Magic and the Physical World in Thirteenth-Century Scholasticism

Abstract

The turn to modern science in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century is typically characterized as dependent on the novel adoption of a mechanical hypothesis for operations in nature. In fact, the Middle Ages saw a partial anticipation of this phenomenon in the scholastic physics of the thirteenth century. More precisely, it was just the two factors, denial of action at a distance and an emphasis on the primary materiality of causation, that constituted this early mechanism--or "protomechanism." The latter's emergence can be seen most clearly where scholastic thinkers-here, William of Auvergne, Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome--confronted the theoretical limits of natural cause and effect in their efforts to determine the reality of magic and locate its place in the natural world.