ABSTRACT
The story of the relation between magic and natural philosophy in the Middle Ages begins in the twelfth century. Before then, the issue was hardly relevant. Not that there were no fields of magical learning or practice in those early centuries that we might want to link to natural philosophy – or, to use a modern term, natural science. Valerie Flint’s work on magic in the early Middle Ages reminds us that at no time was astrology entirely absent from the cultural world of medieval elites. 1 And as we shall soon see, astrology was one of the areas often thought of as part of magic that could plausibly vie for a place among the sciences of nature in the high and later Middle Ages. But the problem is that there existed, before the twelfth century, virtually no conception of a realm of knowledge formally distinct from all other learning and characterized as being “scientific”. Thus, there was even for educated minds before the twelfth century nothing that could be designated in the language of the time as natural philosophy – or again as we might prefer, nothing specifically identified as natural science. Hence, for those early medieval centuries, there was nothing natural philosophical to which magic could be said to relate.
