Necessary Inventions: Roger Bacon, the Middle Ages, and the Making of Modern Science

"This book reveals how we have inherited from the distant past a way of thinking about science, objectivity, and knowledge, and a way of thinking about ourselves in the present. Tracing the invented histories of Roger Bacon across centuries and comparing the thirteenth-century portrait with the later versions reveals that there is nothing self-evident about historical periodization or the historical narrative of scientific development. The Middle Ages as a historical period and Roger Bacon as a historical character are earlier inventions that were necessary to creating a narrative of scientific development that privileged Christian Europe as the origin for modern science. The way we have understood the relationship of the Middle Ages and Roger Bacon to the development of modern science are borrowed from early medieval Christian theology. Far from being secular and objective, modern science is Christian, medieval, and bound up with concepts of replacement and superiority. A detailed, expansive reading of the historiography of Roger Bacon since the fourteenth century reveals how a definition of modern science as objective, rational, authoritative, and methodical relies on "the Middle Ages:" a fantastical period characterized as credulous, superstitious, dogmatic, and erratic. Understanding how these categories--medieval and modern, superstitious and scientific--were constructed and why makes it possible to get a different, possibly clearer, perspective on the past, and to appreciate how ideology shapes the historical narrative, how we see ourselves, and even the definition of science itself"--Publisher's description.