For most medieval scholars, who believed that God created the universe according to geometric and harmonic principles, science – particularly geometry and astronomy – was linked directly to the divine. To seek these principles, therefore, would be to seek God.
European science in the Middle Ages comprised the study of nature, mathematics and natural philosophy in medieval Europe. Following the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the decline in knowledge of Greek, Christian Western Europe was cut off from an important source of ancient learning. Although a range of Christian clerics and scholars from Isidore and Bede to Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme maintained the spirit of rational inquiry, Western Europe would see a period of scientific decline during the Early Middle Ages. However, by the time of the High Middle Ages, the region had rallied and was on its way to once more taking the lead in scientific discovery. Scholarship and scientific discoveries of the Late Middle Ages laid the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution of the Early Modern Period.
According to Pierre Duhem, who founded the academic study of medieval science as a critique of the Enlightenment-positivist theory of a 17th-century anti-Aristotelian and anticlerical scientific revolution, the various conceptual origins of that alleged revolution lay in the 12th to 14th centuries, in the works of churchmen such as Thomas Aquinas and Buridan.[1]
In the context of this article, "Western Europe" refers to the European cultures bound together by the Catholic Church and the Latin language.
^Duhem was working on Les origines de la statique in 1903, when he stumbled upon a reference to Jordanus Nemorarius. This provoked a deep study of medieval science and cosmology, which he first began publishing in 1913 as Le Système du monde (only five of ten volumes made it to the press before his death). An abridged English translation has been published by Roger Ariew under the title Medieval Cosmology. Cf. Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem Archived 2011-07-26 at the Wayback Machine.
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