The genesis and persistence of the medieval historian

The case of Pierre Duhem

Abstract

The conditions of the emergence of the history of medieval science in the work of Pierre Duhem are well-known: studying the origins of statics between 1903 and 1904, the French author accidentally discovered some forgotten medieval treatises that, in his opinion, anticipated modern statics. If the urgency to explore his recent findings has fostered an immediate sequence of publications on the subject, that same urgency is unable to explain Duhem’s later writings. We believe that the explanation to that fact consists on a new set of unexpected discoveries, this time about dynamics and medieval astronomy, which would to take place only in mid-1908. In the theories of John Buridan and Nicholas Oresme, Duhem glimpsed the birth of modern science. This paper aims to: (a) expose, with new sources, the early positivist view adopted by our historian and partially abandoned after the initial revelations of 1904; (b) determine the circumstances of the second set of findings related to the dynamics of the fourteenth century; (c) evaluate some of the main – and drastic – consequences entailed by them in the work of maturity, and; (d) contextualize the increasingly intimate and explicit relationships between the rehabilitation of the Middle Ages and the Duhemian religious project.