1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

11.1 The Early Renaissances 293
at least in part. Arabic translations of Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy started
to spread throughout Europe. Another channel was opened violently by
the Fourth Crusade, with the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the consequent
foundation of the Latin empire, one of whose consequences was
a major dispersion of manuscripts hitherto held at Byzantium. 17
Two European cultural centers of the thirteenth century that applied
themselves to the task of reclaiming ancient scientific knowledge were
Paris and Oxford, the latter being where the exceptionally important work
of Robert Grosseteste (1168–1253) and Roger Bacon (ca. 1220–1292?) took
place. Bacon’s masterpiece, the Opus majus, organizes the knowable into
seven parts. Not counting a pars destruens, focusing on the identification
of sources of error, the second part, requisite for all other studies, is the
command of Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. Only those who could read these
tongues, says Bacon, could acquire essential knowledge that had remained
hidden to his day from Latin speakers. 17a The same was said on various
occasions by Robert Grosseteste (compare citation on page 304). Now, it
is scarcely conceivable that all Greek, and especially Arabic and Hebrew,
manuscripts extant in Europe in the thirteenth century survived until the
invention of printing and were then published — if nothing else, readership
would have been too limited to make such an enterprise viable.
Therefore it is likely that on certain topics what we get from Grosseteste
and Bacon comes from sources now utterly lost or as yet undiscovered.
That Bacon was in the past held by many to be not only a pioneer in mathematical
geography but also the inventor of lenses, gunpowder and such
like shows how hard it is to track the scientific and technological sources of
these ideas. As late as the twentieth century Arabic manuscripts have been
“discovered” containing translations of Greek works that had remained
outside the Western tradition since the imperial age, yet obviously were
preserved in Muslim lands down to our days. 18 Thus we must always
keep in mind the possibility that thirteenth-century scholars had access to
ancient works that we have not even heard of.
What is probably the most famous document of medieval technology
dates from around 1230: the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt. 19 Besides
many religious and architectural objects, it illustrates some remarkable
devices that we have already encountered: for instance, on folio 22v
we see a water-operated saw, a screw-jack to lift heavy weights and a sim-
17 See, for example, [Vogel], p. 274.
17a Bacon returns to this point (and to the sacrifices he had to make to procure costly manuscripts
in the “scientific” languages) in a letter to Clement IV, published in [Bacon/Gasquet] and [Bacon/Bettoni].
18 See, for example, note 27 on page 55, note 24 on page 90 and note note 9 on page 291.
19 [Villard de Honnecourt].
Revision: 1.11 Date: 2003/01/06 07:48:20