Before Galileo

Histories of modern science often begin with the heroic battle between Galileo and the Catholic Church that sparked the Scientific Revolution and led to the world-changing discoveries of Isaac Newton. In reality, more than a millennium before the Renaissance, a succession of scholars paved the way for the discoveries for which Galileo and Newton are often credited. In Before Galileo, John Freely investigates the pioneering research of the first European scientists, many of them monks whose influence ranged far beyond the walls of the monasteries where they studied and wrote. Before Galileo places the great discoveries of the age in their rightful context.