A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Volume II

Lynn Thorndike's A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Volume II, published by Columbia University Press in 1923, is part of Thorndike's monumental eight-volume survey tracing the history of magical belief and early experimental science together as intertwined rather than opposed traditions in medieval and early modern Europe. Thorndike's project remains, a century later, one of the most exhaustively documented surveys of its kind, drawing on an enormous range of primary manuscript sources. Its strength is that sheer documentary breadth, still cited as a reference resource for tracking down primary texts on medieval magic and natural philosophy. Its limit is its age: a work of early twentieth century scholarship, it reflects the interpretive assumptions and occasionally the factual errors later specialist scholarship has corrected in individual cases, so a specific claim drawn from it benefits from checking against more recent, narrower studies of the same period.