• DOI:10.1086/354550
• Corpus ID: 145569406

Science as Handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the Patristic Tradition

@article{Lindberg1987ScienceAH,
  title={Science as Handmaiden: Roger Bacon and the Patristic Tradition},
  author={David C. Lindberg},
  journal={Isis},
  year={1987},
  volume={78},
  pages={518 - 536}
}

• D. Lindberg
• Published 1 December 1987
• History
• Isis

E VERY HISTORIAN OF MEDIEVAL SCIENCE must sooner or later confront the enigma of Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century Franciscan renowned for his attack on authority and his defense of mathematics and experimental science. Bacon has become the symbol, not exactly of medieval science, but of modern science struggling to emerge during the medieval period-prevented from doing so by ecclesiastical repression. Symbolism, of course, can be a vehicle for misunderstanding as well as understanding, and we must inquire, in Bacon's case, whether the symbol is consistent with the reality. In the process we stand to learn vital lessons about the nature of medieval science and its relationship to church and society. The nineteenth-century image of Bacon, created by William Whewell, Emile Charles, and others, portrayed him as a bitter opponent of authority and scholastic method, a proponent of free inquiry and experimentation. Whewell argued that "Roger Bacon's works are not only so far beyond his age in the knowledge which they contain, but so different from the temper of the times, in his assertion of the supremacy of experiment, and in his contemplation of the future progress of knowledge, that it is difficult to conceive how such a character could then exist." Charles considered Bacon "the only man before modern times to claim the right of thought for its own sake, . . . as a method without which all progress becomes impossible."1 A few years later Robert Adamson wrote of Bacon: