ABSTRACT
Among the many explanations of the so-called Scientific Revolution, one of the more attractive relates to the temporary lowering of the social divide between the technical expertise of the craftsmen and the theoretical knowledge of the scholars. In several countries in Europe, architects, navigators, craftsmen, and surgeons contributed both to the construction of scientific knowledge and to the introduction of new methods and instruments. Italian engineers and architects led the way in the fifteenth century, but even as late as the last quarter of the seventeenth century an ordinary Dutch merchant like Antoni van Leeuwenhoek was able to stupefy the Royal Society of London with his most detailed microscopic observations of “small animals.”
