ABSTRACT
The critical attitude towards all kinds of scriptural knowledge shown by such men as Abelard and Erasmus was shared by many others. This became increasingly obvious from the late fifteenth century onwards, as printing and epistolary networks intensified the dissemination of knowledge and the ensuing debate. It is frequently suggested that the emphasis on texts, originating from or based on the classical tradition, combined with the great influence of the Churches on education, hindered the development of the modern, more experimental sciences. However, this is not the case. The interaction between the empirical research methods of philology as used in the study of religious and literary texts and the fundamental problems which philosophy continued to formulate with regard to the nature of man and the cosmos actually stimulated experimental scrutiny in other areas, for instance, in the natural sciences.1 Thus, the Venetian Daniele Barbaro translated the work of Dioscurides which codified Greek botanical thought, yet to this text, which was not based much on empiricism, he added many a contemporary observation. Indeed, in these years, a way of thinking developed in Europe that more than ever before raised profound questions concerning perceptible reality but which also, in the long run, created a growing gulf between the real, that is to say physical world, which people now thought could be understood and explained rationally, and the world of the invisible, whose existence was acceptable only on the basis of arguments of authority and belief. The lives and works of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and the Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) show what happened.
