s an interesting discussion of medieval magic, very well thought out and very clear. The story proceeds by giving biographies of individuals and discussing their work. This of course makes it easier to read.