ABSTRACT
The twentieth-century historian of science Edwin Burtt remarked in his Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, “It is the ultimate picture which an age forms of the nature of its world that is its most fundamental possession. It is the final controlling factor in all thinking whatever.”1 The picture that Europeans had of their world underwent incredible revision during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There were many factors driving the change, including the widespread use of the printing press, the discovery of new “worlds” by sea-faring explorers, political reorganization and revolution, and the scientific and philosophical revolutions. These were at the same time causes and effects of the changes during this period of intellectual history we now call modernism, and they fundamentally shaped the world picture of the time.
