It was inevitable. An e-mail (for more context on Galileo, Jonah has long been on the case):

Rich,
I wanted to add a few tidbits, which I will not back up with scholarship here, but can if you want more than my word on it: 1) Church and state were separate in Medieval Europe. The Magna Charta’s (yes, with a “h”) first article was that the English Church shall be free. The unification of Church and State under “divine right” was a concept invented by Tyndale (ironically, the guy Derb loves) in the early 1500’s. Before that, medieval law (constitutional and statutory) limited state power and prelate power severely. Germany even had a legally enshrined right to revolt if certain natural rights to private property were not honored (can you tell I wrote a paper on it yet?). True there was a state religion like the ones we had in the colonies and early history of the U.S.; but it was nothing like the caricature. Heretics were not burned until they set fire to something themselves (German Lutherans, for instance, were left alone until they killed tens of thousands in a culticidal glut–the Catholics responded in kind of course, but the liberty point stands). 2) O Galileo, ah thus were you ever the pawn! The case against Galileo is this: he did what climatologists do today. He made scientific observations which everyone took under consideration, but then theorized that various religious tenets were false (and he was wrong) because of his science which demonstrated no such thing as he claimed it did with regard to doctrines etc). Nietzsche jokes about the leech doctor–”actually a doctor specializing in one part of the leeches brain”–who thinks his true knowledge gives him the ability to extrapolate far beyond what the learning actually warrants, wandering into ethics, history, economics, etc. Galileo chose heresy when his science did not even warrant an opinion on the religious matters he meddled in. Again, state religion and all that was a problem here, but, again, the science point stands (not to mention the complexity of “Italy” at that time with free republics like Venice, free cities like Sienna, and fluctuating papal protectorates (here, the Enlightenment folks have a real point–but it is the exception in Europe, by far–like Justice O’Connor citing Swiss law for precedent).
As you can see this is not an apology for the Middle Ages, which had its troubles. I just want to comment on the Enlightenment narrative…add my two cents to your other emailer. Hobbes, Bacon, Spenser, et al. wanted science to trump religion because there were now gobs of religious wars since church and state had been united in the divine right of kings doctrine that arose in the 1500s (Q. Elizabeth could annul marriages for state reasons, for instance–and did). In that circumstance, religion is the straw man: what they are really concerned about is a political situation in which the rulers want to wear the cloak of president and pope (if you will, caesaropapism)–Henry the Eighth is the obvious one because he accepted divine right explicitly, but the Catholic princes followed suit shortly thereafter with their own “Catholic” versions of divine right. In order to pry them apart, Hobbes and others tried to disparage religion as irrational and to praise science as the sole health of the state in order to convince rulers and gentry to embrace their proper cowl of secular competency, namely the rule by reason, by science (not just algebra and chem, but also rhetoric and philosophy–just leave off the theology and ecclesiology). As a professed Hamiltonian-Madisonian–hitting you where it hurts, heh heh–I caution you not to embrace the French Revolution and Jeffersonian agit-prop that says all was monkish ignorance before the Enlightenment. A mouthful, to be sure. I hope I do not offend. Having studied Thomas More a bunch (a saint of both the Roman and Anglican Churches), I tend to bristle at that narrative because I know how hard he fought to keep England free….

UPDATE

An e-mail in response:

Your writer wrote, “Heretics were not burned until they set fire to something themselves.” I don’t pretend to whatever level of scholarship the writer may have, but Jan Hus is an obvious counter-example.
I’m not sure, either, what he meant by German Lutherans being left alone. That simply is not the case with Luther, who had to hide to avoid church-sanctioned assassination.