Contrary to prevailing opinion, the roots of modern science were planted
in the ancient and medieval worlds long before the Scientific
Revolution of the seventeenth century. Indeed, that revolution would
have been inconceivable without the cumulative antecedent efforts of
three great civilisations: Greek, Islamic, and Latin. With the
scientific riches it derived by translation from Greco-Islamic sources
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Christian Latin
civilisation of Western Europe began the last leg of the intellectual
journey that culminated in a scientific revolution that transformed the
world. The factors that produced this unique achievement are found in
the way Christianity developed in the West, and in the invention of the
university in 1200. As this 1997 study shows, it is no mere coincidence
that the origins of modern science and the modern university occurred
simultaneously in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages.
