Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Erudite nonsense.

The author through collecting specious evidence, suggests that alchemy was as rational as a premodern science. This is nonsense. While premodern scientists were mystically inclined etc., they published their manuscripts for everybody to learn and maintained active correspondence, frequently international, with their colleagues. The majority of alchemists supplied their mystico-philosophical treatises with chemical magic/experiments but they were supplied essentially as "proofs" that the author had some secret knowledge. Chemical side of alchemy did not evolve throughout many centuries and it remained a cultural phenomenon totally separate from the emergence of modern science. This is not to say that some serious scientists (Newton, Boyle) were also alchemists.

John Freely, Before Galileo: The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe, Overlook Duckworth: London, 2012.

Very good book. Heavily relies on Crombie.

Emergence of the modern science, which characterized XVI-XVII centuries (Copernicus. Tartaglia, Cardano, Galileo, Kepler, Ortolanus, etc.) could have happened two centuries before. Yet, the lights of the XIII-XIV century Oxford-Paris school (Bradwardine, Buridan, etc.) who could lead to mechanics, geometrical optics, geocentric theory in astronomy and even calculus, were prematurely extinguished. After the Great Plague, this unique international collaboration lost its significance.

My argument with Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins presumes, as do many other outspoken atheists, that the decline of religion would usher in the triumph of secular humanism. But this is not so. The retreat of organized Abrahamic religions is filled with (beginning with the least harmful)

• unrestrained consumerism and narcisisstic hedonism, threatening economic well-being of nations and the quality of the global environment; 
• the return to the heterodox pre-Christian paganism typical of the late Roman era, particularly in the guises of the New Age and American "Biblical Christianity": the glorification of militaristic state as an apex of male-centric nuclear families; and
• aggressive nationalism.

None of the intellectual/social currents superseding the organized religion is particularly better or humane than the religious bigotry they are assumed to replace.