FOREWORD
In our preceding book on the twelfth century we included some writers, like Alexander Neckam, who lived on a few years into the following century but whose works were probably written in the twelfth. We now, with Michael Scot, begin to treat of authors whose period of literary productivity dates after 1200. We shall endeavor to consider the various authors and works in something like chronological order, but this is often difficult to determine and in one or two cases we shall purposely disregard strict chronology in order to bring works of the same sort together. Our last four chapters on Arnald of Villanova, Raymond Lull, Peter of Abano, and Cecco d’Ascoli carry us over the threshold of the fourteenth century, the death of the last-named not occurring until 1327.
Greater voluminousness and thoroughness mark the work of these writers as compared with those of the twelfth century. The work of translation has been partly accomplished; that of compilation, reconciliation, criticism, and further personal investigation and experimentation proceeds more rapidly and extensively. The new Friar Orders invade the world of learning as of everything else: of the writers whose names head the following chapters Bartholomew of England and Roger Bacon were Franciscans;[962] Thomas of Cantimpré, Vincent of Beauvais, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas were Dominicans. In these representatives of the new religious Orders, however, theology cannot be said to absorb attention at the expense of natural science. The prohibitions of the study of the works of Aristotle in the field of natural philosophy by the University of Paris early in the century preceded the friars and were not lasting, and the mid-century struggle of the friars with the other teachers at Paris[963] was one over privilege and organization rather than tenets. Teachers and writers were, however, sometimes condemned for their intellectual views at Paris and elsewhere in the thirteenth century, and whether the study of natural science and astrology was persecuted is a question which will arise more than once. In any case the friars seem to have declined in scientific prowess as in other respects toward the close of the century. Petrus Hispanus, who became Pope John XXI in 1276-1277, had not been a friar himself, and is said to have been more favorable to men of learning than to the regular clergy. Finally, in Guido Bonatti, Arnald of Villanova, Peter of Abano, and Cecco d’Ascoli we come to laymen, physicians and astrologers, who were to some extent either anti-clerical themselves or the object of clerical attack.
This was the century in which Roger Bacon launched his famous eulogy of experimental science. A good-sized fleet of passages recognizing its importance will be found, however, in our other authors, and we shall need to devote two chapters to experimental books which were either anonymous or pretended to date back to ancient or Arabic authors. And not without some justification, since we have been tracing the history of experimental science through our previous books.
[962] Little that is new on the theme of the Franciscans and learning is contributed by H. Felder, Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Studien im Franziskanerorden bis um die Mitte des 13 Jahrhunderts, Freiburg, 1904.
[963] Concerning it consult F. X. Seppelt, Der Kampf der Bettelorden an die Universität Paris in der Mitte des 13 Jahrhunderts, Breslau, 1905, in Kirchengesch. Abhandl., III; or H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, I, v, 2, “The Mendicants and the University”; or P. Feret, La faculté de théologie de Paris: moyen âge, Paris, 1894-1897, 4 vols.; and other works listed by Paetow (1917), p. 441.