In a series of lectures delivered at Oberlin College, Ohio and subsequently published as Aristotle and the Renaissance (1983), the late Charles B. Schmitt wrote compellingly of the need to recognize a variety of Aristotelianisms in medieval and early modern thought. Two sets of scholars, he noted, had hitherto misrepresented the scholastic tradition in order to generate the impression that it was uniform and unitary: students of medieval theology and philosophy, who sought to defend the intellectual and cultural significance of medieval Aristotelianism, and historians of early modern science, who had seen it precisely as the obstacle to be overcome on the way to modernity. Modestly, but accurately, Schmitt described his own account of the various and complex receptions and appropriations of Aristotle in the Renaissance as just ‘a sort of first approximation of the subject’ (p. 110). Much work, he was clear, remained to be done.

Craig Martin's Subverting Aristotle is an important contribution to the project that Schmitt had in mind. Martin's chief concern, as outlined in his introduction, is with the process by which Aristotle and Aristotelian philosophy lost their value as bulwarks of Christian belief in the seventeenth century – a process that he argues contributed to, and made space for, the emergence of rival natural philosophies. Two different Aristotles were key targets for the critics who eroded his authority to this end: the (re)Catholicized Aristotle of the Fifth Lateran Council and the Council of Trent, and the atheistical Aristotle whose naturalism and rationalism, it became increasingly clear, led to conclusions at odds with the revealed truths of religion. English Protestant polemicists such as John Wilkins, Thomas Hobbes and John Webster were thus in the fortunate position of being able to attack scholastic philosophy both for being untrue to itself, since it had been distorted to serve Catholic theology, and yet, if true to its pagan origins, then dangerously wrong. But many other seventeenth-century thinkers, some of them Catholic, were also able to challenge Aristotle's authority on the grounds that it promoted irreligion. The terminus of the book is the Enlightenment victory of Cartesian and Newtonian philosophy, even amongst such stalwart defenders of Aristotle as the Parisian Jesuits; hence its subtitular claim to be intimately concerned with the history of early modern science.

Despite his own emphasis on its end point, however, the story Martin tells is necessarily a long one; it reaches deep into the later Middle Ages, spends as long in the fifteenth century as in the seventeenth, and resides most of all in the sixteenth. Renaissance humanism and historicism play a key role in almost all of the chapters: in differentiating Aristotle's teachings from the Aristotelian traditions of late antiquity and the Middle Ages; in the gradual substitution of Greek texts and new Latin translations from the Greek for the Arabic-derived readings; in the disentangling of Aristotle's idea from Averroes's, and what Averroes thought Aristotle thought from what each thought independently; in motivating the study and teaching of what Aristotle himself thought, even when that was different from the doctrines that the Catholic authorities wanted scholastic philosophy to support; in learning more about Aristotle's life and context; and in understanding the reasons why earlier scholars had represented or misrepresented Aristotle's life and work in a particular way. Thus, by the end of the process Martin describes, a sophisticated historical understanding not only of Aristotle, the ancient Greek thinker, but also of the way in which different contexts had shaped the various understandings of Aristotelian philosophy in preceding centuries, was deployed by at least some of the scholars critically engaged with the various Aristotelianisms flourishing within their milieu. Over the same period, however, there was also frequent recourse to a crude character assassination which relied on the telling and retelling of historical untruths: Aristotle helped to poison Alexander the Great; he fell in love with a whore; he committed suicide; his understanding of nature, such as it was, depended on his interactions with demons. Just as many Aristotelians and anti-Aristotelians found it convenient not to try to understand what the man himself had thought, some users of history found it convenient not to represent the actual past.

Across the period covered in the book, Aristotle's compatibility with Christian orthodoxy was repeatedly doubted with respect to a small number of positions that he was thought to have held: the eternity of the world, of course, and the mortality of the soul, but also the denial of divine providence in the sublunary realm, the Averroean unicity of the intellect, and the necessity of limitations on divine omnipotence and omniscience. Martin's careful and measured exposition of Aristotle's diverse critics and champions unfortunately leaves little room for teasing out the details of these doctrines, or for discussion of Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian views on the substance and nature of the spheres, matter theory and the transmutation of elements, when they too make an appearance in his narrative. It is, therefore, a book better suited to specialists than to students. Nevertheless, it effectively demonstrates the impossibility of completely disentangling the history of premodern philosophy from the history of premodern science, and the value of bridging the medieval and early modern periods even when endeavouring to account for the distinctiveness of the ‘new sciences’ of the later seventeenth century. Thus I think it should be read by all those who teach the ‘Scientific Revolution’, the history of science and religion, and medieval and early modern philosophy – and not only by those whose research lies in one or more of those fields. Schmitt, I think, would be pleased.