I am not a historian, nor am I especially familiar with historiography. The remarks here will, therefore, be those of a well read neophyte. But since that will probably describe many readers coming to this book for the first time, perhaps that will not be too much of a disadvantage.

If I were an editor at Norton, I would give serious consideration to reissuing this book with a new introductory essay. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure who the Whig historians were, and am not quite certain what the relations between being a Whig historian and being a Whig politically is. The only Whig historian Butterfield mentions by name, Lord Acton, was, as Butterfield points out, a Tory. I think I would have profited far more from this book if I had not had to spend all my time wondering precisely who Butterfield's targets were.

Essentially, this book is a critique of imposing moral judgments in historical research. It is a defense of taking each historical epoch on its own terms, and not imposing one's own moral and cultural standards on figures and situations that existed with, perhaps, a different set of moral and cultural concerns. To this degree, the book is commonsensical and noncontroversial, and can be read with a great deal of profit.

The structural problem of the book is that the entire discussion is framed in extremely polemical terms. Perhaps Butterfield was a Whig Catholic, but given the examples he constantly brings up, and the barely disguised passion he brings to the debate, one wonders if he were not a Tory Catholic. Perhaps not, but one cannot help but wonder why he is so polemical. The same points--none of them especially controversial today, however they may have been in 1932--could have been expressed far more effectively in a nonpolemical fashion. But, again, perhaps an introductory essay by a contemporary historian could explain just why Butterfield chose such an inflammatory mode.

Nonetheless, any nonhistorian can read this book with great profit, even if they, like me, wonder about the context in which he wrote and who the Whig historians were.

At the time this book was originally published (1931) I suspect it had a lot of direct relevance for practicing historians. Today, it reads somewhat old fashioned. However, it's well written, if a bit formal, and certainly needs to be read by anyone who wants to keep his or her thinking about history on track. But see also the mention this book gets in Fischer's Historians' Fallacies. Even Sir Herbert doesn't escape that work unscathed.

On reading histories of the nineteenth century, one cannot help but note that the historians believed that all the clashes of history inevitably led to the apotheosis of virtue in the person of the Whig gentleman. Sir Butterfield adeptly demolishes such a naive, though entrenched, approach to historical documentation, noting that the chaos of history, whether provoked by the Reformation or by English politics, in no way consciously intended many of its results. Religious liberty, for instance, was not a conscious aim of the Protestant Reformation, but a byproduct of the brutal wars over religion which scarred Europe for a century. It is only in the deforming glasses of Whig interpreters that the Protestant Reformers appear as advocating everything whiggish.

Butterfield does have a few of his own biases, speaking in the magisterial "we" when declaring our age a secularized one, or speaking of alleged Catholic irrationality. But these are minor faults, and easily accounted for, hardly marring lthis excellent essay.

The Origins of Modern Science, besides providing a scholarly overview of some of the developments of science in the west since late medieval times, advances the notion that the Scientific Revolution stands far above such epochs as the Renaissance or Reformation in importance to the development of western civilization. This, at least, was the impression I gained from the reading, and the latter point is spelled out in the introduction. Based on lectures of Herbert Butterfield first delivered in 1948, another goal is to stimulate interest in science history from historians, and also from the scientific community.

The modern reader has many choices of science history books from which to choose. For someone a little bit familiar with the field Butterfield's work is a good overview. For someone not familiar with the field, I think it would make difficult reading if not supplemented by other books or by classroom discussion. So far as his second goal goes, I think he is right about the importance of the Scientific Revolution, but his transition from what was to what became is weak. After Newton, Butterfield points out only that the numbers and organization of scientists increased. True, he points out that Newton's mathematization and simplification of the universe was tremendously influential on other fields of thought, but on the whole I don't think he's made the connection.

However, this does not mean that I think the work is without value. Rather, I find it well thought out and well written. The scope is necessarily limited by the original lecture format, but this also keeps the writing concise and focused. Although more recent historiography frowns on calling anyone a 'great mind', I'm sympathetic to the point of view that the men involved in early modern scientific thinking were in fact great and intelligent, and should be commended for their work. This does not mean that Butterfield has presented a laundry list of Dark Ages Ignorance that was overcome by the lone genius, but he has accurately described the prevailing world views of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and explained how much effort it took to change or overthrow them.

I discovered this book at the age of 15 in a box of one of my father's college books. I ended up reading it, and it sparked an interest in the history of science and technology, as well as the philosophy of science. I ended up reading perhaps a dozen other books in these two areas before I even got to college, becoming fairly knowledgeable about the subjects while still a fairly young teenager, and I continued these studies in college, even though I ultimately majored in something else--neurobiology. I have Butterfield's classic work to thank for this, and although I understand there are better histories on the subject now, it nevertheless fulfilled an important role in my early intellectual development.

A previous reviewer called the thesis of this book - that the progress of science in Western society was the main historical current from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, to the point of relegating Renaissance and Reformation to the status of side issues - "arrogant". To the contrary, it seems to me not only justified (which has more influence on the lives of all men today, rich and poor: Martin Luther or electricity?) but a very welcome corrective to the ridiculous overvaluation of the sixteenth century and its heresies. The largely coincidental presence of a number of outstanding painters and architects (and a few English and Spanish playwrights) have given this period a gloss that it did not deserve; for intellectual and historical significance, the thirteenth, fourteenth and nineteenth are infinitely more important. But as for Sir Herbert Butterfield's delightful masterpiece, what one has to understand is how much it destroys, not only of much historical prejudice, but specifically of the way the history of science itself was taught. His account, in his very first chapter, of the reaction of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century to Aristotle, of the existence of an anti-Aristotelian tradition which reached Leonardo, of the significance of the willingness to challenge an ancient authority not on the basis of another authority but of one's own observation and research - all of this is a desperately needed corrective of historiographical cliches that are still, a full half-century after Buttefield, being taught. Likewise the very title of his second chapter, "the conservatism of Copernicus". And I could go on. Every chapter, almost every page, knocks down some lazy stereotype that is still today being handed down from journalist to journalist.
But what is most important in this book is its central historical thesis: that science is not a "revolution" that exploded out of nowhere with Galileo (or even worse, with that desperate catch-all of ignorant scribblers, the Renaissance), but rather a tradition, you might say almost an apostolical succession, that goes back as far as the thirteenth century; that is, it is coeval with the rise of the distinctive Western (rather than Christian or Roman) civilization, with its distinctive cultural institutions - Universities and the private commercial publication of books. Butterfield's ability to discriminate, his insight into what is genuinely scientific and what he would call "archaic", are used in the service of a historical theory that, as far as I am concerned, has not aged and is still valid.