Natural Knowledge in the Latin Middle Ages 95arguments that critically evaluated multiple competing possibilities be-
fore choosing a fi nal position. Meanwhile Aristotle’s treatise on scientifi c
demonstration (the Posterior Analytics), along with the interest in Euclid
and Ptolemy, focused much attention on standards of knowledge and de-
ductive methods in particular.
This new material transformed the way intellectuals thought about the
knowledge of nature. After some initial opposition, it was hard for them
not to call most of it scientia, and they did.^57 In literary contexts, scientia
generically meant “knowledge.” In philosophical contexts, scientia often
meant “knowledge attained by demonstration,” following the Posterior An-
alytics’ ideal for the presentation of ascertained, mostly natural, knowledge
(Aristotle’s examples came largely from mathematics, natural philosophy,
and the mathematical sciences). Indeed, to denote such demonstration, the
twelfth century coined the adjective scientifi cus (“knowledge- producing”),
which Dante brought into the Tuscan vernacular (scientifi co).^58 Just as of-
ten, however, scientia was accompanied by specifi c qualifi ers denoting
one discipline (scientia stellarum, scientia de motu, scientia medicine, scientia
dialecticae, scientia de plantis, scientia de ingeniis, and so forth). In such
situations, the term designated a coherent body of specialized knowledge,
without necessarily presupposing a deductive or demonstrative framework
(for example, “Is there a science concerning generation and corruption?”).
At Bologna, offi cial documents used scientia as a synonym for faculty (sci-
entia medicine).^59 Although the term scientia thus extended from general
connotations to fi eld- specifi c bodies of knowledge analogous to what we
now call sciences, its range caused little confusion in context.
For Kilwardby and others, scientia alone could be a synonym for phys-
ica (“natural philosophy” or “the study of nature”), refl ecting the subject’s
importance and omnipresence in the faculty of arts. For a younger con-
temporary of his, philosophy was divided into the mechanical and liberal
sciences (not “arts”); the latter were further divided into “natural phi-
losophy broadly understood,” moral philosophy, and rational philosophy
(that is, the disciplines of the trivium). The category “natural philosophy
broadly understood” in turn encompassed metaphysics, the “mathemati-
cal sciences” (the quadrivium), and natural philosophy in the strict sense,
a schema that Bonaventure also used.^60 As these schemata suggest, there
were many medieval views of the matter.
The wide applicability of the term scientia was surely one reason for
the emphasis on classifi cation: the proliferation of new species demanded
a fresh taxonomy. These later- medieval discussions often disguised meth-
odological debates. Which tools and methods were appropriate to a partic-
ular inquiry? And what was their relation to the tools of related scientiae?