with questions about how you are coming and when will you be finished,
and if you take too long they will regard your work as trifling and you will
experience great dissatisfaction. Of course, if you do not succeed, you will
be humiliated; if you do succeed, they will give you something else to do;
8) finally, the scientist should have plenty of money.Medieval science, then, was comprehensive and holistic, both in the sense of embracing
all areas of human knowledge and in the sense of a hierarchy of interrelated knowledges.
It was profoundly aware of and deferential to the great minds and intellectual traditions of
preceding ages, pagan as well as religious, without mistaking authority for reasons.
“Science” only slowly differentiated itself from “magic,” since both concerned natural
phenomena. Mathematics provided a deductive discipline, a source of theoretical
explanation of bodies in motion, and the beginnings of what would become an essential
constituent of later science.
Frank Catania
[See also: AGRICULTURE; ALBERT THE GREAT; ALEXANDER NECKHAM;
ARABIC PHILOSOPHY, INFLUENCE OF; ARMOR AND WEAPONS; ARTILLERY;
ASTRONOMICAL AND NAVIGATIONAL INSTRUMENTS; BERNARD
SILVESTRIS; CLOCKS AND TIMEKEEPING; CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUES;
ENAMELING; HEALTH CARE; JEWELRY AND METALWORKING; LAPIDARY;
LIBERAL ARTS; MAGIC; MARBODE OF RENNES; MEDICAL PRACTICE AND
PRACTITIONERS; MILITARY ARCHITECTURE; MILLS AND MILLING; MINING
AND METALS; ORESME, NICOLE; SHIPS AND SHIPPING; STAINED GLASS;
TAPESTRY; TEXTILES; VITICULTURE; WEIGHTS AND MEASURES]
Clagett, Marshall. The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1959.
Crombie, A.C. Augustine to Galileo: Medieval and Early Modern Science. 2 vols. 2nd ed.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.
——. Science, Optics, and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought. London: Hambledon,
1990.
Grant, Edward, ed. A Source Book in Medieval Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1974.
Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. New York: Macmillan, 1923.
SCROFULA
. Glandular tuberculosis in general (scrofule), a systemic infection of the skin and various
organs, was apparently widespread in medieval France as a result of dietary deficiencies,
contagion, and bovine tuberculosis, to which it is related. One form that drew particular
attention is an inflammation of the lymph glands in the neck (écrouelles). Medical
encyclopedists, such as Bernard de Gordon and Gui de Chauliac, described scrofulous
abscesses in detail among the apostemes caused by phlegmatic humor, and they noted
correctly that the young were the most common victims. Physicians prescribed an
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