In the final paragraph ofMont-Saint- Michel and Chartres,¹ Henry Adams draws the complex oscillations of human history to a fine point. The book that begins, as John P. McIntyre points out, with the heights (its opening sentence, “The Archangel loved heights”) ends buried in the earth. The Gothic cathedral, its soaring vaults now “restless,” its ingenious buttresses now “vagrant,” expresses, “as no emotion had ever been expressed before” or since, the “haunting nightmares of the Church” as a “cry of human suffering.” Medieval philosophy’s drive toward universal oneness is nobly undone: its logic uncertain, its syllogisms unequal, and its...

In the popular imagination Roger Bacon remains the romantic figure of scientific genius that he once was for John Matthews Manly. Readers today imagine the thirteenth-century scholar as a radical innovator, “one of the most significant and irreplaceable figures in the history of science”;¹ he features prominently in Donald Sharpes’sOutlaws and Heretics: Profiles in Independent Thought and Courage(2007); English editions of Bacon’sSecrets of Art and Natureremain in print thanks to popular presses specializing in “Alchemy and Hermetica,” or in the occult. Bacon continues to be, as William Newman puts it, “a name to conjure with.”²

Yet,...

“The world of the romances,” writes Richard Kieckhefer, “seems at times a vast toy shop stocked with magical delights.”¹ Kieckhefer’s popular history of magic in the Middle Ages casts the enchanting pull of romances as a fantasy associated with childhood. The toy shop metaphor may seem odd for the medieval context, however. Following the work of Philippe Ariès,² social historians had long surmised that childhood did not properly exist during the Middle Ages, a hardscrabble time (apparently) when people were little able to afford the trifles of childhood play.³

This assumption has come again under revision, thanks in part to...

Long before the advent of modern aeronautics, crackpot inventors, artists, romancers, mythologists, and philosophers envisioned the possibilities of taking flight. Horses with wings, like Pegasus, and with pins, like Cambyuskan’s magical horse in Chaucer’sThe Squire’s Tale; ornithopters, or mechanical hybrids described in the works of Roger Bacon; the glider tested by Spanish Arab scientist Abbas Ibn Firnas (c. 875); and the bird-man experiments of Eilmer, as told by William of Malmesbury (c. 1140), all constitute a medieval prehistory for the modern glider, helicopter, and airplane. Throughout the early periods, flying machines delighted speculative thinkers, natural philosophers, and readers of...

Traditional accounts of technological innovation privilege productive economies, often in explicit contrast to markets for luxury items like those recounted in theSquire’s Tale. Weberian sociology generally reserves technological advance for those things associated with production, not leisure, for usable, not “frivolous,” items.¹ Histories of medieval technology have accordingly stressed the innovative power of flying buttresses, windmills, or cannons, and until quite recently ignored the drôleries associated with medieval romance, the automata or mechanical gadgets known from accounts of the garden at Hesdin, or the flying horses described in verse. Such luxuries, like the delicate ceramic glazes or Ming vases...

The year 1492 stands first among the liminal markers of historical rupture, popularly understood as the harbinger of a new Humanist age enthusiastic about novelty, a new time of technological interest and advancement. According to the persuasive narrative advanced most famously by Anthony Grafton, data mined from Columbus’s “New World” shattered medieval strictures against the impiety ofvitium curiositatis(the sin of curiosity), and revolutionized bookish medieval geographies, granting empirical force to a Christianity driving toward the Ends of the Earth. A new empiricism, with its attendant possibilities for human achievement, apparently inspired Europeans to embrace novelty as an unquestioned...