medieval Europe: sciences and medicine had a radical impact on European culture, making the physical universe an object of scholarly interest By the late 12th and 13th centuries, the vehicle for disseminating science and medical theory in Latin Christendom was the university, particularly the undergraduate arts faculty and the medical faculty The intellectuals who worked in these universities are referred to as Scholastics Scholastics did not view qualitative science as a discipline divorced from philosophy but as a subdiscipline within philosophy, called natural philosophy Natural philosophy was taught in universities principally by commenting on Aristotle’s genuine and spurious scientific works along with previous commentaries and other texts Among the most important centers for the study of nature was the University of Paris Leading Scholastic philosophers with an interest in natural philosophy included the 12th century William of Conches and Albertus Magnus (1200–80) More mathematical aspects of science, such as astronomy and optics, were taught outside the natural philosophy curriculum Scholastic natural philosophers faced the challenge of reconciling Aristotle’s thought, produced in the culture of pagan Greece, with Christianity The most common approach was to subordinate Aristotle to Christian doctrine, denying such Aristotelian claims as the eternal existence of the world as unbiblical A very different strategy based itself on the philosophical works of Averroës By asserting the autonomy of philosophy, including natural philosophy, from Christian theology, the Latin Averroists such as Siger of Brabant (c 1240–c 1284) at the University of Paris attracted a great deal of suspicion from church authorities The bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, reacted to the perceived threat of the Averroists by condemning many Aristotelian ideas as irreligious in 1277 The Aristotelian denial of the possibility of multiple worlds, for example, was thought to be a heretical limitation on God’s power The scope of Tempier’s condemnation reached to the works of many philosophers trying to synthesize Aristotle with Christianity, such as the Paris professor Thomas Aquinas (c 1224–74) The effect of this condemnation was limited; it did not, nor was it intended to, stop the study of nature It did encourage a greater focus on God’s omnipotence, with a greater willingness to discuss hypothetical, non-Aristotelian cosmologies These discussions were not assertions of physical reality but remained speculative When the Parisian master Nicolas Oresme (c 1320–82), for example, discussed the antiAristotelian idea that the Earth rotated, his influential arguments were directed at demonstrating that it was possible, not that it was actually happening 267 Somewhat apart from the mainstream of Scholastic science was experimental work Its most notable practitioner in the Middle Ages was the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (c 1219–c 1292), whose optical and alchemical experiments won him a bad reputation as a magician Another experimentalist was the French nobleman Pierre de Maricort, who experimented on magnets The most active experimental program was probably that carried out by alchemists, particularly in distillation As the university scientists, they drew on Greek and Arabic science, but their discipline was passed on outside the academy and aroused some suspicion from church authorities One of the most intriguing developments in late medieval science was the increasing quantification of Aristotelian physics This was initially the work of a group of scholars at Oxford University, many of them associated with Merton College, the so-called Calculatores Leaders in this early effort to create a mathematical physics were Thomas Bradwardine (c 1300–49) Richard Swineshead (d 1365), and William Heytesbury (d c 1372) The project was also advanced by avant-garde masters at the 14th century University of Paris, notably Oresme, Jean Buridan (1300–58) and Albert of Saxony (c 1316–90) Their brilliant work continued to be expressed in the form of commentaries on Aristotle’s works, modifying the Aristotelian system rather than overthrowing it Their most notable conceptual innovation was “impetus,” a quality of a moving body that kept it in motion This differed from the Aristotelian theory that a body’s motion was maintained by the medium in which it moved Although professional healing continued in early medieval Europe, it was not based on mastery of textual sources The transmission of the Greek and Arab tradition in medicine to Latin Europe began in the late 11th century, with a group of translations from the Arabic associated with the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino These translations, made by an otherwise unknown monk named Constantine the African, included works of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, Galen, and Arab physicians The new body of texts was instrumental in the re-creation of medicine as a learned profession, as well as ensuring that the Western medicine would follow Arabic medicine into adopting a basically Galenic framework The first recorded institution devoted to medical education in the Latin West was a medical school at Salerno in southern Italy, which developed a body of texts that would form a basis for medical learning throughout the medieval period With the development of the university system in the 12th century, medicine was taught alongside law