I do think though that the cliché is not far from the truth. Please do not expect to find a good book about the great mathematical achievements during the western middle ages: there were not more achievements than the few outliers we all know.

Although I have not read Hannam book yet, I´m highly interested in the history of ideas in general and specially in the history of scientific ideas. To put all the authors that appears in Hannam´s book in context I suggest as a good reading Etienne Gilson´s la Philosophie au Moyen Age (I et II). That´s the book that helped me to understand christianism in deep. There we can see that christianism from its begining to today´s was nor against science, neither for science: it was about souls, God and salvation; and therefore, in general, science indifferent. Due to this, it is very difficult to proove if science predominates today thanks or despite christianism. And this is surely truth regarding any other religion.

From any past period in history you can select some authors, and from these authors extract some sentences or facts so that the reader has the feeling that what has beeing said about the period this author lived on is not correct. Hannam is a self-declared Christian, I guess a Roman Catholic, and as such i suppose he is writing the kind of revisionist history book we are seeing frequently lately. But to have contributed to to the birth of science or on the contrary to have delayed its development is completely irrelevant from a Christian point of view: this was not in the past, it is not today, its purpose.

Personally, as an atheist, I´m more interested in two related debates which are also revisited by scholars from time to time: was there really a western scientific revolution or just a continous evolution from antiquity to today ? was science really a exclusively western european institution until XX century ?

Ps. I´m awaiting impatiently for the new 2011 posts on the symmetric group !