Here is the latest from the insightful European essayist Fjordman:
The book that inspired this text was The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by Rémi Brague, a French professor and specialist of medieval religious philosophy. He is also the author of the fine book Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization, which I have written an extensive essay about previously. Thematically this text overlaps to some extent with my essay Why Christians Accepted Greek Natural Philosophy, but Muslims Did Not and my reviews of the books Science and Religion by Edward Grant and Defending the West by Ibn Warraq. It also overlaps with some of the material I have included in my book Defeating Eurabia. I will include page references to the various book quotes so that others can use them and will supplement with some quotes from two good onlineinterviews with Mr. Brague.
Medieval Muslims were reluctant to travel to infidel lands. According to Islamic jurists Muslims should not stay for too long in the lands of non-Muslims if they cannot live a proper Muslim life there. Muslims had little knowledge of or interest in any Western languages. Only Italian had some currency for commercial purposes, but mainly involving Jews and Eastern Christians, especially Greeks and Armenians. Few Muslims knew any non-Muslim languages well, the knowledge of which was considered unnecessary or even suspect.
Consequently, the translators of Greek and other non-Muslim scientific works to Arabic were never Muslims. They were Christians of the three dominant denominations plus a few Jews and Sabians. The language of culture for these Christians was Syriac (Syro-Aramaic or Eastern Aramaic) and their liturgical language was Greek. The translators already knew the languages they were to translate. We do have examples of translators who traveled to Greece to perfect their skills, but they were Christians for whom Greek was already at least a liturgical language. Here is Rémi Brague in The Legend of the Middle Ages, page 164:
“Neither were there any Muslims among the ninth-century translators. Almost all of them were Christians of various Eastern denominations: Jacobites, Melchites, and, above all, Nestorians (though I am not sure why the latter predominated). A few others were Sabians, a somewhat bizarre religious community with an intriguing history, whose elites were perhaps the last heirs of the pagan philosophers of the School of Athens. No Muslim learned Greek or, even less, Syriac. Cultivated Christians were often bilingual, even trilingual: they used Arabic for daily life, Syriac for liturgy, and Greek for cultural purposes. The translators that helped to pass along the Greek heritage to the Arabs were artisans who worked for private patrons, without institutional support. One often hears tell of the ‘House of Wisdom’ (bayt al-hikmah), a sort of research center subsidized by the caliphs that specialized in producing Arabic translations of Greek works. This is pure legend. The further back in time we go, the less the chroniclers connect the activity of translation with that ‘house.’ As an institution it was above all a propaganda office working for the Mu`tazilite doctrine supported by the caliphs.”
The Baghdad-centered Abbasid Dynasty, which replaced the Damascus-centered Umayyad Dynasty after AD 750, was closer to pre-Islamic Persian culture and influenced by the Sassanid Zoroastrian practice of translating works and creating libraries. Even Dimitri Gutas admits this in his pro-Islamic book Greek Thought, Arab Culture. There was still a large number of Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews and they held a disproportionate amount of expertise in the medical field. According to author Thomas T. Allsen, Middle Eastern medicine in Mongol ruled China was “almost always” in the hands of Nestorian Christians.
One prominent translator was the Christian scholar Hunayn ibn Ishaq
(808-873), called Johannitius in Latin. He was a Nestorian (Assyrian)
Christian who had studied Greek in Greek lands, presumably in the
Byzantine Empire, and eventually settled in Baghdad. He, his son and
his nephew translated into Arabic, sometimes via Syriac, Galen’s
medical treatises as well as Hippocratic works and texts by Aristotle,
Plato and others. His own compositions include the Ten Treatises on the Eye, which transmitted a largely Galenic theory of vision.Thabit ibn Qurra (ca. 836-901) was a member of the Sabian
sect of star worshippers who had adopted much of Greek culture. His
native language was Syriac but he knew Greek and Arabic well. He worked
for years in Baghdad where he produced influential Arabic translations
or revised earlier ones of Ptolemy’s Almagest and works by Archimedes and Apollonius. Later Arabic versions developed from his version of Euclid’s Elements. He was also an original mathematician who contributed to geometry and the theory of numbers.Aramaic is a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic. It was
once the lingua franca of much of the Near East after the ancient
Persians had made it their Imperial language. It was supplemented by
Greek after the conquest of this region by Alexander the Great. A young
Jew such as Jesus of Nazareth in Roman-ruled Palestine would probably
have known some Hebrew, still the religious language but no longer the
spoken language of the Jews. He would most likely have used Aramaic for
preaching although it is possible that he knew some Greek.Syriac or Syro-Aramaic gradually gave way to Arabic after the Arab
conquest of this region, but when the Koran was composed, Arabic did
not yet exist as a written language. Author Ibn Warraq estimates that
up to 20% of the Koran is incomprehensible even to educated Arabs
because parts of it were originally written in another related language
before Muhammad was born, if Muhammad as he is described to us ever
existed at all, that is.The author of the most important work on this subject, a German
professor of Semitic languages, due to potential threats writes under
the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg. According to him, certain obscure passages of the chapters or suras
of the Koran usually ascribed to the Mecca period, which are also the
most tolerant ones as opposed to the much harsher and more violent
chapters allegedly from Medina, are not “Islamic” at all but based on
Christian hymns in Syriac, Biblical texts adapted for liturgical use:“In its origin, the Koran is a Syro-Aramaic liturgical
book, with hymns and extracts from Scriptures which might have been
used in sacred Christian services…Its socio-political sections, which
are not especially related to the original Koran, were added later in
Medina. At its beginning, the Koran was not conceived as the foundation
of a new religion. It presupposes belief in the Scriptures, and thus
functioned merely as an inroad into Arabic society.”While many philosophical and scientific works (but hardly any
literary or historical ones) were translated into Arabic, Muslims
didn’t preserve the originals as these were now seen as unnecessary.
This made the phenomena of “renaissances” impossible — that is, a
return to the original texts to reinterpret and study them with fresh
and unbiased eyes.Muslims themselves virtually never learned Greek.
Here is The Legend of the Middle Ages again, page 168:“Those who knew Greek had been raised bilingual because
they were sons of an Arab father and a Greek mother. No Muslim seems to
have ever learned a foreign language for theoretical reasons rather
than, for example, commercial reasons. The one exception is perhaps
Farabi. One of his biographers relates that he is supposed to have
spent years in ‘Greece’ in order to study there. This information is
all the more interesting because the word used is not ‘Rum,’ which
designated Constantinople, but rather ‘Yunan,’ which can mean only
Greece. One might well wonder where, to what center of teaching, in
Greece of the time might a student from the Muslim world have possibly
gone. Farabi does not seem to have shown proof of a very profound
knowledge of Greek. He does indeed cite a few words of that language.
But the etymological explanations that he gives of the titles of some
of Plato’s dialogues are sheer fantasy. The only real exception is
Biruni. But he is an exception that proves the rule: the language that
he learned was not Greek, but Sanskrit. Biruni had learned that
language to the point of being able to translate into it from Arabic.”Islamic civilization, in sharp contrast to the European one, never
used its knowledge of the foreign as an instrument that would permit
it, through comparison and distancing in relations to itself, to
understand itself by becoming conscious of the non-obvious character of
its cultural practices. An extremely rare exception to this rule may be
the eleventh century Persian polymath al-Biruni. As Brague states in
his book Eccentric Culture, page 112-113:“It may be that its geographers made a eulogy of India and
of China in order to address a discreet critique of the Islamic
civilization of their time, often compensated in the last instance by
an affirmation of the religious superiority of the latter. The examples
that one could find of such a vision ‘reflected’ in the mirror are
exceptional and come from marginal or heretical thinkers. Thus, the
contact with the Brahmin Hindu thinkers whose religion does quite well
without prophecy (which the Islamic religion declares on the contrary
necessary to the happiness of man and to a good social order) posed a
problem for the Muslim thinkers; the real or fictitious dialogue with
the Brahmins was able to serve to mask a critique of the Islamic
religion in a free thinker like Ibn al-Rawandi. The only incontestable
exception is without doubt the astonishing work of Al-Biruni on India.
This universal scholar (973-1048), astronomer, geographer, historian,
mineralogist, pharmacologist etc., had taken the trouble to learn
enough Sanskrit to be able to translate in both directions between this
language and Arabic (for him also a learned language). He presented a
tableau of Hindu society and beliefs with perfect impartiality.”Greek translations heavily influenced Middle Eastern scholars. Al-Kindi
(died ca. AD 873), commonly known as “the Philosopher of the Arabs,”
lived in Baghdad and was close to several Abbasid Caliphs. Al-Kindi did
significant work on optics and made notable mathematical contributions
to cryptography. Al-Farabi (ca. 875-950), “perhaps the greatest” Muslim
philosopher according to Brague, came to Baghdad from Central Asia,
emphasized human reason and was more original than many of his
successors. InHow Greek Science Passed to the Arabs, writer De Lacy O’Leary
states that “It is significant that almost all the great scientists and
philosophers of the Arabs were classed as Aristotelians tracing their
intellectual descent from al-Kindi and al-Farabi.” The attempt to
reconcile Islam with Greek philosophy was to last for several centuries
and ultimately prove unsuccessful due to religious resistance.For various reasons, al-Kindi and al-Farabi were not much translated into Latin.As Rémi Brague states, “in the oft-romanticized city of Cordoba, the
family of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides was banished, Averroes was
exiled, and many Christians martyred.” Ibn Rushd, or Averroes
(1126-1198), was born in Cordoba, Spain (Andalusia). He faced trouble
for his freethinking ways and is today often hailed as a beacon of
“tolerance,” yet he was also an orthodox jurist of sharia law and
served as an Islamic judge in Seville. He approved, without
reservation, the killing of heretics in a work that was wholly
philosophical in nature. Nevertheless, he is remembered for his
attempts to combine Aristotelian philosophy and Islam. He had a major
influence on Latin scientists but was practically forgotten in the
Islamic world, where philosophy went into permanent decline. The very
influential al-Ghazali argued that much of Greek philosophy was an
affront to Islam. Virtually all freethinkers within the Islamic world
were at odds with Islamic orthodoxy and frequently harassed for this.European Christians re-conquered Toledo in Spain and Sicily from the
Muslims in 1085 and 1091, respectively. The great Italian (Lombard)
translator Gerard of Cremona (ca. 1114-1187) was by far the most
prolific translator from Arabic to Latin of works on science and
natural philosophy. He lived for years at Toledo, aided by a team of
local Jewish interpreters and Latin scribes. David C. Lindberg argues
that Alhazen’s Book of Optics probably was translated during
the late twelfth century by Gerard or somebody from his school; it was
known in thirteenth century Europe. Many works initially translated
from Arabic by Gerard and his associates, among them Ptolemy’s great
astronomical work the Almagest, were later translated directly
from Greek into Latin from Byzantine manuscripts. Obviously, Alhazen’s
work had to be translated from Arabic since it was written in that
language in the first place.The basic principle of the astrolabe, a working model of the heavens, was a discovery of the ancient Greeks. Stereographic projection,
one way among several of mapping a sphere onto a flat surface, was
probably known to the great mathematical astronomer Hipparchus in the
second century BC and was certainly in use by the first century BC when
Vitruvius, the Roman writer on architecture and engineering, mentioned
it. The first treatise on an astrolabe in the modern sense was probably
written by Theon of Alexandria (ca. AD 335-405). He was a teacher of
mathematics and wrote commentaries on the works of Ptolemy, including
the Almagest, and made an influential edition with added comments of Euclid’s Elements. Writer James E. Morrison is the author of the book The Astrolabe. As Morrison says:“The earliest astrolabes used in Europe were imported from
Moslem Spain with Latin words engraved alongside the original Arabic.
It is likely that European use of Arabic star names was influenced by
these imported astrolabes. By the end of the 12th century there were at
least a half dozen competent astrolabe treatises in Latin, and there
were hundreds available only a century later. European makers extended
the plate engravings to include astrological information and adapted
the various timekeeping variations used in that era. Features related
to Islamic prayers were not used on European instruments. The astrolabe
was widely used in Europe in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. . .
. Astrolabe manufacturing was centered in Augsburg and Nuremberg in
Germany in the fifteenth century with some production in France. In the
sixteenth century, the best instruments came from Louvain in Belgium.
By the middle of the seventeenth century astrolabes were made all over
Europe.”The oldest surviving, moderately sophisticated scientific work in the English language is a Treatise on the Astrolabe, written by the English poet and philosopher Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) for his son. His The Canterbury Tales are studded with astronomical references.
It should be noted that while it was a very popular device, the
astrolabe was not a precision instrument even by medieval standards.
Its popularity stemmed from the fact that approximate solutions to
astronomical problems could be found by a mere glance at the
instrument. The invention of the pendulum clock and more specialized
and useful scientific devices such as the telescope from the
seventeenth century on replaced the astrolabe in importance.Nevertheless, its medieval reintroduction via the Islamic world did
leave some traces. Quite a few star names in use in modern European
languages, for instance Aldebaran or Algol, can be traced back to
Arabic or Arabized versions of earlier Greek names. Today astronomers
frequently identify stars by means of Bayer letters, introduced by the German astronomer Johann Bayer (1572-16259) in his celestial atlas Uranometria from 1603. In this system, each star is labeled by a Greek letter and the Latin name of the constellation in which it is found.It is true that there were translations from Arabic and that these
did have some impact in Europe, leaving traces in star names and some
mathematical and chemical terms. Yet far too much emphasis is currently
placed on the translations themselves and too little on how the
knowledge contained within these texts was actually used. After the
translation movement it is striking to notice how fast Europeans vastly
surpassed whatever scholarly achievements had been made in the medieval
Middle East based on largely the same material.Moreover, it is simply not true that these translations “rescued”
the Classical heritage. This survived largely intact among Byzantine,
Orthodox Christians. When Western, Latin Christians wanted to recover
the Greco-Roman heritage they translated Greek historical works and
literature as well, in addition to philosophy, medicine and astronomy,
and copied works by Roman authors and poets in Latin which had been
totally ignored by Muslims.It is easy to track how Arabic translations of Greek texts from
Byzantine manuscripts, almost always made by non-Muslims, made their
way from the Islamic East to Sicily and southern Italy or to the
Iberian Peninsula in the Islamic West where some of them were
translated by Jews and Christians, for instance in the multilingual
city of Toledo in Spain, to Latin. It is true that some ancient Greek
texts were reintroduced to the West via Arabic, sometimes passing via
Syriac or Hebrew along the way, but these were usually based, in the
end, on Byzantine originals. The permanent recovery of Greco-Roman
learning and literature was undertaken as a direct transmission from
Greek, Orthodox Christians to Western, Latin Christians.The greatest translator from Greek to Latin was the Flemish scholar William of Moerbeke (ca.
1215-ca. 1286), a contemporary of the prominent German scholar Albertus
Magnus. He was fluent in Greek and made very accurate translations,
still held in high regard today, from Byzantine originals and improved
earlier translations of the works of Aristotle and many by Archimedes,
Hero of Alexandria and others. Like his Italian friend the great
theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), William of Moerbeke was
a friar of the Dominican order and had personal contacts at the top
levels of the Vatican, including several popes.Thanks in part to William of Moerbeke’s efforts, by the 1270s
Western Europeans had access to Greek works that were never translated
into Arabic, for instance Aristotle’sPolitics. This benefited Thomas Aquinas and his great theological work the Summa Theologica. The Spanish-born Jewish rabbi and philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), famous for his The Guide for the Perplexed,
attempted to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Biblical Scripture.
Aquinas was well aware of his work as well as Muslim Aristotelian
commentators such as Avicenna and Averroes, but he could be critical of Averroes and his use of Aristotle.Renaissance figures in Italy and Western Europe had at their
disposal a more complete body of Greek thought than any of the major
Muslim philosophers ever did. The translation movement, which began in
the late eleventh century, continued during the Renaissance and
culminated in its final and arguably most important phase during the
second half of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth with the
introduction of the printing press. This invention vastly increased the
circulation of books as well as the accuracy of their copying.It was a major stroke of historical luck that printing was
introduced in Europe at exactly the same time as the last vestige of
the Roman Empire fell to Muslim Turks. Texts that had been preserved in
Constantinople for a thousand years could now be permanently rescued.
As Elizabeth L. Eisenstein says in her monumental The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:“The classical editions, dictionaries, grammar and
reference guides issued from print shops made it possible to achieve an
unprecedented mastery of Alexandrian learning even while laying the
basis for a new kind of permanent Greek revival in the West….We now
tend to take for granted that the study of Greek would continue to
flourish after the main Greek manuscript centers had fallen into alien
hands and hence fail to appreciate how remarkable it was to find that
Homer and Plato had not been buried anew but had, on the contrary, been
disinterred forever more. Surely Ottoman advances would have been
catastrophic before the advent of printing. Texts and scholars
scattered in nearby regions might have prolonged the study of Greek but
only in a temporary way.”Muslims and Christians treated Greek philosophy very differently,
partly because Judaism, Islam and Christianity are monotheistic in very
different ways. Brague points out that there are fundamental
differences between them. It is a misunderstanding that there are
“three religions of the book” because the meaning of the book is very
different in each religion.According to
Rémi Brague, “In Judaism, the Tenakh is a written history of the
covenant between God and the people of Israel, almost a kind of
contract. In Christianity, the New Testament is the history of one
person, Jesus, who is the incarnate Word of God. In Islam, the Koran is
‘uncreated’ and has descended from the heavens in perfect form. Only in
Islam is the book itself what is revealed by God. In Judaism God is
revealed in the history of the Jewish people. In Christianity God is
revealed as love in the person of Jesus. Judaism and Christianity are
not religions of the book, but religions with a book.
The third misconception is to speak of ‘the three Abrahamic religions’.
Christians usually refer to Abraham as a person who binds these three
religions together, and who is shared by them. In Judaism, he is the
‘founding father’. But in the Koran it is written: ‘Abraham was neither
a Jew nor a Christian.’ (III, 67)….According to Islam, the first
prophets received the same revelation as Mohammed, but the message was
subsequently forgotten. Or it was tampered with, with evil intent. So
according to Islam, the Torah and the Gospels are fakes.”In Islamic lands, falsafa remained a private affair, an
unofficial matter for individuals in fairly restricted numbers.
Philosophy was always marginal in the Islamic world and was never
institutionalized there as it was in the European medieval
universities. According to Rémi Brague, theology as such is a Christian
specialty. He even claims that “‘theology’ as a rational exploration of
the divine (according to Anselm’s program) exists only in Christianity.”Brague states
that “The great philosophers of Islam were amateurs, and they pursued
philosophy during their leisure hours: Farabi was a musician, Avicenna
a physician and a vizier, Averroes a judge. Avicenna did philosophy at
night, surrounded by his disciples, after a normal workday. And he did
not refuse a glass of wine to invigorate him a bit and keep him on his
toes. Similarly, among the Jews, Maimonides was a physician and a
rabbinic judge, Gersonides was an astronomer (and astrologer), and so
on. The great Jewish or Muslim philosophers attained the same summits
as the great Christian Scholastics, but they were isolated and had
little influence on society. In medieval Europe, philosophy became a
university course of studies and a pursuit that could provide a
living….You can be a perfectly competent rabbi or imam without ever
having studied philosophy. In contrast, a philosophical background is a
necessary part of the basic equipment of the Christian theologian. It
has even been obligatory since the Lateran Council of 1215.”Demand usually precedes the presence of a product on the market and
it is the demand that needs to be explained. As Brague notes,
translations are made because someone feels that a certain text
contains information that people need. The real intellectual
revolution in Europe began well before the wave of translations in
Toledo and elsewhere. This was demonstrated by the American jurist
Harold J. Berman in his important 1983 book Law and Revolution.
The efforts of the Catholic Church to make a new system of law required
refined tools, which meant that the West sought out Aristotle’s and
other Greek work on logic and philosophy.The “Papal Revolution” starting in the eleventh century was an
effort to apply ancient Greek methods of logic to the remnants of Roman
law dating back to Late Antiquity and the reforms of the active Eastern
Roman Emperor Justinian the Great. Justinian’s revision of existing
Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law)
was compiled in Latin in the 530s AD and later influenced medieval
Canon Law. While they did utilize Roman law and Greek logic, medieval
Western scholars through their intellectual efforts created a new
synthesis which had not existed in Antiquity. Prominent among them was
the twelfth century Italian legal scholar Gratian, a monk who taught in Bologna. His great work, commonly known as the Decretum, appeared around 1140 as a synthesis of church law. Harold J. Berman writes in his book Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, page 225-226:“Every person in Western Christendom lived under both canon
law and one or more secular legal systems. The pluralism of legal
systems within a common legal order was an essential element of the
structure of each system. Because none of the coexisting legal systems
claimed to be all inclusive or omnicompetent, each had to develop
constitutional standards for locating and limiting sovereignty, for
allocating governmental powers within such sovereignty, and for
determining the basic rights and duties of members. . . . Like the
developing English royal law of the same period, the canon law tended
to be systematized more on the basis of procedure than of substantive
rules. Yet after Gratian, canon law, unlike English royal law, was also
a university discipline; professors took the rules and principles and
theories of the cases into the classrooms and collected, analyzed, and
harmonized them in their treatises.”With the papacy of the dynamic and assertive Gregory VII
(1073-1085), the Roman Catholic Church entered the Investiture
Struggle, a protracted and largely successful conflict with European
monarchs over control of appointments, investitures, of Church
officials. Edward Grant explains in his book God and Reason in the Middle Ages, page 23-24:“Gregory VII began the process that culminated in 1122 in
the Concordat of Worms (during the reign of the French pope, Calixtus
II [1119-1124]), whereby the Holy Roman Emperor agreed to give up
spiritual investiture and allow free ecclesiastical elections. The
process manifested by the Investiture Struggle has been appropriately
called the Papal Revolution. Its most immediate consequence was
that it freed the clergy from domination by secular authorities:
emperors, kings, and feudal nobility. With control over its own clergy,
the papacy became an awesome, centralized, bureaucratic powerhouse, an
institution in which literacy, a formidable tool in the Middle Ages,
was concentrated. The Papal Revolution had major political, economic,
social, and cultural consequences. With regard to the cultural and
intellectual consequences, it ‘may be viewed as a motive force in the
creation of the first European universities, in the emergence of
theology and jurisprudence and philosophy as systematic disciplines, in
the creation of new literary and artistic styles, and in the
development of a new consciousness.’ . . . the papacy grew stronger and
more formidable. It reached the pinnacle of its power more than a
century later in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198-1216), perhaps
the most powerful of all medieval popes.”The power of the secular states grew as well, but the separation
between Church and state endured because the Papal Revolution had
established a virtual parity between them. It was the internal dynamism
of Europe during the High Middle Ages that drove the recovery of
Classical learning. Here is The Legend of the Middle Ages by Rémi Brague, page 180:“The European intellectual renaissance preceded the
translations from the Arabic. The latter were not the cause, but the
effect of that renaissance. Like all historical events, it had economic
aspects (lands newly under cultivation, new agricultural techniques)
and social aspects (the rise of free cities). On the level of
intellectual life, it can be understood as arising from a movement that
began in the eleventh century, probably launched by the Gregorian
reform of the Church. . . . That conflict bears witness to a
reorientation of Christianity toward a transformation of the temporal
world, up to that point more or less left to its own devices, with the
Church taking refuge in an apocalyptical attitude that said since the
world was about to end, there was little need to transform it. The
Church’s effort to become an autonomous entity by drawing up a law that
would be exclusive to it — Canon Law — prompted an intense need for
intellectual tools. More refined concepts were called for than those
available at the time. Hence the appeal to the logical works of
Aristotle, who was translated from Greek to Latin, either through
Arabic or directly from the Greek, and the Aristotelian heritage was
recovered.”Rémi Brague is a highly competent scholar and I can easily recommend
his works to those who have a serious interest in studying these
subjects. I will conclude by adding some other books that people can
read. About Islam I recommend essentially everything written by Robert Spencer. Bat Ye’or’s books are groundbreaking and important….Ibn Warraq’s books are excellent, starting with Leaving Islam. Understanding Muhammad by the Iranian ex-Muslim Ali Sina is worth reading, as are Defeating Jihad by Serge Trifkovic and A God Who Hates by Wafa Sultan. For Western and European readers especially I could add my own book Defeating Eurabia.For books about the history of science, I recommend everything written by Edward Grant. The Beginnings of Western Science
by David C. Lindberg is good, though slightly more politically correct
than Grant when it comes to science in the Islamic world. The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West
by Toby E. Huff is highly recommended. Huff’s work is carefully
researched and should be considered required reading for those who are
interested in this subject. These books are easy to read for an
educated, mainstream audience.For books that are excellent, yet more specialized and slightly more challenging, I can recommend Victor J. Katz for the history of mathematics and The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy
by James Evans for the history of pre-telescopic astronomy up to and
including Kepler. Evans’ book is extremely well researched and
detailed, almost too much so on European and Middle Eastern astronomy,
but contains virtually nothing on Chinese or Mayan astronomy. For a
more global perspective, Cosmos: An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology by John North is good and not too difficult to read.