Sep 30 2008
Scientists of the Black Death, Part I
In her reader of fourteenth-century writings regarding the Black Death, Rosemary Horrox identifies “scientific explanations” as a principal category among the documents that she classes as “explanations and responses.” In doing so, she explicitly contrasts that “scientific” category with another one that she terms “the religious response.” While Horrox is careful to point out that “scientific” and “religious” reactions to the problem were not necessarily incompatible, she nevertheless presents them as if they were somehow symmetrical alternatives. In doing so, she is courting a certain amount of anachronism by employing a modern distinction between scientific and religious knowledge. The importance that modern culture tends to attribute to the contest between the explanatory regimes of science and religion could perhaps be found in the medieval competition between philosophy and theology. And indeed, the Philosopher himself—i.e. Aristotle—is a principal authority cited in some of the explanations that Horrox terms “scientific.” But one must question the extent to which this sort of medieval philosophy of nature corresponds to our reflexive modern conceptions about natural science, and how accurate it would be to follow Horrox in calling the authors of these documents “scientists.”
Quantitative proofs regarding physical phenomena, the idea of “scientific method,” and various scientific institutions are of course characteristically modern, and they were not part of fourteenth-century European intellectual life. The notion of a science as an organized and integrated body of knowledge was already present. Such medieval thinkers as Roger Bacon had even argued for the use of empirical considerations in verifying knowledge about the natural world. And yet the predominant method of reasoning and argument in natural philosophy was still through the unblinking citation of authorities, including Bacon himself. This approach routinely resulted in conclusions founded on presumably well-attested but utterly fabulous phenomena, such as the remarkable properties of basilisks. Granted, some thinkers of the period were quite dismissive of basilisk lore, such as the author of the treatise “It is from divine wrath that the mortality of these years proceeds.” This plague theorist argued for his seismic-cum-atmospheric theory of plague causation predominantly on the basis of empirical statements about patterns of infection, weather, rotting fruit, and other contemporary (and presumably observed) natural phenomena. But even he progresses without pause from such notes to this consideration:
“As Avicenna and Albertus Magnus rehearse, any earthquake has the power of turning men to stone, and notably into salt, because of the very powerful mineral virtue which exists in earthy vapors.”
