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Death in 1965 claimed two eminent octogenarian figures in the his tory of science and technology—Abbott Payson Usher three days be fore the summer began, and Lynn Thorndike three days after Christmas. To the very end Professor Thorndike had continued his amazing record of study and publication; impairment of sight and handicaps of age had been singularly ineffective in interrupting his visits to the Columbia University Library, where we met him but a scant fortnight before a stroke brought to a close his illustrious career. His deep and persistent devotion to learning will long be an inspiration to all of us who knew him. Lynn Thorndike was born on July 24, 1882, in Lynn, Massachusetts, the son of a Methodist clergyman and the youngest of three brothers whose work, in varying fields, added luster to Columbia University.
Ashley Thorndike, professor of English, was a recognized author and authority on Shakespeare at the time of his death in 1933; Edward Lee Thorndike, who died in 1948, had been professor of educational psychology and was noted for his many books on learning and the principles of teaching; and Lynn Thorndike, professor of history, achieved fame in medieval history and the history of science. He had been graduated from Wesleyan in 1902 (where in 1930 he was awarded one of his many honorary doctorates). He did his graduate work at Columbia, earning his Ph.D. degree in 1905 under James Harvey Robinson with a thesis on “The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe,” a theme that was to be foremost in his thought throughout the next sixty years. After teaching at Northwestern and at Western Reserve, he re turned in 1924 to Columbia as professor of history, a post that he held until 1950, when he retired into a life of continuing research. It was in 1954 that Columbia conferred upon him the honorary degree of Litt.D. It had been at the height of his career, in 1934—35, that we first met each other as members of Thorndike’s seminar in “Studies in Intellectual History in Closing Medieval and Early Modern Centuries,” a course that we shall long remember. The class convened in his office atop Fayer-weather Hall, the walls lined with books and the room crowded with files of index cards, and the atmosphere suggested, “Let no one uncommitted to learning enter here.” We were fully aware of the reputation for scholarship which Thorndike already had earned, but we were un prepared for the obviously temperate estimate he had formed of his own achievements. It was not that he took learning lightly—far from it, for while he set high standards for his students, he evidently was his own exacting taskmaster. No one of our teachers rivaled Lynn Thorndike in devotion to intellectual pursuits; and while he expressed pleasure on being told of our engagement, and of our marriage shortly after the close of that school year, it is clear that he took more satisfaction later from the fact that we, like so many of his students, were prepared to make our modest contributions to scholarly research. Thorndike in 1917 published the History of Medieval Europe, a very successful textbook which set something of a tradition and which reappeared in new editions in 1928 and 1949; and his Short History of Civilization, first published in 1926, was revised in 1948. His chef d’œuvre, nevertheless, was clearly his celebrated History of Magic and Experimental Science (8 vols., 1923-58). This monumental project had been adumbrated in his doctoral thesis, but the scope had steadily expanded, so that where the first two volumes cover the first thirteen centuries of our era, the last four volumes are devoted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only. The title is somewhat inexact as a description of the material, for nothing could be further from the author’s intention than to portray the development of magic and experimental science as two parallel but separate streams. A ponderous title, such as “The Role of Magic in the Historical Development of Science” might have been more descriptive, but still not adequate. What the author really had in mind was the totality of the naturalistic setting within which science has been enmeshed at every stage in its historical development. As a con sequence, it would have been unthinkable for Thorndike to have over looked the part played by technology, despite the fact that the history of thought receives more of his attention than does the activity of arti sans. There is in his account no systematic outline of technological advances, to be sure; but there is the ubiquitous awareness that applied science was inextricably interwoven with theory, and the uncompromising insistence that accuracy in detail is a desideratum in the history of technology as well as of theoretical science. Not inappropriately, the Case Institute of Technology was among the institutions granting the author honorary degrees. The medieval invention of the mechanical clock, for instance, was not intimately related to magic, and yet Thorn dike took pains to show, on the basis of manuscript sources, that the invention took place apparently by about 1271, rather than in the fourteenth century. He was concerned also with medieval sanitation, a problem not bordering significantly on occult practice; and his subtle and wry sense of humor led him to compare pejoratively the permanence of the inorganic wastes that plague a modern city with the ephemeral organic refuse of a town in the Middle Ages. The extensive use of previously unedited material is a bench mark of all of Thorndike’s work, and this not infrequently prompted him to make strikingly independent judgments bordering on iconoclasm. In the preface to his History of Magic he expressed the opinion that “Constant questioning, criticism, new points of view, and conflict of opinion are essential in the pursuit of truth.” He was especially impatient with those guilty of “magnifying unduly the importance of some one man or theory, and failing to evaluate the facts in their full historical setting.” Already in his early paper of 1914 on Roger Bacon one notes the warning against unsubstantiated eulogy and the insistence that Bacon’s “experimental science” was “representative of the science of his time rather than in revolt against it.” Throughout the volumes of the History of Magic there is opposition to the conventional view that science developed chiefly under the leadership of a small number of intellectual giants in certain well-defined periods; and Thorndike took particular delight in exposing to view scientific transgressions or medieval indebtedness of such heroes of early modern science as Regiomontanus and Leonardo da Vinci. Of the astronomy of Regiomontanus and his successors Thorndike wrote, “Astrology was the warp, and the instruments, tables, calculations and observations only the woof in the web of their activity, in the seamless robe of Queen Philosophy.” Instead of regarding the ingenious devices suggested in the notebooks of Leonardo as heralds of a new age, Thorndike saw in them a continuation of “the technological tradition of the preceding centuries.” This once unconventional view has received support from recent studies, such as that of Bertrand Gille, in which it is argued that the technology of Leonardo was not notably atypical of his age. It was perhaps Thorndike’s confidence in the interrelatedness of all aspects and periods in human development that, above all else, gave his work significance for the history of technology and culture. He repeatedly warned that an attempt to separate the history of science from the history of other aspects of culture, such as magic, is to “tear to pieces a unified fabric.” Postulating the essential oneness and connected ness of man’s activities, he felt a strong repugnance for the concept of a renaissance—or, as he was wont to refer to it, the “so-called renaissance.” He caustically described the “spirit of the renaissance” as “that rare gas 394 Lynn Thorndike (J.882-1965) which the historical laboratory has never yet succeeded in holding in solution.” Thorndike’s shyness did not lead him to shun responsibilities in learned societies. He was a charter member of the History of Science Society (1924), a charter fellow of the Mediaeval Academy of America (1925), a charter membre effectif of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, and a charter member of the Society for the History of Technology. He served as vice-president, and later as president, of the History of Science Society (1928-29) and of the American Historical Association (1954—55). The title of his presidential address to the Association was, characteristically, “Whatever was, was right.” Speaking out against those who would value only such elements of thought and culture as have persisted and have significance today, he argued that it is wrong to superimpose our standards upon a past era. History must be studied in its entirety, with due regard for magic as well as science, for ephemeral aspects as well as viable, for minor figures as well as major. An impression of the magnificent extent of Thorndike’s published works can be gathered from the fifteen-page bibliography, covering the years 1905-52, which appeared in 1954 in Volume XI of Osiris, a Festschrift containing studies by students and friends presented to him on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Many of the items in the bibliography are of course articles—a score of them for the year 1936, in ten different journals—but there are also half a dozen books apart from those already mentioned: from Science and Thought in the Fifteenth Century (1929) to Latin Treatises on Comets Between 1238 and 1368 A.D. (1950). Thorndike might honorably have rested on his laurels at this point; but those of us who knew him realized that he would not. In 1963 he and Dr. Pearl Kibre published a greatly expanded edition, comprising 1938 columns, of their Catalogue of lncipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin. In 1965, in his eighty-third year, he had seen through the press his last book, a volume on Michael Scot. Appearing just sixty years after the publication of his doctoral thesis, this study brought to a close a period of three-score years of research, extraordinary for quality as well as quantity. His published works will appropriately remain as manifest monuments to his memory. Less obtrusive, perhaps, but equally persistent will be the abiding inspiration to scholarly achievement which Lynn Thorndike instilled in a generation of students.
Carl B. Boyer and Marjorie N. Boyer
Originally published as Carl B. Boyer, and Marjorie N. Boyer, “Lynn Thorndike (1882–1965).” Technology and Culture 7, no. 3 (1966): 391–94. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894584.
Thorndike, Lynn. The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe. New York: AMS Press, 1967.
Thorndike, Lynn. “Words in Theophilus.” Technology and Culture 6, no. 3 (1965): 442-443. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/894679.
Thorndike, Lynn. Traditional Medieval Tracts Concerning Engraved Astrological Images. Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947.
Thorndike, Lynn. Science and Thought in The Fifteenth Century. Studies in the History of Medicine and Surgery, Natural and Mathematical Science, Philosophy and Politics. New York : Columbia University Press, 1929.
Thorndike, Lynn. A Short History of Civilization. New York: F. S. Crofts, 1926.