The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages by Robert Bartlett (review)

In search of diversity and disagreement in medieval intellectual life, Bartlett finds them among the grandest conceptions of things—explanations of what causes what in the physical world, of what sorts of creatures inhabit it, and of what kind of agency they exert. Neither broad theological uniformity nor the other commonalities of (what Roger Bacon called) the respublica Latinorum precluded a range of opinions on these matters during the Middle Ages or the intellectual discomfort thereby produced. What was "natural" or "supernatural" or "monstrous," where magic and witchcraft were to be placed on any map of knowledge and practice, whether the world was more like a machine or a book, and how individual phenomena like eclipses or night flying or cynocephali were to be accounted for, were questions for debate and controversy. Yet both these issues themselves and the fraught, boundary-challenging consequences of debating them are familiar—familiar, in any case, to historians who have recently traced them through to at least the eighteenth century. Thus Bartlett's lecture series does not so much recruit the Middle Ages (and specifically, a naturalist like Bacon) for the world of intellectual diversity or for Max Weber's narrative of "disenchantment." Instead Bartlett reinforces a periodization increasingly used to identify the peculiarities of intellectual life during the long early modern age. From the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, it seems, knowledge issues of the sort traced in these lectures, rather than any straightforward trajectory of disenchantment, were characteristic of the republic of letters. Hence the answer to a rhetorical question Bartlett poses to his audience is contained in his own arguments: how does one reconcile the art of Leonardo, the science of Copernicus and Galileo, and the literature of Shakespeare with the witch craze? This question is no longer, as he terms it, "perplexing"; it is merely old-fashioned.