83In the rough millennium between Boëthius (d. 524 CE) and Regiomonta-
nus (d. 1476 CE), the inquiry into nature in Europe changed drastically.
Starting from a modest Roman inheritance, the intellectuals of medieval
Europe built new conceptual, methodological, and institutional frame-
works for their study of nature.^1 Accordingly, this chapter seeks to charac-
terize the emergence of several medieval approaches to nature in a series
of transformations that proceeded at an accelerating pace to the fi fteenth
century. Today, the English word “science” and its counterparts in other
vernaculars denote primarily the systematic inquiry into nature, an activ-
ity that is fi rmly anchored in the world’s universities. This partnership
traces its ancestry to the later Middle Ages.
The long process that culminated in these transformations had hum-
ble beginnings. Between the fi fth and tenth centuries, the western part of
the former Roman Empire found itself literally in a postcolonial situation.
Formerly occupied peoples with varying degrees of access to the language,
infrastructure, and culture of their Roman colonizers survived new waves
of Germanic, Hun, and Norse occupiers. The descendants of these peoples
eventually coexisted and mingled, building a distinctive political and intel-
lectual world by selection, amalgamation, and innovation. Intellectually,
they eventually came to terms with the legacies of Greco- Roman culture
and the Judeo- Christian scriptures in Latin, the language imposed by Rome
and subsequently promoted by the Church of Rome. The most momen-
tous developments of the early medieval era were anonymous and techni-
CHAPTER 4Natural Knowledge in the Latin Middle Ages
Michael H. Shank