Essay Review The Complicated History of Science and Religion by James C. Ungureanu Bernard Lightman (Editor). Rethinking History, Science, and Religion: An Ex- ploration of Conflict and the Complexity Principle. ix + 307 pp., notes, bibl., index. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. $50 (cloth); ISBN 9780822945741. D uring the early modern period, an opinion arose that would have lasting consequences. Certain thinkers of that era began imputing the past with the appellation “middle ages,” describing those centuries as a period of intellectual stagnation—if not desolation. Among the earliest of such appraisals came from Francis Bacon, who set the tone when he wrote in his Novum Organum (1620) that the ages between antiquity and his own were “unfortunate, both in the quantity and richness of the sciences produced.” The French philosophes would follow suit. Voltaire, for instance, described medieval Europe as mired in “general decay and degener- acy.” His younger contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote of previous centuries as “relapsed into the barbarism of the earliest ages.” And finally, Condorcet, in his 1795 Esquisse, argued that the “triumph of Christianity was the signal for the complete decadence of philosophy and the sciences.” This view, which amounted to a narrative of “conflict” between science and religion, would be further sharpened and more widely disseminated a century later—and, indeed, contin- ues to enjoy widespread popularity even today. But starting in the 1920s, when the nascent discipline of the history of science was first emerging, scholars were beginning to question the “conflict” narrative. They were beginning to see that the his- torical relationship between “science and religion” is far too complicated to categorize as simply “con- flict.” The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, for instance, warned readers in 1925 that although “conflict between religion and science is what naturally occurs to our minds,” the “true facts of the case are very much more complex.” Interestingly, Whitehead also observed that the very foundations of modern science were laid in the soil of medieval religious thought, a position that was further sup- ported in the work of Pierre Duhem, Lynn Thorndike, Charles H. Haskins, Alexandre Koyré, E. A. Burtt, Marshall Clagett, Amos Funkenstein, David C. Lindberg, Edward Grant, and Marcia L. Colish, to name just a few. Rather than seeing religion as oppressive or obstructionist, scholars were beginning to view it as important—if not essential—in the development of modern science. If the work of early twentieth-century scholarship rejected the notion of “conflict” between science and religion, by midcentury other scholars were beginning to argue that Christian James C. Ungureanu is Historian in Residence in the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. He is an intellectual historian with a particular interest in the history of religious ideas, from antiquity to the present. His most recent book is Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh, 2019). Isis, volume 112, number 2. © 2021 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021-1753/2021/0112-0015$10.00. 382