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This is overall a delightful book for the interested non-expert. The writing is clear and compelling, the humor infrequent and dry but a welcome addition, and the span of topics quite interesting. I come at this from the perspective of a professional physicist, a group whose folk history of their discipline starts with Newton or Galileo, with a mention of Aristotle if one is lucky - no mention of anything worthwhile in the intervening two millennia. (Modern astronomers fare slightly better, learning of Ptolemy and Copernicus - but still have a gap of 1400 years in their folk history.) The achievements in the Islamic empire and the late Middle Ages were well worth seeing in some detail (although it appears the early Middle Ages were only slightly less intellectually dark than popularly imagined). Lindberg’s repetition of dates and key ideas, as well as both Latinized and more accurate names of Islamic scholars, might be annoying to some but was welcome to me. I can’t imagine the average reader without a background in the subject accurately remembering every thinker and thought for reference in later chapters.

The book misses a five-star rating due to three concerns. The first is that it’s generally not clear how idiosyncratic Lindberg’s presentation is. Multiple times he characterizes what “many� or “most� historians believe - generally on his way to present a contrary view. In some cases, like his discussion of alchemy in the Middle Ages, he (openly) bases his presentation on a single source. As a non-expert looking for a consensus view, I was a bit frustrated with these sections. And I am left to conjecture what prejudices would lead to someone discussing an Arabic translation of a Greek original text to give the name of the text not in English, Greek, or even Arabic - but perplexingly in Latin.

The second is perhaps minor, but still concerns me. It’s when Lindberg attempts to use the language of a modern physicist. Here he carelessly uses “heat� when he means “temperature�, and “angular velocity� when he means “linear velocity�. To a casual reader these may seem like minor mistakes or even acceptable common language, but they’re definitely confusing very distinct things from a freshman physics course. While I appreciate that Lindberg takes the approach of trying to judge the scholarship of a period in its historical context, rather than seeking threads that only after the fact can we see lead to our modern view, these mistakes make me wonder if he was in fact even capable of taking the latter approach.

Third, was I convinced that science has a longer history than I suspected? No. A modern scientist sees no writing instantly recognizable as science until Newton’s Principia, though Galileo’s approach is certainly familiar. (Historians seem to believe modern scientists see Copernicus as one of our own, but we don’t. Copernicus uses only the machinery of antiquity, and he himself discusses his continuity with earlier writers to an excessive degree.) For someone arguing for a great deal of historical continuity between the Middle Ages and the Scientific Revolution, Lindberg is certainly quite mute on the Renaissance. He skips straight from Nicole Oresme (died 1382) and Thomas Bradwardine (died 1342) to Galileo (born 1564). To be clear, most physicists alive and working today are closer in chronology to Newton than Newton was to Bradwardine. Lindberg seems as guilty of neglecting the Renaissance and the Byzantine Empire as those he chastises are of neglecting the European Middle Ages.

However, the history of pre-science was certainly richer and more complex than I had known, and it was good to get an overview of it. While my review focuses more heavily on the negatives, I really did overall find this book a great read.