ABSTRACT
The interaction of science, magic, and humanism was a characteristic feature of the late fifteenth century. It represented in part the humanist's effort to assert their control and the supremacy of their method over all fields, philosophical and scientific as well as philological and literary. Humanism and philology seem blind alleys next to the royal road of direct study of nature, controlled experiment and quantitative natural laws that the great men of the Scientific Revolution would have to travel. Throughout the sixteenth century, Italian and Northern scientists alike carried on a similar enterprise of collation and explication of scientific texts, and debated recognizably similar ideas. Tommaso Campanellas cosmos tries to combine traditional assumptions about the order and nature of the cosmos with new visions of physical force, astronomical law and the world of the elements. The humanists provided much of the new rhetoric that seventeenth-century science would deploy in its own defence sometimes against later defenders of the humanist tradition.
