Medieval Science, Technology and Medicine

Razi, Al-

According to *al-Biruni, Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Zakariyya al-Razi (Rhazes) was born in Rayy (near modern Tehran) in 865 C.E. He may have first focused on alchemy and done experiments, which affected his eyesight, and then moved to medicine, in which he excelled. He directed the Rayy hospital and died there in 925, although this date is disputed.

He was well known as a freethinker, who claimed that revelation to a particular people at a particular time would be contrary to God’s justice, which he wanted to uphold. Some dubbed him “The Heretic,” but he was highly respected by al-Mansur, the governor of Rayy. His great model was *Galen, who wrote The Best Doctor is also a Philosopher, and like him he saw himself as the complete physician, i.e., physician of the body through medicine, and physician of the soul through philosophy and reformation of character in particular. For instance, in the introduction to his Spiritual Physick he explains that al-Mansur asked him to write it as a companion to the Liber Almansoris, a previous textbook on bodily medicine he had dedicated to al-Mansur.

Al-Razi’s own intellectual autobiography-cum-bibliography and apology for his right to be called a true philosopher emphasizes his consideration of medicine as philosophy, which we now deem to be two totally distinct disciplines, as two sides of the same coin. Although officially taking Socrates as his master, al-Razi is in fact following the footsteps of Galen, whose works he knew well, since most of them were translated into Arabic, the Arabic translation being in some cases the only surviving version. In 2003 Stephen Menn showed the importance of Galen’s own numerous and extended biobibliographical passages in his various works as the origin of a biobiblio-graphical genre leading to al-Razi’s text, as well as to intellectual autobiographies of Avicenna (*Ibn Sina) and *al-Ghazali, indeed right up to Descartes. In this brief but fascinating text written at the end of his life, al-Razi not only defends his character and his medico-philosophical endeavor but also offers an interesting normative ethic derived from God’s three basic attributes of intelligence, justice, and compassion. As he believes in transmigration he argues for vegetarianism and develops an environmental ethic.

Just as Galen freely criticized his predecessors, whether Empirics or Methodics or Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, al-Razi did not hesitate to criticize his own predecessors including Galen. In his Doubts on Galen written at the end of his life, al-Razi brings up “doubts” or, more accurately, criticisms relating both to Galen’s medicine and philosophy. These “doubts” are organized according to various works of Galen: (1) On demonstration; (2) On the views of Hippocrates and Plato; (3) On the elements according to Hippocrates; (4) On the Commentary on Hippocrates’ nature of the human being; (5) On mixtures; (6) On “al-Mayamir” (which deals with compound drugs); (7) On healing methods; (8) On painful members; (9) On causes and accidents; (10) A brief treatise on the art of medicine; (11) On aphorisms; (12) On the preservation of health; (13) On acute illnesses; and (14) An advanced treatise on the pulse. In the course of this enterprise he refers to many other works of Galen.

In his Spiritual Physick al-Razi bitterly criticizes Galen for affirming that the soul is mortal, and indicates that his favorite philosopher is Plato. Again, faithfully following Galen who had written a Commentary on the Medical Statements in the “Timaeus” in no fewer than four books, al-Razi might have written a commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, which he certainly knew at least through its Galenic summary that survived only in Arabic.

Galen had insisted on the importance of logic and al-Razi, always keen to highlight the parallel between medicine and philosophy, entitled an introductory book to medicine Isagoge as a match to Porphyry’s Isagoge to Aristotle’s Logic, which introduced the philosophy curriculum in both the Greek and the Arabic traditions.

As Galen had written several medical texts for beginners, al-Razi did not limit himself to his Isagoge but also penned a Kitab al-Murshid aw al-Fusul (Guide-book or Aphorisms), published by Iskandar in 1961 and translated into French as Guide du médecin nomade in 1980.

Original Contributions

Al-Razi’s main medical works show his originality and explain his fame, mainly as a physician in the East and in the West during Middle Ages. Under the name of Rhazes he makes an appearance in *Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Besides his medical textbook dedicated to al-Mansur in 903, translated into Latin by *Gerard of Cremona between 1150 and 1180, which enjoyed several Renaissance editions, we have his al-Hawi or Comprehensive Book on Medicine, a diary, which Faraj ben Salim, a Jewish physician, translated into Latin in 1279 in Naples under the title Continens. Iskandar describes it as “merely a commonplace book, an aide-mémoire, and a private record of the author’s comments and reflections on case histories of his patients and on medical books written from the time of Hippocrates down to his own time.” Such a description underrates its value as one of the first extensive studies in clinical medicine which al-Razi mined to prepare some of his published treatises. He even records clinical observations about his own illnesses. According to Iskandar, these medical files might have been arranged “in accordance with the accepted method of writing medical books, beginning with the head and working downwards to the toes.” This collection of notes was left to his sister and edited posthumously by his students. It should be distinguished from the Kitab al-Hawi in four books which al-Razi himself published shortly before his death.

His Treatise on the Small-pox and Measles remained of great importance up to the eighteenth century when it was twice translated into Latin and into Greek by the Byzantine Symeon Beth probably in the eleventh century.

This very incomplete listing is rather impressive but in his autobiographical The Book of the Philosophic Life, in which al-Razi refers to a few other medical texts, he proudly speaks of his large Summary or al-Jami’ al-Kabir, a medical encyclopedia, and the sacrifices he endured for it: “With respect to the latter, none of the people of the kingdom has surpassed me nor has anyone yet followed along in my steps or copied me…. In working on the large Summary, I spent fifteen years working night and day so weakening my eyesight and ruining the muscles in my hand that at this moment I am prevented from reading and writing. Though my situation is thus, I exert myself as much as I can not to abandon them and always have recourse to someone to read and write for me.”

In one of its parts, Kitab Saydalat al-tibb, or Pharmacology, al-Razi argues that pharmacy is simply an auxiliary of medicine, once again following Galen who distinguished physicians from pharmacists. According to al-Razi, pharmacists should be mainly concerned with purchasing pure kinds of drugs, storing them safely, and keeping them unadulterated. His work on pharmacology is completed with two Aqrabadhin or Formularies, i.e., recipes and advices on how to compound drugs, the al-Adwiya al-murakkaba and its summary, the Aqrabadhin.

Most of these works were also translated into Hebrew but at times from the Latin version.

Al-Razi saw himself as the new Galen in considering spiritual medicine or philosophy and bodily medicine as two branches of one and the same discipline as well as in his spirit of independence and dedication to scholarship.

See also Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Kitab al-Shukuk ‘Ala Jailinus. Edited by Mehdi Mohaghegh. Teheran: International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization of Kuala Lumpur, 1993.

Libro de la introducción al arte de la medicina o “Isagoge” (Kitab al-madkhal ila sina’at al-tibb). María de la Concepción Vásquez de Benito, ed. and trans. Salamanca: Instituto Hispano-Arabe de Cultura, 1979.

The Spiritual Physick of Razes. Translated by Arthur J. Arberry. London: John Murray, 1950.

La médecine spirituelle. Translated by Rémi Brague. Paris: Flammarion, 2003.

The Book of the Philosophic Life. Translated by Charles E. Butterworth. Interpretation (1993) 20: 227–236.

Guide du médecin nomade. Translated by El-Arbi Moubachir. Paris: Sindbad, 1980.

Secondary Sources

Druart, Thérèse-Anne. The Ethics of al-Razi (865–925). Medieval Philosophy and Theology (1997) 6: 47–71.

Iskandar, Albert Z. “The Medical Bibliography of al-Razi.” In Essays in Islamic Philosophy and Science. Edited by George F. Hourani. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975: pp. 41–46.

Menn, Stephen. “The Discourse on the Method and the Tradition of Intellectual Autobiography.” In Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy. Edited by Jon Miller and Brad Inwood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 141–191.

Stroumsa, Sarah. Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rawandi, Abu Bakr al-Razi, and Their Impact on Islamic Thought. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999.

THÉRÈSE-ANNE DRUART

Reason

Reason is used here in the sense of argument for preferring one option to another, especially with respect to claims about the universe and physical nature. In the Middle Ages the relation between religious faith and reason produced a dynamic tension that contributed to some of the most spectacular achievements of medieval culture.

In the Byzantine tradition scholars attempted to integrate Greek philosophy into their religious perspective by interpreting Greek philosophy as derived from prophetic wisdom, and *Plato as Moses translated into Greek. Byzantine philosophy was based on Neoplatonic metaphysics, which influenced interpretations of logic and mathematics. Scholars trace the origins of the *quadrivium to the Pythagoreans and the traditional list of the seven liberal arts back to the first century B.C.E., a scheme that was transmitted to the West by Cicero, Augustine, and *Boethius among others. As part of the liberal arts, mathematics was viewed as the branch most worthy of a free human being, and as the discipline that prepared students for metaphysics and theology.

After the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries C.E., Muslim scholars undertook a major program of translation that preserved and transmitted the great scientific and philosophical achievements of the Greeks. The ideal of Islamic education, however, was religious, leading to a division between religious sciences and their tools (linguistic sciences) and rational sciences (mathematics and philosophy). There was strong opposition in some circles to the study of philosophy, but in Spain there developed a vigorous program in defense of philosophy and its constructive relation to religion. *Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in the twelfth century represents the high point of this effort. His commentaries on Aristotle influenced Latin scholastics so pervasively that they referred to him routinely as “the Commentator.”

Scholars attribute the rise of Jewish philosophy—with the exception of Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 B.C.E.–c. 40 C.E.)—to the cultural revival of the tenth century in the Islamic East. For the next three hundred years Jewish philosophers wrote in Arabic. As Islamic centers in Europe declined, Hebrew became the principal language of philosophy and the sciences. Through contacts with Latin scholastic authors they enriched their earlier ideas, influencing Christian authors in turn and making original contributions to the mathematical disciplines. Students were introduced to higher philosophical studies after their elementary religious education. *Maimonides, for example, addressed his Guide for the Perplexed to religious believers. Rationalistic interpretations of religion in Jewish contexts served the practical purpose of supporting political and social customs and institutions.

Medieval scholars recognized the importance of logical reasoning. Arising out of the Hellenistic context in which Christianity was born, orthodox theologians tried to come to grips with the mysteries of the faith so as to defend belief from charges of irrationalism. Because revelation requires language, and language requires explication, most theologians recognized the need for philosophical training to safeguard fundamental doctrines from heretical interpretations. Medieval scholars shared the belief that humans are under an obligation to evaluate the arguments and evidence on which their conclusions are based. Underlying such a belief are assumptions that humans can discover and articulate rational grounds for their conclusions, and that the universe is ordered in a way that corresponds with the human mind. As most medieval thinkers in the Christian tradition conceived it, even faith involves intellectual assent to a proposition. The contrast between faith and reason rested, not on a difference between separate faculties, but on the difference between the evidence that moves the intellect to assent in an act of faith and the evidence that moves it to a strictly rational assent. Scholars who found this account unsatisfactory resorted to a theory of illumination, divine and natural, to explain the difference, and still others constructed an account that distinguished between revelation, reason, and experience as different sources of certain knowledge.

With respect to theories of perception, medieval scholars, for the most part, followed Aristotelian doctrine. The Aristotelian account is broadly reliabilist, believing that the senses provide correct qualitative information and that the most important deceptions and illusions are easily recognized and corrected. At the level of ordinary experience the Aristotelian exposition is a commonsense account, rejecting by virtue of its assumptions any possibility that the qualities that we perceive in our experience are partly the product of other hidden and more fundamental things. The Aristotelian account also regards mathematics as a valuable tool but one that abstracts from physical reality and is subject to logical and ontological constraints. For example, Aristotle maintained that circular and rectilinear motions are incomparable because “circular” and “rectilinear” belong to different kinds of things, just as the sharpness of a pencil and the sharpness of a musical tone are incomparable. Medieval scholars discussed and sometimes criticized Aristotle’s assumptions and conclusions, but they never entirely escaped the commonsense view, thus often underestimating the need for precise, quantitative descriptions of complex phenomena such as the motions of bodies. Common sense suggested that weight and resistance are factors in the motion of a falling body. Medieval critics of Aristotle’s laws of motion merely produced a more sophisticated mathematical analysis without any more quantified empirical data. The result, however much rooted in common sense and ordinary experience, was a decidedly rationalistic account of the physical universe. Natural philosophy defined its task as the understanding of nature based on a knowledge of causes, rarely relating the causal analysis to any precise empirical investigation. The Neoplatonic and Stoic traditions also reinforced the deeply held conviction that the universe is a harmonious order reflecting the wisdom, omniscience, and beneficence of its divine creator.

With respect to the theoretical bias of ancient *cosmology, there are exceptions, and these are instructive. The medical tradition was more empirical, criticizing the generalizations of philosophers that were based on few observations. In fact, Aristotle was careful to survey the opinions of his predecessors, believing that their views contained valuable insights which required critical assessment. In his biological works Aristotle also undertook his own empirical investigations. In other words, Aristotle himself was not as rationalistic as he became when commentators tended to use his treatises as authoritative textbooks.

In areas such as optics, *pharmacology, astronomy, statics, and kinematics there were important advances in mathematical and empirical analysis, though not always together. In optics, a mathematical-experimental analysis emerged in the fourteenth century that is attributable to the Greco-Arabic tradition and the philosophical interest in problems related to vision, optical illusions, and striking optical phenomena such as rainbows. In pharmacology, analysis of the relation between a geometric increase of a quality and an arithmetic increase in its effect may have contributed to understanding qualitative changes in a quantifiable way, the motion of a uniformly accelerated body, and other conceptual developments related to mass, momentum, and force. Probably because of the real difficulty in producing precise measurable data, however, such considerations remained theoretical. In astronomy, by the fifteenth century more and more experts became aware of several problems with Ptolemaic models and the accuracy of observational data. The fact that medieval scholars used mathematics to try to understand the subjects that they treated, whether physical phenomena or spiritual virtues, confirms their commitments to the power of rational analysis and to the conviction that reality at all levels, though dependent on God’s will, is intrinsically rational.

Aside from developments related to the university, there are many examples in the general culture of the medieval period that have a rationalistic character. The technologies of windpower and waterpower; the dramatic improvements in agricultural technology; spectacular achievements in architecture, painting, and sculpture; the networks of commercial fairs and towns; the maintenance of transportation routes; improvements in shipbuilding, canals, and horse transport; the gradual transition from a barter to a money economy along with the development of banking and insurance; all of the efforts at quantification and the maintaining of records and statistics—all attest the development of an ever more complex society accompanied by the creation of bureaucratic, educational, and legal institutions. In areas where theory and practice went hand in hand—for example, in medicine, music, architecture, and the like—we find increasingly sophisticated efforts to establish practice on sound rational, often mathematical, principles.

The superiority of theology and faith as directed toward salvation did not suppress other objects of study, each of which was seen to have a method appropriate to the investigation of that object. Theology was regarded as the queen of the sciences because it was thought to possess the greatest dignity, but the conclusions of other sciences cannot be extrapolated from the principles of theology nor from texts of the Bible. Whatever misgivings medieval scholars may have had about natural curiosity, they generally recognized the legitimacy of other disciplines and the practical need for education. The institutions that they created demonstrate their commitment to professional standards and competence, as well as to examination of competing and conflicting ideas and their reconciliation. In the disciplines of philosophy, theology, law, and medicine, medieval scholars developed and applied rigorous methods of analysis, and thereby contributed to both empirical and rationalistic approaches to nature, necessary conditions for the emergence of modern science.

See also Arabic numerals; Arnau de Vilanova; Astronomy, Islamic; Astronomy, Latin; Bradwardine, Thomas; Cathedral schools; Commercial arithmetic; Condemnation of 1277; Elements and qualities; Experiment, experimenta; Heytesbury, William of; God in Christianity; God in Islam; Latitude of forms; Logic; Nature: the structure of the physical world; Optics and catoptrics; Quadrivium; Religion and science; Scholasticism; Scientia; Swineshead, Richard; Translation movements; Universities

Bibliography

Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge. Actes du quatrième congrès international de philosophie médiévale, Montreal, 1967. Montreal: Institut d’Études Médiévales; Paris: J. Vrin, 1969.

Berman, Harold J. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Drake, Stillman. Medieval ratio Theory vs. compound Medicines in the Origins of Bradwardine’s Rule. Isis (1973) 64: 67–77.

Fakhry, Majid. Averroes (Ibn Rushd), His Life, Works, and Influence. Oxford: Oneworld, 2001.

Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Gilson, Étienne. Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938.

Grant, Edward. God and Reason in the Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Lindberg, David C. Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

McVaugh, Michael. Arnald of Villanova and Bradwardine’s Law. Isis (1967) 58: 56–64.

Murdoch, John E. “The Analytic Character of Late Medieval Learning: Natural Philosophy Without Nature.” In Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages. Edited by Lawrence D. Roberts. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982, pp. 171–213.

Wallace, William A. Causality and Scientific Explanation. 2 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972–1974.

ANDRÉ GODDU

Regimen Sanitatis

The regimen sanitatis (regimen of health) was a popular genre of medical literature in late-medieval Europe that advised readers how to maintain and regain their health through a lifestyle of moderation. It was rooted in the ancient Greek medical theories of *Hippocrates and *Galen, according to which health was the result of a harmonious balance of the four humors (bodily fluids) blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. In order to keep these humors in check, six areas, known as the sex res non naturales or six non-naturals, were considered of particular importance:

1. Aer (Air)

Topics discussed under this heading usually included the geographic and climatic conditions, air quality, the seasons, winds, location of a person’s house, change of location through travel, clothes, and perfumes, but also the air as a carrier of disease, such as the plague.

2. Cibus et Potus (Food and Drink)

Always regarded as the most important non-natural, advice on diet could range from general guidelines on nutrition regarding appetite, quantity, quality, order, and time of food consumption to dietetic lists of foodstuffs and their humoral qualities, as well as culinary recipes. Of the beverages, water and wine were the most prominent.

3. Motus et Quies (Exercise and Rest)

Covered under this heading were aspects such as the type, quality, quantity, speed, and intensity of physical activity, the effects of excessive and moderate exercise on the body, and the rhythm of physical activity and rest periods. Physical activity was understood to encompass not only work (e.g., hunting, fishing, sailing, construction, carpentry work, sewing), and sports (e.g., riding, running, wrestling), but also activities such as playing musical instruments or board games.

4. Somnus et Vigilia (Sleeping and Waking)

The rhythm of sleep and waking periods, their ideal lengths, and their relation to food consumption, digestion, and emotional well-being are some of the typical topics subsumed under this heading.

5. Repletio et Evacuatio (Repletion and Excretion)

Considered to be of equal importance to regulating the intake of food and drink was the proper management of the various excretions from urine and feces to winds, saliva, mucus, vomit, menstrual blood, and semen. Purging and bloodletting (phlebotomy) were also sometimes included in the list, as were coitus, baths, and massages.

6. Accidentia Animi (Emotions)

Seen as both physical and psychic phenomena, the emotions usually discussed under this heading were joy, anger, anxiety, fear, sadness, and shame. As in all other areas, moderation was the guiding principle when it came to emotions.

Early medieval regimens of health such as the Diaeta Theodori dealt mainly with food and drink; some, such as Anthimus’s De observatione ciborum, were addressed to rulers. Loosely grouped around the six non-naturals were the dietetic rules in the popular Secretum secretorum, and the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum. Despite its claim of being a letter written by Aristotle to his famous pupil Alexander the Great, the Secretum was probably an Arab compilation from c. 1000 C.E. The Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, written in verse, and containing material from the Secretum secretorum, was a later compilation, possibly from the thirteenth century, that may or may not have originated in *Salerno, Italy, seat of medieval Europe’s oldest medical school. By far the most popular European regimen, the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum grew between the fourteenth and the nineteenth century from three hundred sixty-four hexameter verses to over three thousand five hundred. It was translated into many European languages, including French, German, English, and Italian, and appeared in more than two hundred fifty printed editions, at least forty of which were incunabula. Medieval school medicine as taught in Salerno, Montpellier, Paris and elsewhere, was based on regimen literature that applied the structure of the six non-naturals much more rigidly. The texts used at Salerno were Latin translations of Arab-Islamic regimens contained, for instance, in the Isagoge of Johannitius (*Hunayn ibn Ishaq), and the Liber pantegni, an adaptation of the Kitab al-Malaki (Royal Book) of *Ali ibn Abbas al-Majusi (Haly Abbas) made by *Constantine the African in the eleventh century. The regimens in the Liber de medicina ad Almansorem of Rhazes, and the Canon medicinae of *Ibn Sina (Avicenna), translated by *Gerard of Cremona in *Toledo in the twelfth century, were part of the curriculum at the medical school of Montpellier. Other important Arab regimens that circulated in Europe in the later Middle Ages in Latin translation were Avicenna’s Cantica, the regimen in the Colliget of *Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the Regimen sanitatis of *Moses Maimonides, and Ibn Butlan’s *Tacuinum sanitatis. Beginning in the thirteenth century, European physicians compiled their own regimens from these Arab texts. Most of them were written in Latin and later translated into the vernacular. Among the best known were the Régime du corps of Aldobrandino da Siena (1256), the Summa conservationis et curationis of William of Saliceto (1275), the Liber de conservatione vitae humanae of *Bernard de Gordon (1308), the Regimen sanitatis ad inclytum regem Aragonum of *Arnau de Vilanova (1308), the Sanitatis conservator of Konrad von Eichstätt, the Regimen sanitatis of Magninus Mediolanensis (fourteenth century), and the fifteenth-century regimens De regimine sanitatis of *Ugo Benzi, the Libellus de sex rebus non naturalibus of Michele Savonarola, the Regimen of Heinrich von Laufenberg, the De Regimine Sanitatis Ad Laurentium Medicem of Antonio Benivieni, and the De triplici vita of Marsilio Ficino. Konrad von Eichstätt’s text, in particular, influenced a number of Latin and German regimens of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the Tractatus de regimine sanitatis of Arnold von Bamberg, the Ordnung der Gesundheit, the Regimen vite of (Pseudo-) Ortolf von Baierland, the Regel der Gesundheit of (Pseudo-) Arnau de Vilanova, and the Büchlein der Gesundheit.

In addition to the general regimens for healthy adults, physicians compiled special regimens for people thought to belong to the neutral state between sickness and health, such as pregnant and lactating women, infants, the elderly, and convalescents. *Consilia were regimens written for a specific, usually high-ranking personality. Other related genres of dietetic literature were regimens for the months of the year (regimen duodecim mensium) and the four seasons, and the prophylactic plague regimens. The impact of the regimen sanitatis on late-medieval medical practice and the lifestyles of millions of Europeans cannot be overestimated, as it extended the physicians’ sphere of influence from the sick to the healthy.

See also Medicine, practical; Medicine, theoretical

Bibliography

Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Bylebyl, Jerome J. “Galen on the Non-Natural Causes of Variation in the Pulse.” Bulletin of History of Medicine (1971) 45: 482–485.

Braekman, W. L. Studies on Alchemy, Diet, Medicine and Prognostication in Middle English. Brussels: Omirel UFSAL, 1986.

Collectio Salernitana: ossia documenti inediti e trattati di medicina appartenenti alla scuola medica salernitana. Edited by Salvatore de Renzi. 5 vols. Naples, 1852–1859. Reprint, Bologna: Forni Editore, 1967.

Copland, Robert, trans. Aristotle: Secretum secretorum. English. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1970.

Cummins, Patricia Willet. A Critical Edition of Le Regime Tresutile et Tresproufitable pour Conserver et Garder la Santé du Corps Humain. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1976.

Dols, Michael. Medieval Islamic Medicine: Ibn Ridwan’s Treatise “On the Prevention of Bodily Ills in Egypt.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Ficino, Marsilio. Three Books on Life. Edited and translated by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies in conjunction with the Renaissance Society of America, 1989.

García Ballester, Luis. “On the Origin of the ‘six non-natural things’ in Galen.” In Galen und das hellenistische Erbe. Verhandlungen des IV. Internationalen Galen-Symposions veranstaltet vom Institut für Geschichte der Medizin am Bereich Medizin (Charité) der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 18-20 September 1989. Edited by Jutta Kollesch and Diethard Nickel. Beihefte zu Sudhoffs Archiv. Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1993, 105–115.

Grant, Mark. Galen on Food and Diet. London: Routledge, 2000.

Green, Robert Montraville. A Translation of Galen’s Hygiene (De Sanitate Tuenda). Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1951.

Hagenmeyer, Christa. Das Regimen Sanitatis Konrads von Eichstätt: Quellen-Texte-Wirkungsgeschichte. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995.

Harington, Sir John. The School of Salernum: Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, The English Version. Salerno: Ente Provinciale Per Il Turismo, 1959.

Heikki, Mikkeli. Hygiene in the Early Modern Medical Tradition. Helsinki: Academia Scientarum Fennica, 1999.

Jansen-Sieben, Ria and Frank Daelemans. Voeding en geneeskunde / Alimentation et médicine. Brussels: Archief en Bibliotheekwezen in Belgie, 1993.

Jarcho, Saul. Galen’s Six Non-Naturals: A Bibliographic Note and Translation. Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1970) 44: 372–377.

Krueger, Haven C. Avicenna’s Poem on Medicine. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1963.

Liechtenhan, E., ed. and trans. Anthimi De observatione ciborum ad Theodoricum regem Francorum epistula. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1963.

Maimonides, Moses. Regimen sanitatis oder Diätetik für die Seele und den Körper. Edited and translated by Süssmann Muntner. Basel: Karger, 1966.

Milham, Mary Ella, ed. Platina: On Right Pleasure and Good Health: A Critical Edition and Translation of De honesta voluptate et valetudine. Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998.

Niebyl, Peter H. The Non-Naturals. Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1971) 45: 486–492.

Rather, Lelland J. The ‘Six Things Non-Natural’: A Note on the Origins and Fate of a Doctrine and a Phrase. Clio Medica (1968) 3: 337–347.

Weber, Shirley Howard, ed. Anthimus: De observatione ciborum. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1924.

Weiss-Adamson, Melitta. Medieval Dietetics: Food and Drink in Regimen Sanitatis Literature from 800 to 1400. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995.

MELITTA WEISS-ADAMSON

Regiomontanus, Johannes

Johannes Regiomontanus, also known as Johannes Müller of Königsberg, was born on June 6, 1436, in Königsberg (Franconia, Germany). He first emerges in the historical record as Joannes molitoris, “John of the miller.” The familiar version of his name derives from the Latin form of Königsberg. This miller’s son became the foremost mathematician and mathematical astronomer of fifteenth-century Europe, a sought-after astrologer, and an early printer specializing in the mathematical sciences.

After attending university in Leipzig for two years, Regiomontanus matriculated at Vienna at the age of thirteen. By this time, he had already computed a set of astronomical tables. During his Viennese years (1450–1461), he completed his M.A. degree, collaborated with his mentor *Georg Peuerbach on several astronomical and astrological projects, including observations of eclipses and comets (notably the one known today as Halley’s Comet), the construction of instruments, and the casting of horoscopes for the nearby court of Emperor Frederick III of Hapsburg.

Woodprint from Regiomontanus’ calendar showing lunar and solar eclipses for the years 1497 to 1504. Printed by Ratdolt in Venice. (Topham/Charles Walker)

During a diplomatic visit to Vienna (1460–1461), the Greek cardinal Bessarion encouraged Peuerbach to write an Epitome of *Ptolemy’s Almagest that would correct the problems he saw in George of Trebizond’s 1450 translation of and commentary on this work. At Peuerbach’s premature death in 1461, the work was only half finished.

Regiomontanus left Vienna for Italy with Bessarion, to whose extended household he belonged during his Italian years (1461–1465/1467?). Under this prominent patron, Regiomontanus completed the Epitome of the Almagest by 1462. In his hands, the Epitome became not only a summary, but also a critical examination of the Almagest and one of the best introductions to Ptolemy’s mathematical astronomy. In particular, Regiomontanus demonstrated the possibility of an eccentric alternative to the models for Mercury and Venus in Book Twelve of the Almagest. This alternative model—impossible according to Ptolemy—lies behind Nicholas Copernicus’s earliest notes about the arrangement and distances of the planetary spheres around the mean position of the Sun.

While in Bessarion’s entourage, Regiomontanus perfected his Greek, lectured on al-Farghani’s astronomy at the University of Padua, and read widely in his patron’s Greek library. He also joined Bessarion’s longstanding feud with the anti-Platonic rhetorician George of Trebizond. This controversy prompted Regiomontanus to write his longest expository work, the Defense of Theon against George of Trebizond, a book-by-book attack on Trebizond’s commentary on Ptolemy’s Almagest. The dispute was so acrimonious that, a generation later, Regiomontanus was (falsely) rumored to have been poisoned by Trebizond’s sons.

Contribution to Mathematics

Regiomontanus mastered medieval mathematics and went beyond it. His contributions include the formalization of trigonometry (On Triangles, later printed in Nuremberg in 1533) and the discovery of Diophantus’s work (unknown in Europe). In addition to his work in plane and spherical trigonometry and geometry, Regiomontanus’s correspondence shows interest in, among other things, perfect numbers, the five regular solids, and quadratic, cubic, and higher equations.

Regiomontanus was a painstaking critic of problems in contemporary astronomy, from the teaching of the subject to fundamental matters of theory and observation. In his Disputationes contra deliramenta cremonensia, he attacked a widely used university text, the thirteenth-century Theorica planetarum communis attributed to *Gerard of Cremona. In its stead, he promoted Peuerbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum. In astronomical theory, he criticized the mismatch between theory and observation in predictions of planetary position and size (e.g., lunar diameter). In addition, he hoped to reform astronomy so that its models would both be physically coherent and predict planetary positions successfully. Although he admired Ptolemy’s Almagest, Regiomontanus saw it as a work relying on two-dimensional devices that reflected the Greek astronomer’s concern for predictions and his neglect of physical considerations. Regiomontanus claimed that a proper astronomy should compromise neither predictions nor physical coherence. For him this meant a mathematical astronomy based on concentric spheres rather than the eccentrics and epicycles of Ptolemy’s Almagest. Despite the problems with this project (e.g., concentric spheres do not allow variation in planetary distance), Regiomontanus continued to hope that he could find a concentric physical astronomy that would match or exceed the predictive power of Ptolemy’s work. While he sketched concentric-sphere models only for the Sun and Moon in 1460, his hopes for a full-scale astronomy along these lines still reverberate in the manuscript of his Defense of Theon against George of Trebizond, which he was revising in the 1470s.

From 1467 to 1471 Regiomontanus served as astrologer to the court of King Matthias Corvinus in Buda, Hungary. In 1471 he moved to Nuremberg, where he established an instrument shop and a printing press. He announced plans to print forty-five classical, medieval, and contemporary books primarily in mathematics, astronomy, optics, music, and astrology. His printing advertisement included works ranging from Euclid’s Elements to his own Defense of Theon. Only nine editions appeared, including Peuerbach’s New Theories of the Planets (c. 1472), his own four-hundred-page Ephemerides (the first tables of daily planetary positions), and his German and Latin calendars, which included small, moveable, brass arms. Beyond their new content, these works solved the technical problems involved in, and inaugurated, the printing of astronomical diagrams and tables of numbers. Regiomontanus’s concern for the authentic meaning of texts inspired him to emend the manuscripts that he expected to print, laying the groundwork for many later fifteenth- and sixteenth-century editions. He continued to make celestial observations with the Nuremberg patrician Bernhard Walther.

Clearly, Regiomontanus was skilled with his hands and in the use of materials. He had made an astrolabe for Bessarion in 1462, and his Nuremberg workshop was preparing an astrarium (astronomical clock) c. 1474. Neither this instrument nor his full printing program would come to fruition, but his technical skills fueled the legend according to which he had built, like Archytas, a mechanical fly. In 1475, for consultations about calendar reform, Regiomontanus traveled to Rome, where he died at age forty, probably of plague, on July 6, 1476.

Regiomontanus’s unfinished printing program lived on in the output of other presses, most notably those of Erhard Ratdolt (Venice and Augsburg) in the 1480s, and of Johannes Schöner (Vienna) and Petreius (Nuremberg) in the early sixteenth century.

See also Astronomy, Latin; Theorica planetarum

Bibliography

Hughes, Barnabas. Regiomontanus on Triangles. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967.

Rose, Paul L. The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics from Petrarch to Galileo. Geneva: Droz, 1973.

Shank, Michael H. Regiomontanus on Ptolemy, Physical Orbs, and Astronomical Fictionalism: Goldsteinian Themes in the “Defense of Theon against George of Trebizond.” Perspectives on Science (2002) 10: 179–207.

Swerdlow, Noel. “Regiomontanus on the Critical Problems of Astronomy.” In Nature, Experiment and the Sciences. Edited by Trevor Levere and William Shea. Boston/Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990, pp. 165–195.

———. Science and Humanism in the Renaissance: Regiomontanus’s Oration on the Dignity and Utility of the Mathematical Sciences. In World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science. Edited by Paul Horwich. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 131–168.

———. “Astronomy in the Renaissance.” In Astronomy Before the Telescope. Edited by Christopher Walker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, pp. 187–230.

———. Regiomontanus’s Concentric-Sphere Models for the Sun and Moon. Journal for the History of Astronomy (1999) 30: 1–23.

Zinner, Ernst. Leben und Wirken des Joh. Müller von Königsberg genannt Regiomontanus. 2nd ed. Osnabrück: Otto Zeller Verlag, 1968. Translated by Ezra Brown, Regiomontanus: His Life and Work. Amsterdam: North Holland, 1990.

MICHAEL H. SHANK

Religion and Science

The historical relationship between religion and science is surely obscure. For all that, it has been highly, sometimes acrimoniously, debated. As the twenty-first century begins, the United States has witnessed a furious political row over the theory of evolution and what is sometimes advanced as its alternative, creationism. The question comes down to who has the right to decide what appears in textbooks for public-schools. On one side stand education professionals and most biologists, speaking on behalf of “science”; on the other fundamentalist Christian churches and defenders of “family values,” speaking for “religion” and ultimately in the name of God. In this spectacle, science and religion find themselves directly opposed, contesting the authority to determine “truth” and thus dictate what children learn.

Although many observers, both scholars and laity, would protest that the antithesis in the American standoff is overdrawn, perhaps even factitious—the result of a category mistake pitting religion against science as two varieties of a uniform genus of knowledge simply conceived—much the same oppositional view is in fact enshrined in the standard historical narrative of the rise of modern natural science. Here Galileo plays the archetypal role of “scientist,” champion of a truth set free from revelation, while the Roman inquisitors do duty for partisans of the other side, insisting on the unrestricted right of “religion” to set the set the terms for education and cognition—in this case, of course, “religion” as mediated by the church. By this account, “science” as we know it in the modern world—and which most of the story’s tellers take as the model for knowledge of the truth—appeared only when the competing claims of “religion” were beaten back, tamed by intrepid seekers of truth who took Galileo’s censuring not as cause for silence but instead heroic resistance. In a Manichaean universe such as this, science and religion can coexist only when one accepts the epistemic hegemony of the other.

It is a pity that such a vision so dominates both popular and learned discourse in our world. Examined without prejudice, the history of science and religion in the Middle Ages has a vastly more complex, at times even entirely antithetical, story to tell. We can take steps toward a modest survey of this history by agreeing at the outset that there are two fundamental questions to be asked to get the relation between religion and science straight. The first is: how has religion affected the shape or content of science? The second reverses the terms: how has science exercised an influence on religion?

Religion in the Middle Ages can be said to have exercised an influence on scientific knowledge either materially, affecting its content and extent, or more formally, shaping the way it was viewed and approached. In the early Middle Ages, for example, especially in the golden years of monasticism from the eighth to the tenth century, religion provided the material grounds for much of what we would take as the scientific components of Latin learning. By creating the need for an accurate grasp of the lunar calendar, the round of monastic liturgy promoted an interest in astronomy and considerable application to the mathematics required to calculate the motions of heavenly bodies and thus establish precise dates and times, a discipline referred to in Latin revealingly as “computus.” The biblical commentator and church historian of eighth-century England, *Bede, was by no means exceptional for having authored important studies on chronology and the determination of dates. Much later in the Middle Ages, university theologians’ interests in puzzles about potentially quantifiable qualities such as “grace” or “virtue” opened the door in their work for technical discussions again of a highly mathematical nature about numerical progressions and the measurement of continuities, subjects of investigation medievalists recognize under the heading “intension and remission of forms.” Although in this latter case theologians may not deserve primary credit for sustaining innovative thought—for arts masters were interested as well—they nonetheless made great material contributions to it. Negatively speaking, on the other hand, it would seem that the time and intellectual energy devoted to matters of liturgy, religious devotion and biblical commentary in the monastic regime—for long stretches of the Middle Ages the principal locus of learned activity—precluded any serious attention to subjects and activities we would consider scientific. The stereotype of medieval religion crowding out scientific concerns must surely derive from this apparent grain of truth.

On the formal side of the ledger, religion can likewise be pictured as bearing on science in both positive and negative ways. Contrary to widespread current assumptions, religious thought through most of the high Middle Ages, once monasticism had lost its near monopoly in intellectual affairs, encouraged what we would take to be independent and self-sustaining currents of scientific inquiry. The humanism of twelfth-century theology—which the historian Chenu associated with a revitalizing “light from the East”—inspired a more general naturalism, an interest in “nature” as an object of study in itself, that underlay the considerable achievements of thinkers of that time in cosmology and much of natural philosophy. Likewise the demands of thirteenth-century *Scholasticism drew even masters of theology into realms of speculation that we would consider more scientific than religious, again most often fields corresponding to modern physics, biology, and chemistry. From the “Hexaëmeron” commentaries of Robert Grosseteste to the encyclopedic compendia of *Albertus Magnus, much work produced by high-medieval theologians appears fundamentally scientific to modern eyes. Yet intellectual sensibilities derived from religious sentiment could also inhibit scientific inquiry, especially when regarded as done for science’s sake alone. Thirteenth-century warnings against “vain curiosity,” issued periodically by theologians from the first decades to the last, set limits within university walls on science conducted with a sense of autonomy or even internal coherency of plan. In fourteenth-century Italy, humanists such as Petrarch inveighed against the worthless natural philosophy engendered by scholastic theological disputes, prioritizing instead both moral and devotional speculation. The almost anti-scientific humor historians have sometimes detected in early Renaissance thought would seem in this light a sign of religion’s power to narrow the bounds of the intellectual world.

Even more purely formal was the apparent power of religious thinking to determine the way science was pursued or understood. Returning to twelfth-century theological preoccupation with creation as manifested in “nature,” or advancing to fifteenth-century humanists’ fascination with the legacy of classical and Hellenistic Greece as evident in the Florentine Marsilio Ficino—surely part of a greatly religious if non-scholastic cultural milieu—we see the repeated emergence of an intellectual idealism affecting more arenas of learning than religion alone. The so-called “Platonism” of twelfth-century natural science can thus be viewed in large part as a “scientific” effect of religious intellectual commitments, and so, too, the Platonizing mathematicism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, an outgrowth of Florentine humanism Thomas Kuhn put forth as formative on Copernicus and Copernican science.

Less formal but equally determinative would be the impact of religion on science proposed in the now legendary thesis of Pierre Duhem. In this account, late-thirteenth-century *Aristotelianism was stopped in its tracks by theological concerns about divine omnipotence, creation, and the nature of the soul, eventuating in the famous Parisian *Condemnation of 1277. The unintended result was a turn among those interested in science to new lines of speculation free of Aristotle’s commitments to the absolute character of place, for instance, or the cosmic hierarchizing of the laws of motion. For those agreeing with Duhem, the seeds of a modern universe, where the Earth need not be at the center and all bodies need not move towards a natural place, were planted by this religious, emphatically non-scientific, act of from the high Middle Ages. Almost as if by accident, religion should thereby be credited with having deflected the course of science.

But what about the alternative question: how might science have affected religion? To be sure, modern sensibilities, and thus historians’ investigations, have been less inclined to consider the relationship from this perspective. Yet medievalists have sometimes found it to be a productive approach. Here, the formal link between science and religion has attracted the greater attention. Late medieval debates about whether theology constituted a science, and especially thirteenth-century efforts to fashion a scholastic theology that was truly scientific, are pointed to again and again as examples of how modes of thinking that originated in the natural sciences spilled over into the religious arena, particularly among the very learned. It is now standard to affirm that as the prestige of Aristotle’s writings grew in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, scholars at the newly emergent *universities fell increasingly under the influence of an Aristotelianizing epistemology anchored to an apodictic model of science. So far as natural science was concerned, masters in the schools of arts appealed to this model as methodological endorsement for efforts to work from Aristotle’s foundations to fill in the substance of the fields already delineated in his corpus of scientific works. Eventually, theologians, too, felt pressured to conform to the same cognitive ideal. The result was, if not theology as science—though many in theology at mid-thirteenth century believed that this was what they ought to produce—at least theology expounded according to the terms of scientific discussion. The product was Scholasticism in paradigmatic form, the sort epitomized in the great summa of Thomas Aquinas or that attributed to Alexander of Hales. In this view, theology was what it was in the high Middle Ages because of the allure of Aristotle’s view of the natural sciences.

The material influence of science on religion, if less spectacular, has nevertheless not been overlooked. Again, the high Middle Ages are seen as providing the most fertile ground. Indeed, the rise of a scholastic theology in the thirteenth century would appear to constitute the enabling condition. For if religious speculation was to be held to the discursive standards of natural philosophy, perhaps the natural sciences would themselves have to furnish crucial elements for a theologian’s explication of the realities entailed by Christian faith. Formal doctrines such as transubstantiation of the host, originating in the thirteenth century, are perhaps best understood as theological expressions of the natural scientific learning of the day.

In the end, however, after all consideration of deep functional connections between religion and science as evidenced in the historical development of both, it is hard not to return to where we began, with a simple intuition that, when all is said and done, religion tends to stand in science’s way. Hence the perennial attraction of the example of Galileo. In a cultural world where both science and religion can lay claim to authority, is it not likely that knowledge generated in one sphere will, on occasion, be seen as substantively in conflict with knowledge generated in the other? And if so, will not one sphere be forced to give way, science to religion in Galileo’s case, religion to science during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment? Scientific thinkers, in both the medieval and the modern world, have often been led by such reasoning to worry about the autonomy of speculation in their field. Echoing Duhem, we can note, for example, attempts in the thirteenth century by theologians—as in the Condemnation of 1277—to impose limits on questions of natural philosophy, such as the eternity of the world, as debated in the schools of arts.

At this point, one is tempted to reflect once more on the late-medieval run-up to modern science. Among historians it is common to say that calls for a scientific theology in the thirteenth century, followed by conflicts surrounding the condemnations at century’s end, led to a progressive distancing of the intellectual domains of theology and natural science in the fourteenth century. In the eyes of some interpreters, the upshot was a liberation of science. Thus the speculations of *John Buridan and *Nicole Oresme on geocentrism or the nature of motion, both in some way laying the groundwork for modern science. For others, however, there finally resulted an estrangement of theology from science so great that theologians no longer felt compelled to accommodate the ideas of contemporary scientists at all. The almost inevitable outcome, from this perspective, was Galileo’s conviction for heresy. So far, advocates of the two approaches have found little common ground. Perhaps that will remain the case until we develop more subtle understandings of the sociology of knowledge.

See also God in Christianity; Lombard, Peter; Reason; Scholasticism; Scientia

Bibliography

Chenu, Marie-Dominique. La théologie au douzième siècle. 2nd edition. Paris: J. Vrin, 1966. (Partial translation: Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.)

Eastwood, Bruce S. Medieval Empiricism. The Case of Grosseteste’s Optics. Speculum (1968) 43: 306–321.

Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Grant, Edward. “Science and Theology in the Middle Ages.” In God and Nature. Historical Essays. Edited by David C. Lindberg and R.L. Numbers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957.

Marrone, Steven P. The Light of Thy Countenance. Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2001.

Murdoch, John E. “Pierre Duhem and the History of Late Medieval Science and Philosophy in the Latin West.” In Gli studi di filosofia medievale fra otto e novecento. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1991.

Tambiah, Stanley J. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

STEVEN P. MARRONE

Richard of Middleton

A Franciscan theologian probably of English origin (c. 1249–1302), Richard of Middleton (Richardus de Mediavilla) studied at Paris, where he was regent master (professor) of the Franciscan School from 1284 to 1287. His most important works, contained in many manuscripts and printed in the sixteenth century, are a commentary on the Sentences by *Peter Lombard and eighty Quodlibetal Questions. Most of his Disputed Questions are still unpublished. Richard enjoyed great fame in schools for centuries.

Historians basically agree on Richard of Middleton’s doctrinal position: he is rooted in the Franciscan tradition (especially the work of Bonaventure), although his views on philosophical and theological matters are closer to those of *Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent, and he appears to have considerably assimilated *Aristotle’s thought. In matters regarding physics and *cosmology, to safeguard divine almightiness and inspired to some degree by the *Condemnation of 1277, Richard made various corrections to the peripatetic view. Although his contribution to medieval thought is important, it is generally agreed to have had less significance than that attributed to it by Pierre Duhem (1861–1916), who described Richard as a forerunner of fourteenth-century or even of modern science.

Richard showed great interest in subjects taken from experience, particularly matters of natural philosophy. Discussing the epistemological foundations of theology, he certainly did not put forward an original theory of *scientia, in the Aristotelian meaning of the term. However, what is innovative and methodologically important in his work is the recognition that even some qualities, such as charity, can increase and decrease and therefore are measurable as a continuum: Although they have no mass quantity, they have a force quantity (*latitude of forms). Also various substantial forms, such as the *elements, “receive the more and the less.”

Richard’s interest in the quantitative aspects of scientific knowledge is confirmed by the attention he devoted to the question of the infinite. In his opinion, any mathematical quantity can be divided endlessly, but a physical quantity can be divided endlessly only by God: no created power could maintain in being parts of fire or air which are so small that they cannot act. However, even the result of any division performed by God would only be potentially infinite: any actual infinity is excluded in creatures.

Richard’s argument, like Bonaventure’s, was against the possibility of creation ab aeterno. However, this does not invalidate the possibility, completely excluded by the Aristotelian cosmology, of empty space, provided that it is finite: God could produce a vacuum by destroying any creature between the heaven and the earth. In defense of that view, Richard explicitly referred to the syllabus of Parisian bishop Stephen Tempier, and he did so again when he defended, against Aristotle (De coelo) and *Plato (Timaeus), the possibility that God may produce other worlds, by “world” meaning not the totality of creatures, but the things as a whole contained below a surface which is not contained in other surfaces. To explain the movement, he therefore combined the theory of natural places with an acknowledgement of the role of distance: Any body consisting of earth would naturally tend not to the center of its world but to the center of the world in which it was placed.

Richard showed greater interest than many theologians of his time in several matters of biology and theoretical medicine. However, while the zoological corpus and the Parva naturalia of Aristotle are used through precise quotations, his references to various medical theories of the tradition influenced by *Hippocrates and *Galen (spirits, humors, complexions, etc.) seem rather generic. In quite a few quodlibetal questions (on the imagination’s capacity to change the body, on the premonitory value of dreams, and on the possibility of suggestion and telepathic communication), a widely used source is the De anima of Avicenna (*Ibn Sina), although it was in part contested by Richard since it goes against faith.

Once again, Richard’s attitude toward Aristotelian doctrine appears ambivalent. He approved of the embryological theory of the gradual hominization in support of the theory of the plurality of forms in man, championed by Richard against Thomas Aquinas (treatise De gradu formarum). On the contrary, as regards the principles of human *generation, which is an important issue in the Sentences for the doctrine of the hereditary sin and for Christology, Richard corrected the Philosopher, interpreting him in the light of Avicenna’s theory (De animalibus): in accordance with the point of view of physicians, a certain active role is also assigned to the “female seed” in the generative process.

See also Medicine, theoretical; Religion and science

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Richardus de Mediavilla. Super quatuor Libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi quaestiones subtilissimae (Questions on the Four Books of Peter Lombard’s Sentences), Quodlibeta quaestiones octuaginta (Eighty Quodlibetal Questions). 4 vols. Brescia, 1591; repr. Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1963.

———. Quaestio de gradu formarum (A Question on the Hierarchy of Forms), ed. R. Zavalloni, Richard de Mediavilla et la controverse sur la pluralité des formes. Textes inédits et étude critique. Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1951, 35–169.

Secondary Sources

Cova, Luciano. Originale peccatum e concupiscentia in Riccardo di Mediavilla: vizio ereditario e sessualità nell’antropologia teologica del XIII secolo. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1984.

Cross, Richard. “Richard of Middleton.” In A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages. Edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia and Timoth Noone. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 573–578.

Duhem, Pierre. Le Système du monde. Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic. 10 vols. Paris: Hermann, 1913–1959.

Hocedez, Edgar. Richard de Middleton: sa vie, ses oeuvres, sa doctrine. Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, and Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, Édouard Champion, 1925.

LUCIANO COVA

Richard Rufus of Cornwall

According to his younger contemporary *Roger Bacon, Richard Rufus of Cornwall was a favorite of the “foolish multitude,” considered mad by the wise and censured at Paris when he lectured on theology there toward the end of his life. According to the Franciscan chronicler Thomas of Eccleston, the same Parisian lectures earned Rufus the renown of a “great and admirable philosopher.”

Richard entered the Franciscan Order in 1238 as a Parisian master of arts. As a bachelor of theology, he lectured at Oxford around 1250 and in Paris around 1253, becoming that university’s fifth Franciscan regent master of theology about three years later. He probably died not long after November 1259, when he inherited a habit and a copy of the canonical epistles.

As a Parisian master of arts before 1238 Rufus was one of the first to teach the scientific works of Aristotle, an established part of the undergraduate curriculum by 1255 but at the time still the object of suspicion and the subject of a ban on instruction at the university of Paris as late as 1231. His commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Physics, De generatione et corruptione, and De anima derived at least in part from his classroom lectures, are among the earliest works of this kind to survive from the Latin West. At Oxford, Rufus was the first bachelor of theology to lecture on *Peter Lombard’s Sentences, following Richard Fishacre who lectured on Lombard as a master of theology.

As a student of Aristotelian natural philosophy Rufus was in the first instance a commentator on Aristotelian texts, examining and resolving doubts raised by the texts at hand.

For Rufus following Aristotle, “science” (scientia) was knowledge derived from logical demonstration. Aristotle was an eminently logical writer, and the elucidation of the deductive part of his thought was no small part of the commentator’s task. At the same time, however, Rufus was fully prepared to compare his reading of Aristotle with the testimony of experience, as with the demands of Christian belief, and willing, where necessary, to revise Aristotle’s claims, taking a questioning, critical approach which set an agenda for his successors.

Physics

Rufus’s treatment of the problem of projectile motion in Book Eight of the Physics offers a good example of his intellectual methods, as well as one which was to be influential in the later development of medieval impetus theory. According to Aristotle’s understanding, motion involves contact between a moving body and something that moves it; physical bodies do not move in the absence of a distinct motor moving them. Yet a ball continues to move in the direction it is thrown after it leaves the hand of the thrower, and an arrow in the direction it is shot after it leaves the bow: what, then, accounts for this motion? On Aristotle’s own account, as Rufus presents it—following the interpretation of Aristotle’s great Arabic commentator Averroes (*Ibn Rushd)—it is the medium, the air or water through which the projectile passes, which moves it along. Because of their flexibility and divisibility, air and water have the special property of being able to pass on the motion they have received from the initial mover even when they themselves have ceased to be moved, albeit with gradually decreasing force as one part of air or water moves the next.

For Rufus, however, this is a piece of special pleading consistent neither with Aristotelian principles nor with the observable phenomena. To the extent that this solution simply displaces the problem of finding a mover from the projectile to the medium, Rufus is able to defend (or interpret) Aristotle by means of an appeal to another Aristotelian fundamental, the composition of all natural bodies by form and matter. A projector throwing a ball divides the air in an unnatural or violent way by his motion, separating and expanding its parts to a greater extent than is compatible with the form of air (which governs, among other things, the density and internal distribution of its matter). The separated parts do not return initially to their proper position but are more condensed than is compatible with their form. Each successive compression and expansion of the parts of the air distend it less until the parts come to rest at their proper place. The successive motion of the parts before they come to rest in the proper position produces a motion that is transmitted to the ball without the need to postulate an additional mover. It is, Rufus says, “as we see in the string of a lyre pulled out of its place.”

Still, Rufus goes on to point out, this cannot be a sufficient explanation—even if, as he also notes, it may have been enough for Aristotle’s immediate purposes. Two projectiles can pass one another in the same medium going in different directions, and a stone is more easily thrown than a ball of feathers of the same size; something other than the medium and its motion, therefore, must be responsible for these different results. This Rufus characterizes as an “impression” made by the thrower on the thing thrown, rearranging its parts in a way similar to the rearrangement of the parts of the medium already described. Heavier things receive a stronger impression because they offer greater resistance, having a greater natural inclination to be elsewhere (that is, to fall downward), and violence, by definition, is proportional to resistance.

Psychology

In his commentary on Aristotle’s De anima Rufus does not pursue this account, although its elements can be found: there are impressions received (2.12.Q4), effects caused by rearrangement of parts (2.10.Q1), and the persistence of motion in compressed media (3.12.E2). Whereas in the Physics Rufus sought to supplement Aristotle’s account, in his psychology Rufus eventually departs deliberately from Aristotle’s explanation of apprehension. Rufus prefers Augustine’s account of how species in our organs of perception produce sensation in the soul. Rather than acting directly on the soul, such species excite the soul, which responds to that stimulation by considering within itself a similitude of that species (2.12.Q2). In his De anima commentary, Rufus seeks to support this account of excitation by reference to the Aristotle’s analogy between sensation and the impression made on wax by a signet ring: nothing material is transmitted. In his Contra Averroem 1, Rufus makes it explicit that the species received are not efficient causes of sensation, and in his last lectures on Aristotelian natural philosophy, he not only explicitly accepts Augustine’s account but also asks whether Aristotle’s claim that sensible objects move the soul is deceptive or can be salvaged.

On the whole, however, Rufus taught his students Aristotelian psychology: species of colors and other sensible qualities found in external objects are received by our five particular external senses, which are linked to what Aristotelians call a “common sense” that apprehends motion, rest, and other common sensibles. Our ability to receive, retain, and reproduce sensible images or phantasms is a function of imagination or memory. Within the intellect, the “possible intellect” that responds to sensation is distinguished from the “agent intellect” that abstracts sensible forms making them accessible to the “possible intellect.” Absent from Rufus’s account is the estimative faculty postulated by Avicenna (*Ibn Sina) and Arab psychologists to account for flight or pursuit responses.

Chemistry

For Rufus and other medieval Aristotelians everything in the external world is ultimately comprised of four elements—earth, water, air, and fire. Even the simple body fire contains within it the other three elements subsisting in essential potential. When the elements combine and mix with each other to produce complex substances, the substantial change is incomplete, since the ingredients from which they are made persist in accidental (proximate) potential, rather than essential (remote) potential.

Mixture is the process that combines ingredients. We call the product of elemental mixture “mixts” (from the Latin mixtum) rather than “mixtures” to distinguish product from process.

The elements combine to produce like parted substances or homoeomeries. Animated homoeomeries or mixts such as flesh, blood, bone, and bile are combined to produce organs such as the head, heart, and liver, the hetereomerous parts of plants and animals; inanimate homeomeries such as sulfur and mercury combine in various proportions to produce different metals.

Rufus explains substantial change as a function of form and ultimate matter. Ultimate matter includes not only prime matter but also contrary forms existing in potential (Phys. 2.2.1). In the case of elemental change from fire to air, air to water, and so on, the underlying matter is informed only by the most general form. The matter underlying homoeomerous parts, such as bone, blood or bile, are the elements themselves. More complex mixtures combine ingredients that are themselves mixts. Silver and gold, for example, are produced when their substantial form actualizes matter having the correct proportions of mercury and sulfur. Animals are characterized by two kinds of forms, their substantial form—humanity, for example—and the form of the body that informs the four elements in mixts such as flesh or blood (Phys. 2.5.2).

Since the elements in a primary mixt persist in proximate potential, such that only their combination with elements having contrary qualities prevents them from actualizing their distinctive elemental qualities, they can reemerge from the mixt when it breaks down. The possibility that elements can be recovered from a mixt is one of six criteria for an Aristotelian mixture. In addition, to (1) Recoverability, the others are as follows: (2) Uniformity: Every part of a mixt is the same; it has the same ingredients in the same proportion; (3) Potentiality: Ingredients exist potentially in the mixt; (4) Equilibrium: The powers of the mixable bodies balance each other; (5) Alteration: Mixture involves the alteration of the qualities of the ingredients over time. Since their interaction is reciprocal, ingredients must share the same kind of matter; (6) Incompleteness: The change involved in mixture is not total.

These criteria serve to distinguish mixture from generation and corruption, juxtaposition, augmentation, and alteration.

Rufus’s distinctive contribution to the theory of Aristotelian mixture is his account of the state of the elements within the mixt: the claim that they are in accidental or proximate potential. Rufus refers to embedded forms in accidental potential as matter’s active potentials. He describes matter that includes an active potential to emerge into actuality in the right conditions of heat and humidity as a “necessity.”

Nutrition is another form of incomplete change, in which food flows in and becomes flesh—or bone, or bile, etc.—as it is absorbed, but also deteriorates and flows out and is eliminated. Aristotle characterizes nutrition by three criteria. It must be the result of the addition of something external; the internal flesh which is nourished must persist through the change, and every part of flesh must be nourished. These criteria serve to distinguish nutrition from qualitative change, generation, and corruption.

The problem with these criteria is that jointly they seem to imply one of the following: that there is a void into which food flows as it is absorbed; that food and flesh must coexist in the same place, or that only some parts of the flesh grow. Aristotle’s solution is to distinguish between flesh by species and flesh by matter. Rufus accepts this distinction but rejects what he takes to be Aristotle’s deployment of his distinction to solve the problem. Instead Rufus solves this problem by suggesting that after the food loses its form, its matter is subsumed under flesh by matter, so that they both occupy the same place. Flesh by species together with flesh by matter including active potentials that enable it to grow inform the advening matter of the food to produce new flesh. Since the unity thus achieved is imperfect, and the matter of the food that has become flesh retains its non-fleshy potentials, the fleshy mixture partly breaks down, and some of the matter absorbed from food is eliminated and flows out.

Conclusion

Richard Rufus taught physics, psychology, and chemistry from Aristotelian texts and responded critically and creatively to problems in Aristotelian science. As a theologian, he continued to address many of the same problems—including, for example, a discussion of nutrition in answering the question what is true humanity. The excitement of his approach helps to explain the rapid introduction of Aristotelian natural philosophy into the curriculum. He was deeply indebted to Averroes from whom he took not only an interpretative approach to Aristotle but also a set of important issues. By contrast, Rufus seems deliberately to have avoided positions stated by Avicenna, which may account in part for Roger Bacon’s hostility since Bacon was committed to defending Avicenna as the greatest authority on Aristotelian philosophy.

Like Bacon, Rufus was strongly influenced by *Robert Grossesteste and concerned about the consistency of Aristotelian natural philosophy with Christian theology. Unlike Bacon, however, Rufus adopted from Grosseteste not only a special regard for knowledge acquired by experience, but also a willingness to reject Aristotle’s views. Rufus took this step decades before Bacon was willing to do so, so the lectures they gave at Paris before 1250 are quite different even if often closely related. Those lectures exercised considerable influence on the subsequent commentary tradition; the difference in their approach explains in part the richness of the scholastic tradition.

See also Cosmology; Elements and qualities; Hylomorphism; Impetus; Nature: diverse medieval interpretations; Psychology; Scholasticism; Scientia; Universities

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Brewer, J. S., ed. Monumenta franciscana; scilicet, I. Thomas de Eccleston de adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam; II. Adae de Marisco epistolae; III. Registrum fratrum minorum Londoniae. Rerum britannicarum medii aevi scriptores, or Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages (Rolls Series), vol. 4. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858.

Denifle, Henricus, and Aemilius Chatelain, eds. Chartularium universitatis parisiensis. Vol. 1, Ab anno MCC usque ad annum MCCLXXXVI. Paris: Ex typis fratrum Delalain, 1889.

Richard Rufus of Cornwall. [Pseudo-Peter of Spain]. Expositio libri De anima. In Pedro Hispano, Obras filos—ficas, vol. 3. Edited by Manuel Alonso. Instituto de Filosofía “Luis Vives,” Serie A, no. 4. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cient’ficas, 1952.

———. In Physicam Aristotelis. Edited by Rega Wood. Auctores britannici medii aevi, no. 16. Oxford: For the British Academy, by Oxford University Press, 2003.

Roger Bacon. Compendium of the Study of Theology. Edited and translated by Thomas S. Maloney. Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. Albert Zimmermann, vol. 20. New York: E. J. Brill, 1988.

Thomas of Eccleston. Tractatus de adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam. Edited by A. G. Little. Tout Memorial Publication Fund. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1951.

Secondary Sources

Little, A. G. The Franciscan School at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century. Archivum franciscanum historicum (1926) 19: 803–874.

Raedts, Peter. Richard Rufus of Cornwall and the Tradition of Oxford Theology. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

Weisberg, Michael, and Rega Wood. Richard Rufus’s Theory of Mixture: A Medieval Explanation of Chemical Combination. In Chemical Explanation: Characteristics, Development, Autonomy, ed. Joseph E. Earley, Sr. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 988. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 2003, 282-292.

Wood, Rega. Richard Rufus of Cornwall and Aristotle’s Physics. Franciscan Studies (1992) 52: 247–281.

———. Richard Rufus of Cornwall on Creation: The Reception of Aristotelian Physics in the West. Medieval Philosophy and Theology (1992) 2: 1–30.

———. Richard Rufus: Physics at Paris before 1240. Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale (1994) 5: 87–127.

———. Roger Bacon: Richard Rufus’ Successor as a Parisian Physics Professor. Vivarium (1997) 35: 222–250.

———. Richard Rufus’s De anima Commentary: The Earliest Known, Surviving, Western De anima Commentary. Medieval Philosophy and Theology (2001) 10: 119–156.

REGA WOOD AND JENNIFER OTTMAN

Roads

Transportation by water was so much cheaper than overland transport that new roads were rarely built in the Middle Ages and efforts to improve communications were focused instead on *bridges. Upgrading a river crossing from ford to bridge was more cost-effective than building a new road. Thus, road construction cannot be described as an organized engineering activity in the medieval world. Rather, it is appropriate to speak of strategies or responses that medieval societies adopted to deal with a defined category of infrastructure. Wherever Roman roads survived, they often continued in use, to the point at which there are many instances of modern trunk highways reflecting continuity in use since Roman times. In eastern Spain, the Via Augusta is marked by place names in Romance and Romance Arabisms, such as Llosa and Albalat, both meaning paving stones and, by extension, highway (the town of al-Balat in northern Syria is likewise adjacent to a Roman road).

The basic medieval sense of road (via) was an unobstructed right of way. In the early Middle Ages, such rural roads as existed were generally unsuitable for wheeled vehicles, so the right of way had be broadly interpreted. Thus, in 972 the abbot of the monastery of Cardeña secured a royal privilege to take a cart “through whatever place it might go: if there were no direct highway we give you license to pass through pastures, through cultivated fields and vineyards, and to break boundaries along the way taken in order to proceed by cart, or horses, or loaded mules.”

Practically no building of new roads was done. Causeways of considerable extension were built in marshes or in connection with drainage, but technically they had more in common with bridges, using similar construction techniques. Other than such infrequent projects, the most one finds are major repairs as when, in 1353, King Edward III of England ordered the resurfacing of the road from Temple Bar to Winchester: landowners on each side of the road were responsible for clearing a footpath seven feet (2.1 m) wide, with a paved central strip.

The Arco de Bara over the Via Augusta near Tarragona in eastern Spain. Paved by the Romans, this 1,700-mile (2,735 km) road between Rome and Cádiz was maintained more or less unaltered throughout the Middle Ages. (Corbis/Archivo Iconografico, S.A.)

Work gangs from towns, originally recruited to work on city walls, were also used for road work. In the course of the transition from Roman to feudal modes of governance the responsibility for maintaining roads, whether rural or urban, typically shifted from public authorities to private proprietors on whose parcels such roads bounded. Both town and royal ordinances make this clear.

City Streets

Roman paving was not usually a factor in medieval towns. The constant rebuilding of urban space tended to raised the street level over time to the point where, in formerly Roman towns as separate as Canterbury (England) and Barcelona (Spain), the Roman street level is between thirteen and nineteen feet (4–6 m) below the current level.

Medieval town officials were constantly at pains to keep the streets clean and in repair. The main problems were dumping household and trade refuse into the streets or otherwise unlawfully blocking free passage. Such problems can be appreciated from fourteenth-century dispositions of the town council of London, recorded in pipe-rolls (1326) “That all streets and lanes of the City and suburbs be cleansed and delivered of rubbish, timber and other hindrances, and that pentices and jetties be so high that man may ride beneath without hindrances, and that if any be ruinous and dangerous, they be removed.”

Routine street cleaning was handled independently be each ward, which hired rakyeres (rakers) to clear the rubbish. Citizens were responsible for the condition of the street in front of their houses or shops. In 1362 the aldermen proclaimed “that each one keep his street clean according to the ordinance thereon made; that no one cast water or anything else out of window but bring it down and put it in the kennel.” Large cities had public works bureaus charged with maintenance of walls, moats, and streets. In Valencia, royal roads within the municipal bounds of the city of Valencia (which included the surrounding agricultural district or huerta) and the ditches draining them were under the supervision of the municipal office of walls and sewers (Fabrica de Murs i Valls). Their maintenance therefore fell within the jurisdiction of the town council, which on occasion would name a road inspector (visitador dels camins) to make the round of the royal roads once or twice a month to enforce its rulings. Failure to comply with road regulations was the subject of a communication from Prince John of Navarre to the bailiff general of Valencia in 1450. The municipal officials had informed the Prince that the roads of the huerta were totally ruined as a result of the inattention of the residents, especially in flooding the roads. They suggested that the treasurer (racional) of the city be given charge of enforcing the road regulations. That royal justice has to be invoked in routine maintenance of roads suggests the intractability of the problem.

In Europe, it might be said with respect to communications that bridges, not roads, were the crucial elements. Bridges were a necessity and were regarded as both utilitarian and aesthetically pleasing, prestigious works that could be paid for by tolls and other capitalization strategies. Masons and carpenters were plentiful. Conversely, roads presented too many problems for a society segmented into multiple jurisdictions.

In the Islamic world, wheeled vehicles disappeared in the early Middle Ages because camels proved to be an economically more efficient means of transport. As a result, the pattern of regularly laid-out streets in former Roman cities was gradually subverted. Without wheeled vehicles, there was no need to keep them up. Streets were nothing more than the places left over between buildings, which accounts for the often sinuous nature of urban street trajectories in Muslim towns. Streets followed the natural pitches of local topography, although clearly municipal authorities were charged with a certain level of upkeep, and certain conventions of design were obeyed, such as cambering streets in such a way that sewage and run-off ran down the middle of the street, sometimes guided by paving stones.

See also Bridges; Technological diffusion; Transportation

Bibliography

Bulliet, Richard. The Camel and the Wheel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Hindle, Brian Paul. Medieval Roads. Aylesbury: Shire Publications, 1982.

Hindley, Geoffrey. A History of Roads. Secaucus, N.J: Citadel, 1972.

Menéndez Pidal, Gonzalo. Los caminos en la historia de España. Madrid: Cultura Hispánica, 1951.

Rubiera, María Jesús. Villena en las calzadas romana y árabe. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 1985.

THOMAS F. GLICK

R

Ravenna

Bibliography

Razi, Al-

Original Contributions

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Secondary Sources

Reason

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Regimen Sanitatis

1. Aer (Air)

2. Cibus et Potus (Food and Drink)

3. Motus et Quies (Exercise and Rest)

4. Somnus et Vigilia (Sleeping and Waking)

5. Repletio et Evacuatio (Repletion and Excretion)

6. Accidentia Animi (Emotions)

Bibliography

Regiomontanus, Johannes

Contribution to Mathematics

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Religion and Science

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Richard of Middleton

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Secondary Sources

Richard Rufus of Cornwall

Physics

Psychology

Chemistry

Conclusion

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Secondary Sources

Roads

City Streets

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