ingenuity.” Perhaps Ivins overdoes this emphasis on the Dark 
and Middle Ages as “a culture of techniques and technologies,” 
but it is a kind of approach which makes scholasticism 
understandable, and that prepares us for the great medieval 
invention of typography that was the “take-off” moment into 
the new spaces of the modern world. (19)

The word modern was a term of reproach used by the patristic 
humanists against the medieval schoolmen who developed the 
new logic and physics.

*     Since then many books on medieval science have appeared 
which confirm the Ivins view. The Science of Mechanics in the  
Middle Ages  by Marshall Clagett is an example from which I will 
select a few themes that illustrate the continuous development 
of the visual stress which we have seen emerge in the Greek