Continuity thesis
The continuity thesis claims that the great break between the medieval mind and the modern one never really happened. In the history of ideas, it is the hypothesis that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were joined by steady development, not split by a radical divide. If that is right, the intellectual or scientific revolution said to follow the Renaissance is a myth.
The Australian mathematician and historian of science James Franklin pushes the idea hard. He argues that the twelfth century, not the fifteenth, was the "real, true, and unqualified renaissance".
Most scholars have not followed him. A majority still back the traditional view of a Scientific Revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So who first argued for continuity, and what did they find in the medieval record? Did Renaissance humanism feed science or smother it? And is the phrase "modern science" precise enough to be dated at all?
Pierre Duhem, a French physicist and philosopher of science, began with a narrow question about the origins of statics, a branch of mechanics. Digging for answers, he met the writings of medieval mathematicians and philosophers, among them Nicole Oresme and Roger Bacon. He came to regard them as founders of modern science, because in his view they anticipated many discoveries of Galileo and later thinkers.
That conviction grew into Le système du monde, a ten-volume history of cosmological doctrines running from Plato to Copernicus. Earlier historians such as Voltaire and Condorcet had seen little intellectual importance in the Middle Ages. Duhem set out to show the opposite. He argued that the Roman Catholic Church had helped foster the growth of Western science.
His conclusion was blunt. He wrote that "the mechanics and physics of which modern times are justifiably proud proceed, by an uninterrupted series of scarcely perceptible improvements, from doctrines professed in the heart of the medieval schools."
George Sarton, who lived from 1884 to 1956, stressed the unbroken history of science in his 1931 book The History of Science and the New Humanism. His twist concerned the Renaissance itself. He judged that science stagnated in that era, because Renaissance humanism cared more for form than fact and more for grammar than substance.
Humanists also adored ancient authorities, and that devotion pushed empirical investigation aside. The result, Sarton said, was that science had to be introduced to Western culture twice. The first arrival came in the twelfth century, during the Arabic-Latin translation movement. Humanism swept that first appearance away. Science returned in the seventeenth century, in what became known as the Scientific Revolution.
Sarton defended the medieval centuries with an image of pregnancy. In his Introduction to the History of Science he wrote: "It does not follow, as so many ignorant persons think, that the mediaeval activities were sterile. That would be just as foolish as to consider a pregnant woman sterile as long as the fruit of her womb was unborn. The Middle Ages were pregnant with many ideas which could not be delivered until much later. Modern science, we might say, was the fruition of mediaeval immaturity. Vesalius, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton were the happy inheritors who cashed in."
He also named what he thought ended the old order: "We shall not be far wrong in saying that it was Occamism combined with Averroism which prepared the gradual dissolution of mediaeval continuity and the beginning of a new age."
James Franklin begins by listing what he considers the Renaissance myth. It holds that a new outlook dawned suddenly after a thousand years of darkness. It says ancient learning was rediscovered, and that fresh ideas about freedom of inquiry replaced reliance on authority. It adds that real scientific investigation displaced the sterile disputes of the schools.
Franklin answers that the Renaissance was a period of marked decline, which ended a late medieval advance. The rediscovery of ancient knowledge, which Italian humanists later claimed for themselves, had in fact been accomplished in the twelfth century. That century also saw the first advances in geometrical optics and mechanics.
The Merton School at Oxford, in the 1330s and 1340s, took the first steps toward understanding motion and continuous variation in general. Franklin adds a telling aside. Neither ancient Greek nor Latin had a phrase equivalent to "kilometres per hour".
Nicole Oresme, who also wrote on theology and money, gave most of his effort to science and mathematics. In Franklin's account, Oresme invented graphs and was the first to perform calculations involving probability. He was also the first to compare the workings of the universe to a clock. Franklin stresses that much later thought, and not only in science, rested on a revived scholasticism and not on Renaissance humanism.
The plague of 1348-1350, the Black Death, killed a third of the people in Europe. Franklin, like other historians of the period, blames it for what followed. He sees little of importance in other branches of science in the two centuries between Oresme and Copernicus.
Johan Huizinga's study The Waning of the Middle Ages notes a leaning toward elaborate theories of signs. Franklin compares that habit to the degeneracy of modern Marxism. His example is the late Renaissance naturalist Aldrovandi, who thought his account of the snake incomplete until he had treated it in anatomical, heraldic, allegorical, medicinal, anecdotal, historical and mythical terms. Franklin also points to astrology and alchemy, which developed in the heyday of the Renaissance.
Literature, he says, declined alongside science in the fifteenth century. Chaucer died in 1400. The next writers still widely read are Erasmus, More, Rabelais and Machiavelli, just after 1500. Franklin writes: "It is hard to think of any writer in English between Chaucer and Spenser who is now read even by the most enthusiastic students. The gap is almost two hundred years."
Franklin concedes that painting is where the Renaissance truly excelled. He argues that artistic skill hid its incompetence in everything else. Leonardo da Vinci was supposed to be good at everything, yet on examination "had nothing of importance to say on most subjects". Franklin also cites E. T. Bell's The Development of Mathematics, from 1940, which says Leonardo's published jottings on mathematics "are trivial, even puerile, and show no mathematical talent whatever."
Franklin's verdict on the printing press is harsher still. He compares it to television, which produced "a flood of drivel catering to the lowest common denominator of the paying public, plus a quantity of propaganda paid for by the sponsors".
Robert Pasnau, a philosopher and historian, dates modernity even earlier than Franklin's twelfth-century renaissance would suggest. He writes that "modernity came in the late twelfth century, with Averroes' magisterial revival of Aristotle and its almost immediate embrace by the Latin West."
Pasnau notes that in some branches of seventeenth-century philosophy, the insights of the scholastic era fell into neglect and disrepute. He disputes the modernist picture of medieval thinkers as servants of Aristotle. In his words, "scholastic philosophers agree among themselves no more than does any group of philosophers from any historical period."
The years between 1400 and 1600 are almost unknown, yet Pasnau says they were not barren. They produced vast quantities of material, and much of it survives. That complicates any claim that the seventeenth century brought novelty. He holds that scholasticism's concerns run largely parallel to the central themes of the modern era. Early modern philosophy differs in tone and style but grows naturally out of later medieval debates. Without the scholastic background, he says, Descartes, Locke and others cannot be fully understood.
Edward Grant, in The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages, places the origins of modern science in the medieval period. He names four factors: "Translations into Latin of Greek and Arabic scientific texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; the development of universities, which were uniquely Western and used the translations as the basis of a science curriculum; the adjustments of Christianity to secular learning and the transformation of Aristotle's natural philosophy."
Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel have seen this kind of argument as characteristic of medieval studies in North America in the twentieth century.
In 1973, A. C. Graham questioned the very notion of "modern science". He wrote: "The question may also be raised whether Ptolemy or even Copernicus and Kepler were in principle any nearer to modern science than the Chinese and the Maya, or indeed than the first astronomer, whoever he may have been, who allowed observations to outweigh numerological considerations of symmetry in his calculations of the month and the year".
George Saliba picked up the thread in 1999, in a review of Toby E. Huff's The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West. Saliba argued that terms such as "modern science" or "modernity" must first be defined. Quoting Graham, he observed that "the empirical emphasis placed by that very first astronomer on the value of his observations set the inescapable course to modern science. So where would the origins of modern science then lie?"
Gary Hatfield attacks the label from another side, in his essay "Was the Scientific Revolution Really a Revolution of Science?" He accepts that the seventeenth century contained several individual revolutions. He does not accept that it was a scientific revolution. In his view science was still tied to metaphysics, and experimental physics was not separated from natural philosophy until the end of the eighteenth century.
Comparable revolutions in single sciences kept occurring before and after the seventeenth century. Hatfield offers the optical revolution of Faraday and Maxwell as one example.
Arun Bala, in his dialogical history of the birth of modern science, challenges the story from a different direction. He argues that the changes behind the Scientific Revolution were rooted in influences reaching Europe from many cultures. Those changes include the mathematical realist turn, the mechanical philosophy, atomism and the central role given to the Sun in Copernican heliocentrism.
Bala names specific debts. Alhazen's physical optical theory is one. Chinese mechanical technologies, he says, led to the perception of the world as a machine. The Hindu-Arabic numeral system carried within it a new mode of mathematical atomic thinking. Heliocentrism, in his account, grew from ancient Egyptian religious ideas associated with Hermeticism.
Bala holds that ignoring these sources has produced a Eurocentric conception of the Scientific Revolution. Critics reply that no documentary evidence shows the transmission of specific scientific ideas. Until such evidence appears, they say, his model will remain "a working hypothesis, not a conclusion".
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Common questions
What is the continuity thesis in the history of ideas?
The continuity thesis is the hypothesis that there was no radical discontinuity between the intellectual development of the Middle Ages and that of the Renaissance and early modern period. On this view, the idea of an intellectual or scientific revolution after the Renaissance is a myth.
Who first proposed the continuity thesis?
Pierre Duhem, a French physicist and philosopher of science, first set out the idea in his ten-volume work Le système du monde. His research into the origins of statics led him to Nicole Oresme and Roger Bacon, whom he came to regard as founders of modern science.
What did George Sarton say about the continuity thesis and the Renaissance?
George Sarton, who lived from 1884 to 1956, argued in his 1931 book The History of Science and the New Humanism that science stagnated during the Renaissance. He said science had to be introduced to Western culture twice, in the twelfth century and again in the seventeenth.
Why does James Franklin call the Renaissance a myth in the continuity thesis debate?
James Franklin argues that the Renaissance was a period of significant intellectual decline that ended a late medieval advance. He says the rediscovery of ancient knowledge happened in the twelfth century, which he calls the "real, true, and unqualified renaissance".
Do most scholars accept the continuity thesis?
No, a majority of scholars still support the traditional view of the Scientific Revolution occurring in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel saw the continuity thesis as characteristic of medieval studies in North America in the twentieth century.
What four factors does Edward Grant give for the medieval origins of modern science?
Edward Grant names Latin translations of Greek and Arabic scientific texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the development of universities that used them as a science curriculum. He also names the adjustment of Christianity to secular learning and the transformation of Aristotle's natural philosophy.
All sources
20 references cited across the entry
- 1Freedman, Paul, and Gabrielle Spiegel, 'Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies', American Historical Review, 103 (1998), 677–704. .
- 2BookRevolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700Peter Dear — Princeton University Press — Apr 2001
- 3BookIt Started with Copernicus: How Turning the World inside out Led to the Scientific RevolutionHoward Margolis — McGraw-Hill — 25 Apr 2002
- 4BookThe Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and MechanicsRichard S. Westfall — Cambridge University Press — Oct 1971
- 5BookReappraisals of the Scientific RevolutionCambridge University Press — 27 Jul 1990
- 6JournalScience and Humanism in the Italian RenaissanceEric Cochrane — Oxford University Press for the American Historical Association — Dec 1976
- 7BookIntroduction to the History of ScienceGeorge Sarton — Williams & Wilkins for Carnegie Institution of Washington — 1947
- 8JournalThe Renaissance MythJames Franklin — Nov 1982
- 9BookA Sourcebook in Medieval ScienceEdward Grant — Harvard University Press — Jan 1974
- 10BookGod's PhilosophersJames Hannam — Icon Books — 6 Aug 2009
- 11JournalScience by conceptual analysis: the genius of the late scholasticsJames Franklin — 2012
- 12BookHerfsttij der middeleeuwenJohan Huizinga — E. Arnold & Co. — 1924
- 13BookThe Development of MathematicsE.T Bell — Dover Publications — 2 September 1992
- 14JournalA Theory of Secondary QualitiesRobert Pasnau — Nov 2006
- 16JournalSeeking the Origins of Modern Science?George Saliba — Autumn 1999
- 17BookThe Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual ContextsEdward Grant — Cambridge University Press — 13 Oct 1996
- 18BookTradition, Transmission, Transformation: Proceedings of Two Conferences on Pre-Modern Science Held at the University of OklahomaGary Hatfield — Brill Publishers — July 1996
- 19BookThe Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern ScienceArun Bala — Palgrave Macmillan — 15 Sep 2008
- 20JournalBook Review: The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern SciencePeter G Sobol — University of Chicago Press on behalf of History of Science Society — Dec 2007