THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

VOLUME 3

Early Modern Science

Volume 3 offers a broad and detailed account of how the study of nature was transformed in Europe between ca. 1500 and ca. 1700. Chapters on how nature was studied, where, and by whom cover disciplines from astronomy and astrology to magic and natural history, sites of knowledge from the laboratory and the battlefield to the library and the marketplace, and types of knowers, from university professors and apothecaries to physicians and instrument makers. Separate sections on “The New Nature” and “Cultural Meanings of Natural Knowledge” address the impact of the new natural knowledge on conceptions of nature, experience, explanation, and evidence and on religion, art, literature, gender, and European self-definition, respectively. Contributions are written in clear, accessible prose, with extensive bibliographical notes, by noted specialists. The volume offers to scholars and general readers a synoptic overview of the research on early modern science that has challenged the traditional view of the “Scientific Revolution” while emphasizing profound but diverse changes in natural knowledge during this key epoch in European history.

Katharine Park is Samuel Zemurray, Jr., and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science and of the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. In addition to Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998), she is the author of Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (1985) and The Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (2006).

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Honorary Professor at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is the author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (1998, with Katharine Park), Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen: Zur Geschichte der Rationalität (2001), and Images of Objectivity (2006, with Peter Galison).

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

General editors
David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers

VOLUME 1: Ancient Science
Edited by Alexander Jones

VOLUME 2: Medieval Science
Edited by David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank

VOLUME 3: Early Modern Science
Edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston

VOLUME 4: Eighteenth-Century Science
Edited by Roy Porter

VOLUME 5: The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences
Edited by Mary Jo Nye

VOLUME 6: The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences
Edited by Peter Bowler and John Pickstone

VOLUME 7: The Modern Social Sciences
Edited by Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross

VOLUME 8: Modern Science in National and International Context
Edited by David N. Livingstone and Ronald L. Numbers

David C. Lindberg is Hilldale Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has written or edited a dozen books on topics in the history of medieval and early modern science, including The Beginnings of Western Science (1992). He and Ronald L. Numbers have previously coedited God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (1986) and Science and the Christian Tradition: Twelve Case Histories (2003). A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has been a recipient of the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, of which he is also past president (1994–5).

Ronald L. Numbers is Hilldale and William Coleman Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he has taught since 1974. A specialist in the history of science and medicine in America, he has written or edited more than two dozen books, including The Creationists (1992) and Darwinism Comes to America (1998). A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former editor of Isis, the flagship journal of the history of science, he has served as the president of both the American Society of Church History (1999–2000) and the History of Science Society (2000–1).

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

VOLUME 3

Early Modern Science

Edited by
KATHARINE PARK
LORRAINE DASTON

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521572446

© Cambridge University Press 2006

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2006

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

(Revised for volume 3)
The Cambridge history of science
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
Contents: – v. 3. Early modern science / edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston
v. 4. Eighteenth-century science / edited by Roy Porter
v. 5. The modern physical and mathematical sciences / edited by Mary Jo Nye
v. 7. The modern social sciences / edited by Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross
ISBN 0-521-57244-4 (v. 3)
ISBN 0-521-57243-6 (v. 4)
ISBN 0-521-57199-5 (v. 5)
ISBN 0-521-59442-1 (v. 7)
1. Science – History. I. Lindberg, David C. II. Numbers, Ronald L.
Q125C32    2001
509 – dc21
2001025311

ISBN-13 978-0-521-57244-6 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-57244-4 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for
the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or
third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such
Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

KIRSTI ANDERSEN teaches the history of mathematics in the History of Science Department at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. She has published on the developments leading to Newton’s and Leibniz’s creation of the calculus and is currently finishing The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory of Perspective from Alberti to Monge.

JIM BENNETT is Director of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford. He has published on a wide range of topics in the history of practical mathematics, astronomy, and scientific instruments from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.

DOMENICO BERTOLONI MELI teaches the history of science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Equivalence and Priority (1993, paperback, 1997) and the editor of Marcello Malpigh: Anatomist and Physician (1997). His forthcoming book Thinking with Objects: The Transformations of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century is to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press. His current research concerns mechanistic anatomy in the seventeenth century.

ANN BLAIR teaches in the History Department at Harvard University. She is the author of The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (1997) and is currently working on a project entitled “Coping with Information Overload in Early Modern Europe.”

HENK J. M. BOS is Professor of the History of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at Utrecht University. He has published on Huygens’s mathematical and scientific work, the fundamental concepts of the Leibnizian calculus, and Descartes’ geometry, including the monograph Redefining Geometrical Exactness: Descartes’ Transformation of the Early Modern Concept of Construction (2001). He is editor, together with Jed Buchwald, of the Archive for History of Exact Sciences.

MARY BAINE CAMPBELL is Professor of English and American Literature at Brandeis University. She is the author of The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (1988), and Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (1999), as well as two collections of poetry. She is currently studying early modern dreams and dream theories in relation to the fate of metaphor and the reorganization of knowledge in that period.

HAROLD J. COOK is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. He has published many essays and articles on early modern medicine and is the author of The Decline of the Old Medical Regime (1986) and Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London (1994), which won the Welch Medal (of the American Association of the History of Medicine). He is currently working on a book about medicine and natural history in the Dutch Golden Age.

ALIX COOPER teaches early modern European history, history of science, and environmental history in the History Department at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. She is currently preparing for publication Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and the Inventory of Nature in Early Modern Europe.

BRIAN P. COPENHAVER is Professor of Philosophy and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include Renaissance Philosophy (1992), Hermetica (1992), and Polydore Vergil, On Discovery (2002), in addition to chapters in The Cambridge History of Philosophy on magic and science and many related articles. His current research focuses on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.

LORRAINE DASTON is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Honorary Professor at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is the author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (1998, with Katharine Park), and Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen: Zur Geschichte der Rationalität (2001) and editor of Biographies of Scientific Objects (2000), The Moral Authority of Nature (2003, with Fernando Vidal), and Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (2004). With Peter Galison, she is completing Images of Objectivity.

PETER DEAR teaches in the departments of History and Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Mersenne and the Learning of the Schools (1988), Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (1995), and Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (2001), as well as a forthcoming book on intelligibility in science.

KELLY DEVRIES is Professor of History at Loyola College in Maryland. His books include Medieval Military Technology (1992), Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century: Discipline, Tactics, and Technology (1996), The Norwegian Invasion of England in 1066 (1999), Joan of Arc: A Military History (1999), A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology (2002), and Guns and Men in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500: Studies in Military History and Technology (2002). The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy, 1363–1477, coauthored with Robert D. Smith, is to be published shortly. He edits the Journal of Medieval Military History and is the series editor for the History of Warfare series of Brill Publishing.

WILLIAM DONAHUE is Co-Director of Green Lion Press in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and translator of Kepler’s Astronomia nova and Kepler’s Optics. He is completing a guidebook to Kepler’s planetary theory as developed in the Astronomia nova.

WILLIAM EAMON is Regents Professor of History at New Mexico State University, where he teaches the history of science and medicine and early modern history. His research concerns science and popular culture in early modern Europe as well as the history of science in early modern Italy and Spain. He is the author of Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (1994) and The Charlatan’s Tale: A Renaissance Surgeon’s World (forthcoming). He is at work on a book titled Science and Everyday Life in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1750.

RIVKA FELDHAY is Professor of History of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Her publications include Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? (1995, reprint 1999); “The Use and Abuse of Mathematical Entities: Galileo and the Jesuits Revisited,” in P. Machamer (ed.), A Companion to Galileo (1998); “The Cultural Field of Jesuit Sciences,” in J. O’Malley, S.J. et al. (eds.), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (1999); “Giordano Bruno Nolanus: Authoritarian Sage and Martyr for Free Speech,” in Lord Dahrendorf et al. (eds.), The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences (2000); “Strangers to Ourselves: Identity Construction and Historical Research,” in M. Zuckermann (ed.), Psychoanalyse und Geschichte in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch f̣uer deutsche Geshchichte (2004).

PAULA FINDLEN is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994) and other studies of science and culture in the early modern period. She has coedited Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (2002, with Pamela H. Smith) and edited Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (2004).

DANIEL GARBER is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and Associated Faculty in the Program in the History of Science. He is the author of Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (1992) and Descartes Embodied (2001), and he is the coeditor of The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1998, with Michael Ayers). He is working on early seventeenth-century Aristotelianisms and anti-Aristotelianisms and on a monograph on Leibniz’s conception of the physical world.

ANTHONY GRAFTON teaches history and history of science at Princeton University. He has written widely on the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West, and the history of science. Among other books, he is the author of Joseph Scaliger (1983–93), Leon Battista Alberti (2001), and Bring Out Your Dead (2002).

STEVEN J. HARRIS has taught at Harvard University, Brandeis University, and Wellesley College. His main research interest has concerned the scientific activities of members of the Society of Jesus. He is coeditor of two volumes on Jesuit cultural history, The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (1999, second volume to appear in 2006). His current work is on the history of early modern cosmography.

ADRIAN JOHNS teaches in the Department of History and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (1998). He is currently working on a history of intellectual piracy from the invention of print to the present.

LYNN S. JOY, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, teaches modern philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of science. She is the author of Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (1987/2002). She currently writes on contemporary meta-ethics as well as the history of ethics. Her work-in-progress includes Making Sense of Normativity, a book on the role of natural dispositions in explaining moral norms and values, and articles such as “Hume on Natural and Moral Dispositions” and “Newtonianism without God: Hume as a Philosophical Critic.”

PAOLO MANCOSU is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests are in mathematical logic and the history and philosophy of mathematics. He is the author of Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Practice in the Seventeenth Century (1996) and From Brouwer to Hilbert (1998). He has coedited the volume Explanation, Visualizations and Reasoning Styles in Mathematics (2005).

BRUCE T. MORAN is Professor of History at the University of Nevada at Reno, where he teaches the history of science and early medicine. In addition to other books and articles, he is the author of Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry and Scientific Revolution (2005) and is completing another study, “Chemists and Cultures in Early Modern Germany: The Torments and Tempests of Andrea Libavius.”

WILLIAM R. NEWMAN is Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University. He works on the history of medieval and early modern alchemy, natural philosophy, and matter theory. His most recent books are Alchemy Tried in the Fire (2002, with Lawrence M. Principe), Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (2004), and Atoms and Alchemy: Geber, Sennert, Boyle, and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (forthcoming, 2006). He is also researching the “chymistry” of Isaac Newton.

CARMEN NIEKRASZ is a doctoral student in the Art History Department at Northwestern University. Her dissertation title is “Flemish Tapestry and Natural History, 1550–1600.”

DORINDA OUTRAM is Franklin I. Clark Professor of History at the University of Rochester. She has published widely on the history of science, the Enlightenment, and the history of exploration and culture contact in the same period. She is the author of The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (1989) and The Enlightenment (1995) and is currently working on a project on the history of foolishness.

KATHARINE PARK is Samuel Zemurray, Jr., and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science and of the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She studies the history of science and medicine in late medieval and Renaissance Europe and the history of women, gender, and the body. Her books include Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (1985), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (1998, with Lorraine Daston), and The Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (2006).

H. DARREL RUTKIN is currently a Hanna Kiel Fellow at the Harvard University Center of Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florence. He researches the complex roles of astrology in premodern Western science and culture, circa 1250–1750.

LONDA SCHIEBINGER is Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and Professor of History of Science at Stanford University. She is author of The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (1989), Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (1993, 2nd ed. 2004), Has Feminism Changed Science? (1999), and Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (2004). She is the editor of Feminism and the Body (2000), section editor of the Oxford Companion to the Body (2001), coeditor of Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine (2001, with Angela Creager and Elizabeth Lunbeck), and coeditor of Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics (2004, with Claudia Swan). She is currently working on race and health in eighteenth-century colonial science.

R. W. SERJEANTSON is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he teaches history and history of science. He is the editor of Generall Learning by Meric Casaubon (1999).

STEVEN SHAPIN is Franklin L. Ford Professor of History of Science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985, with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (1994), and The Scientific Revolution (1996).

PAMELA H. SMITH is Professor of History at Columbia University. She is author of The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (1994) and The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (2004).

CLAUDIA SWAN is Associate Professor in the Art History Department at Northwestern University, where she is also a founding director of the Program in the Study of Imagination. She is the author of The Clutius Botanical Watercolors: Plants and Flowers of the Renaissance (1998) and Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn Ⅱ (1565–1629) (2005). She has coedited Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (2004, with Londa Schiebinger).

KLAUS A. VOGEL is a historian and merchant marine captain. He has been a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for History, Göttingen, and a lecturer at the University of Göttingen. He is the author of Sphaera terrae: Das mittelalterliche Bild der Erde und die kosmographische Revolution (1995) and editor of the Pirckheimer Jahrbuch für Renaissance-und Humanismusforschung (1995–2000). Since 2000, he has been working on ocean-going container vessels for the Claus Peter Offen Shipping Company, Hamburg.

GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE

In 1993, Alex Holzman, former editor for the history of science at Cambridge University Press, invited us to submit a proposal for a history of science that would join the distinguished series of Cambridge histories launched nearly a century ago with the publication of Lord Acton’s fourteen-volume Cambridge Modern History (1902–12). Convinced of the need for a comprehensive his-tory of science and believing that the time was auspicious, we accepted the invitation.

   Although reflections on the development of what we call “science” date back to antiquity, the history of science did not emerge as a distinctive field of scholarship until well into the twentieth century. In 1912, the Belgian scientist-historian George Sarton (1884–1956), who contributed more than any other single person to the institutionalization of the history of science, began publishing Isis, an international review devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences. Twelve years later, he helped to create the History of Science Society, which by the end of the century had attracted some 4,000 individual and institutional members. In 1941, the University of Wisconsin established a department of the history of science, the first of dozens of such programs to appear worldwide.

   Since the days of Sarton, historians of science have produced a small library of monographs and essays, but they have generally shied away from writing and editing broad surveys. Sarton himself, inspired in part by the Cambridge histories, planned to produce an eight-volume History of Science, but he completed only the first two installments (1952, 1959), which ended with the birth of Christianity. His mammoth three-volume Introduction to the History of Science (1927–48), a reference work more than a narrative history, never got beyond the Middle Ages. The closest predecessor to The Cambridge History of Science is the three-volume (four-book) Histoire générale des sciences (1957–64), edited by René Taton, which appeared in an English translation under the title General History of the Sciences (1963–4). Edited just before the late twentieth-century boom in the history of science, the Taton set quickly became dated. During the 1990s, Roy Porter began editing the very useful Fontana History of Science (published in the United States as the Norton History of Science), with volumes devoted to a single discipline and written by a single author.

   The Cambridge History of Science comprises eight volumes, the first four arranged chronologically from antiquity through the eighteenth century, the latter four organized thematically and covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eminent scholars from Europe and North America, who together form the editorial board for the series, edit the respective volumes:

Volume 1: Ancient Science, edited by Alexander Jones, University of Toronto

Volume 2: Medieval Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Volume 3: Early Modern Science, edited by Katharine Park, Harvard University, and Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

Volume 4: Eighteenth-Century Science, edited by Roy Porter, late of Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London

Volume 5: The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences, edited by Mary Jo Nye, Oregon State University

Volume 6: The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, edited by Peter Bowler, Queen’s University of Belfast, and John Pickstone, University of Manchester

Volume 7: The Modern Social Sciences, edited by Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles, and Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University

Volume 8: Modern Science in National and International Context, edited by David N. Livingstone, Queen’s University of Belfast, and Ronald L. Numbers, University of Wisconsin–Madison

   Our collective goal is to provide an authoritative, up-to-date account of science – from the earliest literate societies in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the beginning of the twenty-first century – that even nonspecialist readers will find engaging. Written by leading experts from every inhabited continent, the essays in The Cambridge History of Science explore the systematic investigation of nature and society, whatever it was called. (The term “science” did not acquire its present meaning until early in the nineteenth century.) Reflecting the ever-expanding range of approaches and topics in the history of science, the contributing authors explore non-Western as well as Western science, applied as well as pure science, popular as well as elite science, scientific practice as well as scientific theory, cultural context as well as intellectual content, and the dissemination and reception as well as the production of scientific knowledge. George Sarton would scarcely recognize this collaborative effort as the history of science, but we hope we have realized his vision.

David C. Lindberg
Ronald L. Numbers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank Josephine Fenger, Nathalie Huet, John Kuczwara, Carola Kuntze, and Alisha Rankin for their help in preparing this volume. The project has extended over a decade and two continents, and without their patient assistance in keeping track of drafts, correspondence, figures, and a swarm of editorial details, this volume would have taken even longer to appear. We are also grateful to Harvard University, especially the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, for substantial institutional support. At Cambridge University Press, we were fortunate to be in the capable editorial hands of Alex Holzman and Helen Wheeler. As the General Editor responsible for our volume, David Lindberg read though the entire manuscript; we profited greatly from his characteristically sharp eye for argument and style. Our authors were models of learning and forbearance, and occasionally even of punctuality. Martin Brody, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Thalia Gigerenzer cheered us on and up throughout; we thank them from the heart.

Katharine Park
Lorraine Daston