ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines early-modern geopolitical and epistemological developments. That move is left to the third innovation to consider in the periods intellectual culture: modern natural science. The book of nature, to adopt the ubiquitous period metaphor, must first of all be discovered; but then it must submit to further discovery of its intelligible structureits sense, in semantic terms. Although scholars have been dubious about the natural-philosophical efficacy of Bacons method whether or not it actually helps the proto-scientist to understand any phenomena Matthews argues that its real role is to ground natural-philosophical efficacy as such. In the end a various collection of evidence for the hypothesis that early-modern European culture offers us an hermeneutic scene in which discovery, as it were, was waiting to be invented. The techniques with which that work is done here, for the most part, philological and historiographic.
