Science and the Senses: Experience and Observation in Medieval Europe

This book will extend the work I did for an article, “Observation in the Margins, 500-1500,” which was commissioned for Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). In that piece, I argued that medieval writers understood experience (experientia/experimentum) and observation (observatio) as two distinct modes for producing natural knowledge using the senses. The former, which was native to the Aristotelian fields of natural philosophy and natural history, and by extension, medical theory, involved punctual sensory engagement with particular objects or events, while the latter, native to the Ptolemaic sciences of the stars, referred to the long-term accumulation of data concerning cyclical phenomena. I will construct a detailed account of observational and experiential practices as they developed over the course of the Middle Ages, establishing the role of sensory inquiry in a field often mischaracterized as entirely based on text. In the process, I will argue for important continuities between early modern experimental practices and their medieval analogues.