An examination of the ideas of Roger Bacon against his historical representation yields a new perspective on the influence of the medieval period on modern science

Necessary Inventions reveals how we have inherited from the distant past a way of thinking about science, objectivity, and knowledge, and a way of thinking about ourselves in the present. Tracing the invented histories of Roger Bacon across centuries and comparing the thirteenth-century portrait with the later versions E. R. Truitt demonstrates that there is nothing self-evident about historical periodization or the historical narrative of scientific development. The Middle Ages as a historical period and Roger Bacon as a historical character are earlier inventions that were necessary to create a narrative of scientific development that privileged Christian Europe as the origin for modern science.

The manner in which we have understood the relationship of the Middle Ages and Roger Bacon to the development of modern science is borrowed from early medieval Christian theology. Far from being secular and objective, Truitt contends, modern science is Christian, medieval, and bound up with concepts of replacement and superiority. A detailed, expansive reading of the historiography of Roger Bacon since the fourteenth century shows how a definition of modern science as objective, rational, authoritative, and methodical relies on “the Middle Ages”—a fantastical period characterized as credulous, superstitious, dogmatic, and erratic. Understanding how these categories—medieval and modern, superstitious and scientific—were constructed, and why, makes it possible to get a different, possibly clearer, perspective on the past. Necessary Inventions teaches us to appreciate how ideology shapes not only the historical narrative but also how we see ourselves and even the definition of science itself.