ABSTRACT
The intellectual foundation for the great philosophical and legal minds like those of Bodin and Bacon came from the apparently unholy alliance between the Church and the philosophy of Aristotle. Known best as Peripateticism, after the alleged habit that the Philosopher had of wandering about the groves of his academy, the Lyceum, as he lectured, the great medieval edifice of Aristotelian philosophy allied itself with the Church through the educational system and dogmatic cosmology. The lessons offered by late Renaissance practitioners produced an easily recognizable style of discourse. For Renaudot, popular science was but one source of amusement, administrative responsibility, editorial practice, and income, Renaudot began his career as a physician in the province of Louis's chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu. The locus classicus for debates between the old philosophy and the new science came in astronomy. The battle between ancient and modern learning came in a rather different context in France: Literature, rather than science, provided the field of conflict.
