:The Church and Galileo

Notes on Contributors

Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture Paula Findlen (bio) How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about the world! And it is all so novel, too. E. A. Burtt In the half-century since the “Scientific Revolution” became a meaningful description of the transformation of attitudes toward nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it seems to have enjoyed more lives than the Cheshire cat and to have remained as enigmatic. 1 Since its original formulation in the late 1940s, it has been the topic of a lively debate about the origins and character of modern approaches to nature and, more generally, knowledge. The result has been not only increased skepticism that the Scientific Revolution could be reduced to any single narrative, but also a profusion [End Page 243] of narratives about what constituted its fundamental characteristics. As Hayden White observes, “any given set of real events can be emplotted in a number of ways, can bear the weight of being told as any number of different stories.” 2 In the process, the Scientific Revolution, perhaps more than any other area of science studies, has become a testing ground for new approaches to the historical understanding of science and new ways of understanding the process of scientific change. Why should we feel so compelled to tell and retell this particular story in the history of science, when there are so many other episodes worthy of our attention? Surely part of the fascination lies in the sense that the Scientific Revolution is, in many respects, the original story in the history of science. From the sixteenth century onward, humanist natural philosophers—from the anatomist Andreas Vesalius to the astronomer Johannes Kepler—wrote the histories of various sciences in order to publicize the importance of their reformation of knowledge. By the eighteenth century they had become the story, protagonists of a narrative rewritten by new scholarly communities in search of modern ruptures with the past. 3 The crafting of scientific narrative has been a prolonged and self-conscious exercise in which scientists as well as historians have participated over the centuries—all the more so because neither the scientist nor the historian enjoyed distinct intellectual identities until fairly recently (quite often, as the case of the seventeenth-century statesman, historian, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon demonstrates well, they were the same person). Accordingly, we might see the Scientific Revolution as one of the fundamental experiments in narrating the history of science. While the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution has largely been a story of the rise of modern science that takes science in a fairly defined sense as its focal point, cultural approaches to the history of science suggest a variety of other possibilities that explore in greater detail the imagery that early modern Europeans had at their disposal when they attempted to describe nature. Such imagery was [End Page 244] not simply an afterthought to the study of nature; often it was so deeply embedded in the act of seeing and understanding nature that it would be impossible to separate how a particular natural philosopher viewed nature from how he viewed culture. 4 Defining nature and defining culture were complementary activities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If we wish to truly understand what it meant to do early modern science, then we need to think more carefully about what it meant to be early modern. The approach I am suggesting has already had a number of advocates. Several years ago, John Schuster remarked that “the Scientific Revolution consisted of a process of change and displacement among and within competing systems of natural philosophy,” and he recommended that historians look more carefully at the “privileged images, metaphors or models” that defined these different approaches to knowledge. 5 The literature exploring the fundamental cultural themes of the early modern period can be a rich resource for expanding our interpretations of the Scientific Revolution. 6 Since nature was never an isolated subject of study during this period but always part of some larger project, we should examine more closely those features of early modern society that best illuminate the place of...

Abstract: Women in early modern Italy were active participants in scientific inquiry and made vital contributions to the shaping of scientific culture. Yet their names are largely unfamiliar today–a problem that reverberates in the continued underrepresentation of women in STEM–partly because their contributions did not always come in the guise of published works. But the discourse of early modern natural philosophy took many other forms, unfolding in salons, academies, and private conversations, as well as on paper. A central challenge for studying the participation of women in early modern science is the emphasis traditionally placed by scholars on authorship, whether print or manuscript, when women did not always write or seek publication, and when scientific and philosophical debate often occurred in an oral context. Moreover, the project of natural philosophy, which encompassed a multifaceted set of concerns, often went hand in hand with that of literature, making it difficult to impose modern disciplinary distinctions. I argue that by considering the evidence presented in a broader variety of sources and contexts, we can begin to piece together a more coherent picture of early modern women's natural philosophical activities and opinions and restore their central role in scientific culture.

Reviewed by: The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine Bruce T. Moran James J. Bono. The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine. Vol. 1, Ficino to Descartes. Science and Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xi + 317 pp. $50.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paperbound). Where should one look for the dynamics of cultural and scientific change in early modern Europe? According to James Bono, the force of change has less to do with external conditions (e.g., the impact of printing, or social context) than with competing language theories—that is, assumptions and debates about the relation between words and things. On this account, language theory and science form “intersecting discourses” joined by means of metaphors common to each. In the case of late Renaissance science and medicine, the metaphors most frequently employed were those of the “Book” and the “Word.” The contest over narrative authority to interpret Scripture and the Book of Nature, argues Bono, led to new relationships between the languages of man and the Word of God. A number of theories regarding the nature and origins of language existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A Neoplatonic theory of language, formulated in large part by Marsilio Ficino, assumed such an intimate connection between the human word and the verbum dei as to make language the means of seizing the powers of nature. In this regard, Bono argues, Renaissance magic underscored a potentially disquieting relationship between language as a tool for acquiring knowledge and as an instrument of magical power. The Reformation advanced its own theory of language, one in which the human word became incapable of comprehending the “Word of God.” Without access to any “supernatural” language, an understanding of divine creation might still result from an exegetical reading of the “Book of Nature.” Whether truth rested in books or in nature became the focus of competing language theories, according to Bono, in a debate between Jean Fernel and William Harvey over spirits and the blood. Here, the contest of hermeneutic practices led finally to a rejection of Renaissance Neoplatonic narratives based on the assumption that ancient texts contained shadowy glimpses of divine wisdom that could be brought to light through philological studies. Both Fernel and Paracelsus viewed nature as an expression of the divine Word. And yet, as Bono shows, they developed different strategies for reading nature’s “text.” For Fernel ancient texts, although written in a “fallen,” “post-Babylonic” language, nevertheless contained a pure, hidden wisdom that [End Page 151] could be exhumed through exegetical expertise. Paracelsus, on the other hand, switched the direction of exegesis from the “Book” to “Nature.” In his “text” matter and spirit were interwoven in such a way as to allow the comprehension of the divine logos through the understanding of the signs and symbols imprinted by God in nature. In the hands of the Paracelsian Oswald Croll, the “text” of Paracelsus came to be reinscribed, in Bono’s view, by means of a “radical” Calvinist narrative of redemption and divine sovereignty. Another reading of the Book of Nature resulted from separating the knowledge of nature from theology. The principal agent in authorizing that reading was Francis Bacon, who transformed cultural narratives by recasting the biblical story of Adam and the Fall. Where Adam’s knowledge in the Garden of Eden brought with it dominion over nature, the fallen state of man subjected human beings to a distorted intellect and to sensory deceptions. These hindrances might be overcome, however, when human labor, experimental tools, and rigorous method mediated the engagement with nature. In this way, Bacon considered possible a “Great Instauration,” a restoration to something like an original Adamic perfection. Beyond the discussion of specific hermeneutic strategies, Bono’s book articulates a very important conceptual reorientation in which nature is defined less in terms of self-presenting material objects than as a “text,” the language of which depends upon a variety of narratives and linguistic assumptions. In this sense “science” itself gets redefined and embraces a broad range of discursive “practices” that are as much linguistic and rhetorical as...

Hylomorphism is, literally, matter-form-ism and an appropriate label for Aristotle's account of matter-form thinking. This chapter first explores the origin of hylomorphism in the early nineteenth-century, further showing that the term did not come to refer to the Peripatetic doctrines of and before the final two decades of the century. Next, it surveys a wide range of seventeenth-century authors, all of whom utilized these terms or their cognates toward various purposes, and the plurality of meanings for matter and form will quickly become apparent. Finally, the author argues that even as certain aspects of and were discarded, the terms remained central in accounting for change in the natural world. He compares Aristotle's position in Physics I with the seventeenth-century Peripatetic Scipion Dupleix and the Cartesian Jacque Rohault. The chapter contributes to changing the entrenched conceptions about and in Early Modern science and philosophy. Keywords:Aristotle; Dupleix; Early Modern science; hylomorphism; matter-form; philosophy; Physics I; Rohault

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 233 tween structure and agency, have led to the development oftheories like ANT. She offers a variation on poststructuralist analysis as a solu­ tion to some of these dilemmas. The theoretical circle is closed by Grint and Steve Woolgar, who critique “failures of nerve” in con­ structivist and feminist analyses of technology (p. 48). The volume also includes six case studies. Telephones, household appliances, reproductive technologies, software, and computers are the technologies analyzed. The methods and sources used vary widely. For instance: Valerie Frissen’s essay on the gendering of tele­ phone use borrows from a wide variety of contemporary and histori­ cal secondary sources. Danielle Chabaud-Rychter followed a group of appliance designers through the design process of coffeemakers and food processors. The result is a suggestive analysis of the gen­ dered nature of the producer-consumer dichotomy. Vicky Singleton offers a highly theorized use ofANT in analyzing cervical screening programs. These case studies are most convincing when they employ field research rather than examples gleaned from secondary sources. Most ofthe technologies in question have already been wellstudied and are gendered in conspicuous ways. Hopefully, as this debate continues, researchers will take on other, less obvious, cases. In the introduction to The Social Construction of Technological Sys­ tems, Bijker, Pinch, and Hughes wrote that it began as a conversation between historians and sociologists over glasses of pink champagne. Both the virtues and the shortcomings of Grint and Gill’s volume suggest that perhaps another conversation is in order, between histo­ rians and sociologists interested in gender. This time, the cham­ pagne need not be pink. Arwen Palmer Mohun Dr. Mohun is an assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware. She is currently completing a comparative history ofgender and technology in the steam laundry industry. Instruments and the Imagination. Edited by Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv+337; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.50 (cloth). An interestin scientific instruments has become an importantpart of new directions in the history of science. This interest is not nar­ rowly focused upon the artifacts themselves. Instead, key instru­ ments, placed in a societal and intellectual framework, are used to clarify the social, and especially the philosophical, foundations of modern science. Hankins and Silverman’s book extends this new approach to include the marginal instruments that hover some­ where between science and the magical and the occult. A new kind of instrument emerged in the Scientific Revolution 234 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE of the 17th century. Telescopes, microscopes, and air pumps were unlike traditional instruments because they distorted nature. The distortion was accomplished through magnification, in the case of optical instruments, or by creating an unnatural void in the evacu­ ated chambers of an air pump. These new instruments, termed phil­ osophical, quickly earned a place in early modern science. The origins of philosophical instruments are more complex and problematic than we have been led to suppose. Our familiarity with telescopes and microscopes masks the fact that many philosophical instruments began as devices of natural magic used to produce won­ drous, awe-inspiring effects. Hankins and Silverman investigate the place ofinstruments in natural magic and early modern science and reveal the philosophical presuppositions that governed their diverse uses. Convincing proof of the authors’ ability to make the most bizarre instrument yield a valuable philosophical and historical lesson is found in their chapter recounting the famous sunflower clock de­ vised by the 17th-century polymath, Athanasius Kircher. According to Kircher, a sunflower blossom placed on a freely moving platform will rotate following the motion of the sun. This botanical timepiece was said to operate indoors from sunrise to sunset on bright or cloudy days. The driving force, Kircher claimed, was the magnetic influence the sun exerted on the sunflower. Notable scientific fig­ ures, including Galileo and Descartes, joined the discussion about the clock’s operation. It would be wrong to declare Kircher a fraud when we learn that his sunflower acted like a clock because hidden magnets, driven by a clockwork mechanism, caused the blossom to rotate in a regular fashion, argue Hankins and Silverman. Kircher did...

The explosive clergy sex-abuse scandal forced the Roman Catholic Church members, clergy, and church leaders to renegotiate the kind of dialogue that they will have with each other. As the full dimensions of the clergy sex-abuse scandal in Boston came to light during 2002, the public response of Cardinal Law and other church leaders to victims, and groups of clergy and laity was often adversarial. While some of the Cardinal's actions were consistent with his stated goal of protecting children, his behavior revealed the unstated goal of protecting the institution of the church, its leadership structure, and ultimately, his own position. By contrast, Bishop Wilton Gregory's November 2002 presidential address to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops employed a more complex model of negotiation: he articulated broad goals to attract the support of his various audiences and while postponing discussion of the controversies that will attend efforts to reach those goals. Ultimately, the future of relations among church members, clergy, and church leaders will depend on how successfully these groups can negotiate church membership.

ON THE EDGE OF ETERNITY: The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Ivano Dal Prete. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022. 214 pages of text plus 82 pages of notes, a bibliography, an index, and sixteen pages of black-and-white halftones. Hardcover; $37.99. ISBN: 9780190678890. Kindle; $25.99. ISBN: 9780190678890. *Ivano Dal Prete is a senior lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine program at Yale University. After receiving his doctorate at the University of Verona, he served as a visiting professor at Columbia, Harvard, and Minnesota before coming to Yale. He has published two prior books in Italian on early modern science and its culture. He is also an amateur astronomer and is the co-discoverer of several asteroids. *On the Edge of Eternity is a helpful and also a disturbing book. Dal Prete's explicit purpose "is to take the first steps toward a new paradigm for the history of deep time in Western culture. It aims to replace the view of a relatively recent discovery of the "abyss" of geological time with one that accounts for the complexity, diversity, and social and cultural significance of pre-modern Earth history" (p. 7). *In the process of his detailed narrative, he demonstrates how an originally multi-perspectival conversation could sadly devolve into polemics and escalating polarization, mimicking (or predicting?) what we have seen during the past century and a half. *Dal Prete carefully lays out the groundwork for his narrative in the first two chapters. Chapter 1, "Footprints in the Dust," concisely introduces classical sources such as Eusebius, Augustine, Avicenna, and Boethius, and their late medieval successors including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Of particular interest was the question of whether the world (today we might think of the material universe) was eternal or had a beginning in time (or with time). The question became highlighted following the translation of Aristotle's major works from Arabic into Latin during the twelfth century and played into the theses of the Fourth Lateran Council and later the controversies at the University of Paris during the thirteenth century. As Aquinas put it, reason could not assess whether the earth was eternal or not, but scripture settled the matter with an absolute beginning in time. However, many aspects of Earth history could be made to mesh with either viewpoint. This provided for a multiplicity of opinions and openings for merging empirical observations with philosophical perspective. For example, Noah's Flood could be a global catastrophe or a local catastrophe; further, it could be a singular event or one of many, repeatedly forced by hypothesized interchanges of land and water, hinted at in Aristotle's Meteorologica. *Chapter 2, "The Medieval Earth," summarizes multiple running debates, extending through the fourteenth century. A problematic issue was the origin of mountains. Erosion of highlands was easily observable, and without a mechanism to raise new highlands, the only result could be the washing of the entirety of the exposed earth into the sea. Thus, without such a mechanism, Earth's age would be constrained. But perhaps Aristotelian or Ptolemaic understandings of Earth's figure and the sea-land boundary could be used to support many cycles of erosion and sedimentation, resulting in new uplifts. Claims for astral influences were yet considered possible by many as well. Dal Prete examines the give-and-take between intellectuals such as Jean Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Pierre d'Ailly, and Dante Alighieri, among others. *Chapter 3, "Vernacular Earths, 1250-1500" broadens attention to the northern Italian Renaissance community of the mercantile class, including artisans and engineers, outside the university faculties. During this period, translations of the classical authors into vernacular dialects became widely available, as well as newer encyclopedic summaries of useful knowledge--for example, mathematics, astronomy/astrology, medicine. Coincidently, northern Italy developed as a major mining center, which literally opened up fertile material (rocks) for speculation. The nascent science of stratigraphy was developing, two centuries prior to Steno. Dal Prete convincingly argues that Leonardo da Vinci was not a lone predecessor of modern natural science, as is often depicted, but rather "just the most celebrated representative of an extremely rich and variegated tradition" (p. 77). Further, typifying his cultural milieu, "Leonardo's writings do not provide the slightest hint that the idea of a young Earth ever crossed his mind. The Italian artist failed to bring up the problem not because it was too much an issue, but because it was not an issue at all. While his world was expanding horizontally toward other continents and vertically in the underground, the one dimension that did not need to be enlarged was time" (p. 90). *If this book were a novel, Dal Prete would have now laid the detailed foundation for ensuing confusion, conflict, and misrepresentation. Unfortunately, this is not a novel. Things begin to unwind in chapter 4, "A ‘Pious' History of the Earth? 1500-1650." Here, Dal Prete explicates the creative attempts to formulate a physico-theology for Earth's historical development during the period of the Reformation. Within Reformation-era Protestantism, the principle of Sola scriptura settled the question of Earth's possible eternity. Earth had a definite beginning in (linear) time. But Sola scriptura could be employed to argue for a face-value interpretation of the genealogies of Genesis, plus a 24-hour-day view of the Creation week, to yield a very compressed Creation account. Reflexively, Counter-Reformation scholars, in their efforts to outdo their Protestant counterparts, often employed the same tactics and principles to take back the "high ground." Their efforts were also responses to the great voyages of discovery, which revealed whole segments of humanity previously unknown to the Christian world. What was the relationship of the inhabitants of the New World to the biblical genealogies? A strict appeal to the Flood of Noah as a singular Earth agent provided an anchor for a lineal descent of the American aboriginal population from Noah and therefore from Adam; they were thus inheritors of the Divine image. *Chapter 5, "The Rise of Diluvialism, 1650-1720," expeditiously covers a lot of territory that will be familiar to many of our readers. During this period, early Earth scientists, including Kircher, de Maillet, Aldrovandi, Scilla, Hooke, Burnet, Woodward, Vallisneri, and others grappled with observations of marine fossils in layered rocks exposed in mountains. They pondered a possible relationship to the Noachian Flood, but derived disparate histories. Some retained a modified Aristotelian Earth, with a protracted history of alterations of land and sea. Some natural historians attempted to meld the rock record with a Noachian Flood in a Newtonian gravity-driven world. Others argued for the strictly miraculous nature of the Flood of Noah, that could not be expected to yield a record in the rocks. But overall, "the idea of a ‘Mosaic' natural philosophy met with considerable success, and its influence was profound" (p. 127). *In chapter 6, "The Invention of the History of Deep Time, 1700-1770," Dal Prete examines a diversity of Enlightenment-era historians and philosophers. These vary from Christians (e.g., Leibniz, Calmet) to deists (Voltaire, Buffon) to atheists (de Maillet, Diderot, Boulanger, d'Holbach). Their proposed schemes for cosmic and human prehistory demonstrate varying familiarity with real Earth phenomena, as well as an expansive willingness to speculate beyond the evidence at hand. However, they realized correctly that Earth must be quite old. Unfortunately, the increasingly strident, even vicious, polemics that some of these thinkers offered against the Christian faith engendered a wide range of popular respondents. And unfortunately, many of these respondents easily seized on diluvialist versions of Earth histories to rebut anti-Creation philosophies. Thus, a century and a half before European and American rationalists invented the "warfare" thesis, a popular perception began to emerge that materialist philosophies often went hand-in-glove with the study of nature. *At this point, Dal Prete returns to Venice and northeastern mainland Italy, in chapter 7, "Political Fossils, 1740-1800." Italian translations of works of the French materialists began to appear in northern Italy in 1740. Up until this time, there had existed a strong community involvement in natural history pursuits. These included clergy: the priest Giovanni Giacomo Spada is reported to have put together a collection of fossil fishes (from the nearby site of Monte Bolca, famed among modern paleontologists) that was far superior to that of John Woodward. But after 1740, numerous books appeared arguing the diluvialist cause. Fossils were co-opted as evidences for the Flood and a young age of Earth. Dal Prete carefully chronicles how the political and economic elites of the region "elaborated a diluvialist orthodoxy allegedly supported by ‘true philosophy' and ‘sane science,' which appeared very different from the Earth history many enlightened Catholics conceived only a few decades earlier" (p. 183). *I found this book useful (but disturbing) for three reasons: (1) Dal Prete demonstrates that prior to AD 1700, many serious Christian scholars realized Earth was an old object and saw no theological problem; (2) the classic fairytale of some age-long conflict between Christianity and natural science began to be manufactured during the eighteenth century, long before Draper, White, and others in the later nineteenth century; and (3) Dal Prete demonstrates that the oversimplistic claims and harsh rhetoric of the diluvialists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, provoked by and responding to erudite but self-important atheists, eerily presage the writings of twentieth-century diluvialists. And thus, the magnificence of God's creative activity in deep time is clouded by verbiage. Ouch. *Reviewed by Ralph Stearley, Professor of Geology Emeritus, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49546.

Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective

In the 17th century, the Dutch Republic was the centre of the world trade in exotic drugs and spices. They were sought after both as medicines, and as luxury objects for the bourgeois class, giving rise to a medical and moral anxiety in the Republic. This ambivalent view on exotic drugs is the theme of the poetry of Joannes Six van Chandelier (1620-1695). Six, who himself ran the drug shop 'The Gilded Unicorn' in Amsterdam, addresses a number of exotic medicines in his poems, such as musk, incense, the miracle drug theriac, Egyptian mumia, and even the blood of Charles I of England. In Dangerous Drugs, these texts are studied for the first time. The study shows how Six, through a process of self-presentation as a sober and restrained merchant, but also as a penitent sinner, thirsting for God's grace, links early modern drug abuse to different desires, such as lust, avarice, pride and curiosity. The book shows also how an early modern debate on exotic drugs contributed to an important shift in early modern natural science, from a drug lore based on mythical and fabulous concepts, to a botany based on observation and systematic examination.

In 1712 the poet Elkanah Settle (1648–1724) published a funeral poem, Threnodia Apollinaris , dedicated to the memory of Dr Martin Lister.[1][1] Settle had a good deal of material to draw upon, because Lister had been Vice-President of the Royal Society, a physician to Queen Anne, and the first

The previous chapters have explored the notion of consumerism as mind mattering. Consumerism was more than consumption. It was not only the acquisition of more, but also the discrimination of better. It was the application of those mental structures in food, dress, shelter, utilities and information, which have been analysed above. The present chapter is concerned with the inverse phenomenon: matter minding. Here, commodities, used as symbols, shaped thought in a reversal of the previous order of causality. Levi-Strauss declared that for primitives, animals were not just good to eat, but also good to think.1 The same principle of symbolism applied to the other natural and cultural objects in which they found structures variously encoded. During the period of globalization 1400–1800, as consumerism stretched out its hands to the planet, the number of such objects multiplied, not only for Europeans, but also for Chinese. The effect of this multiplication on thought is what is discussed below. Though concrete mythological thinking had long been marginalized, in the early modern period, philosophy, science, politics, art theory and religious devotion did not disdain the reinforcement afforded by the new commodities. This chapter, like its predecessors, consists of two unequal parts. First, it will examine the ways in which commodities enter thought as symbols.

Notes on Contributors

<i>Nancy Bradley Warren</i> The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700<i>The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700</i>. Nancy Bradley Warren. University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. ix +339.

This chapter examines the role of science in contemporary democracy and the origins of early modern science. It explores how early modern science gave increased importance to creativity and control without avoiding the tensions among common sense, expert knowledge, and instrumental power evident in Machiavelli’s writings. It discusses Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and other heroes of seventeenth-century science and their works and contributions to modern science. The chapter also explores certain elements of the social history of modern science that speak to the relationship between science and democracy today. Science is not only a body of knowledge but also a combination of norms and institutions, an orientation toward experience and action with potential resonance for politics. The chapter concludes with a point about how these conflicting dimensions of seventeenth-century science continue to shape both political and scientific representation in democracy today.