writing in the second century, the historian Dio Cassius noted the extreme shortage of Roman women. In a remarkable essay, Gillian Clark pointed out that among the Romans, unmarried women were so rare that “we simply do not hear of spinsters.... There is not even a normal word for spinster.”

over several prior centuries, many essential pieces of such a theory had been assembled: that the universe was a vacuum; that no pushers were needed because once in motion, the heavenly bodies would continue in motion; that the earth turned; that the sun was the center of the solar system; that the orbits were elliptical.

As Rabbi Eliezer is quoted in the Babylonian Talmud (ca. 90 CE ), “Better burn the Torah than teach it to a woman.” Indeed, elsewhere the Talmud advises: “Everyone who talketh much with a woman causes evil to himself.”11

The best estimate is that there were 131 males per 100 females in Rome, rising to 140 males per 100 females in the rest of Italy, Asia Minor, and North Africa.

Judge continued: “Pity was a defect of character unworthy of the wise and excusable only in those who have not yet grown up.”39

Christian Scholastics invented the university and gave it its modern shape. The first two universities appeared in Paris (where both Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas taught) and Bologna, in the middle of the twelfth century. Then, Oxford and Cambridge were founded in about 1200, followed by a flood of new institutions during the remainder of the

JUST AS THERE WERE no “Dark Ages,” there was no “Scientific Revolution.” Rather, the notion of a Scientific Revolution was invented to discredit the medieval church by claiming that science burst forth in full bloom (thus owing no debts to prior Scholastic scholars) only when a weakened Christianity no longer could suppress it. This claim usually i

Toward the end of the second plague, Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria wrote a pastoral letter to his members, extolling those who had nursed the sick and especially those who had given their lives in doing so: Most of our brothers showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they to

The Scholastic commitment to empiricism was one of the vital keys to the rise of science. Although the aim of science is to formulate theories to explain natural phenomena, it requires that theories be put to and survive empirical tests.