[...] mechanics was not unknown in the Middle Ages, and medieval thinkers continuously discussed mechanical problems at the crossroads of natural philosophy and mathematics. Mechanics enjoyed continuous interest and progress throughout the Middle Ages, and modern physicists and mathematicians relied to a large extent on results inherited from the Middle Ages. But mechanics as a scientific discipline did not always go under that name.
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The recovery of the Mechanical Problems enabled 16th-century thinkers to realise what was the real nature of the science that Aristotle had called ‘mechanics’ in some of his works. Despite the massive number of commentaries devoted to Aristotle in the prior centuries, medieval thinkers could only speculate about the exact reference of the term ‘mechanics’ that they found here and there in Aristotle’s writings, and did not realise that it corresponded with what they had been calling ‘science of weights’.
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For a long time, people in the Middle Ages did not really know that they were investigating mechanics to the extent that they did not possess the original word for it. Precisely because of that, the science they conceived became a full part of physics conceived as the study of nature and its laws, rather than a mere craft aimed at serving human interests.
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