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Reviews the book `The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West,' by Toby E. Huff.

Reviews the book 'Early Physics and Astronomy: A Historical Introduction,' by Olaf Pedersen.

Reviews the book `Before Science: The Invention of the Friars' Natural Philosophy,' by Roger French and Andrew Cunningham.

Reviews the book `Questions Concerning the Eternity of the World,' by John Pecham, translated by Vincent G. Potter.

Reviews the book `The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat,` by Martin Kemp.

Reviews the book `Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought,' by A. Rupert Hall.

Reviews the book “De numeris datis: A Critical Edition and Translation,” Jordanus De Nemore and edited and translated by Barnabas Bernard Hughes.

Reviews the book 'Science Deified and Science Defied: The Historical Significance of Science in Western Culture From the Bronze Age to the Beginnings of the Modern Era ca. 3500 B.C. to ca. A.D. 1640,' by Richard Olson.

Reviews the book `The Fire Within the Eye: A historical essay on the nature and meaning of light,' by David Park.

Optics was one of the central strands in the medieval scientific enterprise; and unquestionably the central medieval optical text was the Optics of the 11th-century Muslim mathematician and natural philosopher Ibn al-Haytham (known in the West as Alhazen). Although, as Sabra convincingly shows, lbn al-Haytham's Optics enjoyed very modest circulation in Islam before the fourteenth century, its translation into Latin early in the thirteenth century made it available to Roger Bacon, Witelo, and John Pecham, through whose influence it became the foundation of Western optical thought until the seventeenth century. When Kepler began to think about theories of vision in the year 1600 (efforts that led eventually to his formulation of the theory of the retinal image), his starting point was the theoretical framework devised by Ibn al-Haytham and his Western followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the book “On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy,” by Anneliese Maier and edited and translated by Steven D. Sargent.