ABSTRACT

The term ‘Scientific Revolution’ refers to a period stretching roughly from 1500 to 1700. Its beginning is generally associated with the works of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and the anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-64) and its climax with the English expeRimental philosopheR Isaac Newton (16431727). While the precise nature of developments is a matter of debate, all scholars agree that it is a key moment when a specific way of looking at the natural world – what we call ‘modern science’ – began to take shape. Although very familiar to us today, the term was only coined in the 1940s by historians and philosophers interested in the history of the sciences (Box 1). With the term ‘revolution’, they emphasized the idea of a sudden and dramatic change in the way Europeans understood the physical world in the early modern period. But what exactly did change? For these scholars, most of them champions of intellectual history, the change manifested itself in the way people were thinking about nature. For them, the most important element of scientific endeavour was ‘thought’: bold, logical, objective, abstract and predominantly male. Their writings hailed the so-called Scientific Revolution as the triumph of a fearless, rational mind over the superstitious and backward reasoning of the dark Middle Ages. Since the 1970s, however, this heroic view of the Scientific Revolution has come under attack. Scholars felt increasingly uneasy with the very idea of the Scientific Revolution as a singular and discrete event. Medieval historians, for example, have shown that their period was certainly not characterized by ignorance and scientific backwardness. On the contrary, they argued, medieval philosophers provided the foundation for the Scientific Revolution. Following these claims, John Henry argued that no single coherent cultural entity called ‘science’ underwent revolutionary change

in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, simply because the modern notion of ‘science’ only emerged after 1800 (Henry 1997, 4). Before that date, it is now agreed, the natural world was approached with the intellectual and practical tools belonging to a scholarly tradition best described as natuRal philosophy (Dear 2001, 199). Natural philosophers were not concerned with discovering new things but aimed at explaining the entire existing system of the world. Their knowledge and practices covered such diverse fields as navigation, mining, medicine, botany, pharmacology, geology, alchemy, astronomy, but also philosophy, theology and law. Henry therefore warned that the Scientific Revolution must not be seen as a revolution in science, but as a set of dramatic transformations moving natural philosophy towards our modern concept of science. Particularly striking is the increased use of mathematics and measurements to obtain a more precise idea of how the world and its parts work. Moreover, natural philosophers began to trust observations and personal experiences more than ancient texts and, where necessary, embarked on specifically conceived experiments to gain a better understanding of nature’s secrets. Historians also reassessed the socio-cultural context in which scientific practices developed. The long-cherished image of the lonely male investigator of nature, obsessed with his work and immune to any worldly temptations, came under increasing attack. Equipped with methods from neighbouring disciplines like sociology or anthropology, historians began to investigate the context of early modern science. They tried to see the world through the eyes of their historical actors and asked, for example, how their scientific enterprise was shaped by institutions such as the early modern patRonage system or the etiquette of court culture. Feminist scholars demanded a place for women in the heroic accounts of the Scientific Revolution. Why is it, they asked, that hardly any women featured in the many histories of the Scientific Revolution? What are the socio-cultural reasons for their invisibility? As a result of subsequent investigations, we now know more about the activities of women as independent researchers (e.g. the German painter and botanist Maria Sybilla Merian, 1646-1717), as patrons (e.g. the English natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish,

1623-73) or as matrons of an early modern ‘scientific’ household (e.g. Jane Dee, 1555-1605, wife of the court physician John Dee, 1527-1608), and how significant they actually were for the development of modern science (Davis 1995; Schiebinger 1989; Harkness 1997). Despite these recent debates, many historians still speak of a ‘Scientific Revolution’, since natural philosophers themselves, particularly those of the seventeenth century, believed that they were doing something radically new and different from their predecessors. Peter Dear has argued that the term should be reserved for the seventeenth century, when there is overwhelming evidence for the desire to break with previous conceptions and practices. Natural philosophers of the sixteenth century, in contrast, merely sought to ‘correct’ mistakes and ‘renew’ ancient wisdom. This phase, personified by Nicolaus Copernicus and Andreas Vesalius, may be best conceptualized as a ‘Scientific Renaissance’ (Dear 2001).