Lynn Thorndike

• 1. Introduction

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  Lynn Thorndike coined a phrase that historians still use every day, and he did it almost in passing. In A Short History of Civilization, published in 1926, he became the first historian to propose the term "early modern" for the stretch of European life running roughly from 1500 to 1800. The label stuck. Today it organizes courses, libraries, and careers, yet few who use it know the man who minted it. Thorndike spent his life chasing an unfashionable idea. He thought magic and science were not enemies but tangled siblings, born from the same human urge to understand. He was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on the 24th of July 1882, and died on the 28th of December 1965. Between those dates he wrote eight volumes on magic and experimental science alone. Why did a scholar of the Middle Ages stake his reputation on alchemists and astrologers? Why did he pick a fight with one of the most celebrated historians of the Renaissance? And how did a clergyman's son end up sharing a dinner table with the founders of two entirely separate fields of American thought?

• 2. A Family Of Firsts

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  Edward R. Thorndike was a clergyman, and three of his sons grew up to leave permanent marks on American intellectual life. The eldest path belonged to Ashley Horace Thorndike, an educator who became an expert on William Shakespeare. A second brother, Edward Lee Thorndike, is remembered as the father of modern educational psychology. Lynn was the younger sibling in this trio, the one who turned not to the stage of English drama or the laboratory of the mind, but to the manuscripts of medieval Europe. The household produced a Shakespearean, a psychologist, and a historian of magic from a single minister's family. That a clergyman's son would devote his career to the place of magic in European thought carries a quiet irony the historical record leaves for the listener to weigh.

• 3. From Lynn To Columbia

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  Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, granted Thorndike his Bachelor of Arts in 1902. He moved quickly. Columbia University awarded him a Master of Arts in medieval history in 1903 and a doctorate the same year. His doctoral dissertation, completed in 1905, carried the title "The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe." That subject was not a youthful detour. He spent the rest of his life linking magic to the historical development of experimental science. The teaching followed a long arc across the country. He began with medieval history at Northwestern University in 1907, then moved to Western Reserve University in 1909, where he stayed until 1924. Columbia University lured him back in the fall of 1924, and he taught there until he retired in 1950. Retirement did not stop the work; he kept publishing for another ten years.

• 4. Magic And Experimental Science

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  A History of Magic and Experimental Science runs to eight volumes, published between 1923 and 1958. It traces a single thread from early Christianity, through early modern Europe, to the end of the 17th century. Thorndike used the project to argue that the study of magic and the rise of experimental science belonged to the same story. Inside that vast work he paused to defend his method against the cleverness of his peers. "Some investigators of manuscripts, like certain anthropologists and archeologists, seem to think that they attain a higher degree of scholarship, if they propound some novel and improbable theory and adduce a certain amount of evidence for it," he wrote. "This is hardly the direct or rapid method of attaining historical truth." He distrusted the dazzling theory. He preferred the patient one. That preference shaped a second book on the same terrain, Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century, published in 1929.

• 5. Against The Renaissance

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  Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian, had taught generations to see the Italian Renaissance as a distinct and luminous phase, a clean break with the centuries before it. Thorndike refused that picture. He argued that most of the political, social, moral, and religious phenomena commonly labeled Renaissance seemed almost equally characteristic of Italy at any point from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. The famous rebirth, in his eyes, was less a rupture than a long continuity dressed up as a dawn. This was the quiet radicalism of a man who read manuscripts rather than monuments. He had already mapped the medieval ground in The History of Medieval Europe, first issued in 1917 and reaching a third edition in 1949. The same eye for continuity led him to translate the medieval astronomical textbook De sphaera mundi of Johannes de Sacrobosco.

• 6. Honors And A Last Address

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  The History of Science Society gave Thorndike its Sarton Medal in 1957, years after he had left the classroom. He had served that society as president in 1929, and he also led the American Historical Association as its president. The American Philosophical Society elected him in 1939. His scholarly catalogue stretched across decades and topics, from The True Roger Bacon in 1916 to Michael Scot in 1965, the year he died. On the 29th of December 1955, he delivered a presidential address at the annual dinner of the American Historical Association, held at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. He gave it a pointed title: "Whatever Was, Was Right." Among his final published volumes was The Sixteenth Century, issued in 1959, the century he had spent a lifetime arguing was not as new as everyone believed.