Wrestling with Nature From Omens to Science

106 Shank

mathematical and mixed sciences as optics, astronomy, and the science

of weights also fl ourished in or near the universities, among the minority

of scholars who specialized in these subjects.

The thirteenth century assimilated this material so successfully

that innovative trends had appeared already at midcentury. It was dur-

ing the fourteenth century, however, that masters at Oxford and Paris

in particular extended natural philosophy into new territory. In criticiz-

ing Aristotle’s views on motion, they brought proportion theory, geom-

etry, and theoretical measurement to bear on the problem of change and

other areas of natural philosophy. Their work expanded the scope of the

intermediate sciences into territory that would have surprised not only

Aristotle, but also their thirteenth- century predecessors. In the later four-

teenth and fi fteenth centuries, new universities sprang up in the Holy

Roman Empire and in eastern Europe. The masters who spearheaded this

institutional growth drew on recent scientifi c developments in the older

universities and diffused them widely. Masters of arts who took advanced

degrees in medicine and theology brought their learning to bear on their

new studies. By the fi fteenth century, the spread of the universities and

their growing enrolments had rooted the study of nature permanently in

European culture.

NOTES

I thank Ann Blair, Joan Cadden, Victor Hilts, David C. Lindberg, Lynn Nyhart, Evgeny

Zaytsev, and my fellow editors for comments and criticisms, and the Institute for Re-

search in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin- Madison for its incomparable

support. Uncredited translations are my own.

1. During this period, the meaning of natura also was far from invariant; see Tul-
   lio Gregory, “L’idea di natura nella fi losofi a medievale prima dell’ ingresso della fi sica
   di Aristotele: il secolo XII,” in La fi losofi a della natura nel Medioevo (Milan: Società
   editrice Vita e pensiero, 1966), 27–65; Jacques Chiffoleau, “Contra naturam. Pour une
   approche casuistique et procédurale de la nature médiévale,” Micrologus 4 (1996):
   265–312; and Lawrence Roberts, ed., Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages (Bingham-
   ton: NY, 1982).


2. Brian Stock, “Science, Technology, and Economic Progress in the Early Middle
   Ages,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chi-
   cago Press, 1978), 1–51, esp. 23–32.


3. William Stahl, Roman Science: Origins, Development, and Infl uence to the Later
   Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 66, 71, 79, 96.


4. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, I.ii.5.


5. Heinrich von Staden, “Liminal Perils: Early Roman Receptions of Greek Medi-

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