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This article is in part an intervention in the ongoing debate inaugurated by Peter Harrison in 2002 when he called into question the validity of what had come by then to be called ‘the voluntarism ...

Over the course of the past half-century and in the wake of the first articles published on the matter by Edgar Zilsel, Joseph Needham, and myself, historians of science have come to focus with growing insistence on the rise to prominence among the seventeenthw-century mechanical philosophers of the concept of (physical) laws of nature and on the significant role it played in the emergence of early-modern science. Revisiting the case I made on that matter in 1961, this paper goes on to engage in dialogue with the related but divergent argument John Henry framed in the course of his “Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science,” an article that appeared in in the pages of Early Science and Medicine in the year 2004.

This paper is an intervention in the debate inaugurated by Peter Harrison in 2002 when he called into question the validity of what has come to be called ‘the voluntarism and early-modern science thesis’. Though it subsequently drew support from such historians of science as J. E. McGuire, Margaret Osler, and Betty-Joe Teeter Dobbs, the origins of the thesis are usually traced back to articles published in 1934 and 1961 respectively by the philosopher Michael Foster and the historian of ideas Francis Oakley. Central to Harrison’s critique of the thesis are claims he made about the meaning of the scholastic distinction between the potentia dei absoluta et ordinata and the role it played in the thinking of early-modern theologians and natural philosophers. This paper calls directly into question the accuracy of Harrison’s claims on that very matter.

The concluding volume of Francis Oakley's authoritative trilogy moves on to engage the political thinkers of the later Middle Ages, Renaissance, Age of Reformation and religious wars, and the era that produced the Divine Right Theory of Kingship. Oakley's ground-breaking study probes the continuities and discontinuities between medieval and early modern modes of political thinking and dwells at length on the roots and nature of those contract theories that sought to legitimate political authority by grounding it in the consent of the governed.

Setting his face firmly against William Manchester's egregious dismissal of the Middle Ages as little more than “a melange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myth...

Via the focus on food that she had found to be the distinguishing preoccupation in the female piety of the Middle Ages and had addressed so probingly and with such independence of scholarly spirit in her Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Caroline Walker Bynum has moved on over the past two decades, and logically enough, to bring her formidable scholarly intelligence and drive to bear, first, on issues pertaining to the body and then, beyond that, to the intriguing cat's cradle of questions pertaining to late-medieval assumptions about matter and its nature in general. The first impulse came to fruition in her Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, a book in which celibacy, asceticism, fasting, and renunciation notwithstanding, she pushed back hard against the modern temptation to project onto medieval religiosity some sort of body-hating soul-body dualism. In this she was moved, as she herself has forthrightly acknowledged, by a “determination to let individual voices be individual and to let the past be different,” as well as by the adamant refusal, evinced also in the work under review, to simplify “the intricate and contradictory assumptions and practices” she was exploring. “Paradox remains paradox,” she has bluntly insisted, and “complexity remains complex” (13).