Albertus Magnus

Albert earned the title the Great in his own lifetime for the sheer breadth of what he knew. A Dominican who taught at Paris and Cologne, he set himself the task of making the whole of Aristotle available to the Latin world, and along the way wrote firsthand observations on plants, animals, and minerals at a time when most scholars only quoted books. Theology and natural inquiry, he held, need not quarrel: to look closely at the world is to read a second scripture. His most famous student, Thomas Aquinas, carried the synthesis further than the master himself.