medieval scientific enterprises.
One such difference was in their institutional contexts. When the Catholic Church
developed universities for the training of clerics, and included Aristotle’s scientific works in
the university programme of studies, it gave science a central role in an essential institution of
society. There was no comparable institutional framework for science in the ancient world.
Partly as a result, the medieval scientific enterprise involved a continuous process of investigation,
with a view to acquiring more knowledge; whereas scientific progress in antiquity
was sporadic, and scientific activity was often confined to learning previously acquired
knowledge. The Enlightenment picture of the Middle Ages as a period of scientific darkness is
thus the opposite of the truth. Since this is so, it cannot be claimed, as the Enlightenment view
does, that an Aristotelian metaphysics is incompatible with good science.