Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution.

In The Origins of Modern Science Herbert Butterfield called the scientific achievements of the seventeenth century the decisive development that ushered in modernity. Butterfield established many of the concepts and categories that subsequent scholars followed, revised, or rejected, but never replaced. The thirteen essays in this volume exploring the Butterfield legacy are essential reading for those who study early modern science and useful for anyone interested in the problem of periodization in that era.

David C. Lindberg gives the historiographical background to the conception that early modern times produced a new science; he starts with claims of newness going back to Renaissance humanists. Ernan McMullen focuses on what he calls "metamethodology" - the kind of knowledge the new techniques were supposed to deliver - and concludes that the shifts during the seventeenth century do indeed constitute a scientific revolution. Gary Hatfield insists that there was no unified or historically effective metaphysical doctrine regarding the relationship between mathematics and nature, contrary to the assertions of E. A. Burtt. Looking primarily at the case of Galileo he is not sure that all adherents of the new science even had a metaphysics. Robert S. Westman looks at Copernicus's preface to De revolutionibus and suggests that it not only contains his central proof but, thinking that he had reasonable assurance of its approval, he directed it toward humanists both in the court of Pope Paul III who valued the mathematical disciplines and in his province of Varmia. Westman also finds a Horatian aesthetic at work. John Gascoigne explores the relationship of the universities to the Scientific Revolution and finds that the tradition of seeing them on the outside is not totally wrong, but, nevertheless, their role has been underestimated; they were, after all, the places where most of the main participants received their education. Jan V. Golinski notes that although subsequent historiography turned Butterfield's assertion of chemistry's immaturity on its head, historians still have simplified the relation between chemistry and natural philosophy by assigning to chemical practice a position of subservience and passivity regarding theoretical developments in contemporary metaphysics; chemistry had textual, linguistic, and rhetorical practices whose inertia was not immediately overridden by the new philosophy. Harold J. Cook laments that as long as historians study the Scientific Revolution rather than the natural philosophy of the early modern period, the temptation is to point to developments that typify it and demote others to second place. In medicine the practice of physic was displaced by drug therapy and the practice of medicine because of the emphasis on natural philosophy and the search for cures. The new philosophy stressed natural history and empirical experience, which particularized knowledge and undermined universal precepts about humanity and the world. There was also a growing preference for probing nature in interventionist ways. Michael S. Mahoney explores the mathematics of infinitesimals and suggests that the inability of mathematicians, and Cartesians in particular, to accept the new calculus was because the new discourse rested on new canons of mathematical and physical intelligibility. Alan Gabbey discusses mechanics and warns that there is more to the story of mechanical science than is found in tracking the prehistory of Newtonian mechanics. He rejects Kuhn et al. in favor of Laudan: in order to understand the history of mechanics the historian must look at the problems contemporaries were trying to solve.

Expanding the boundaries of the study of early modern science, Brian P. Copenhaver reviews the Yates thesis about the relationship between the Hermetic tradition and science. He agrees that magic and related areas are proper objects for study in the history of science, but natural magic was the most important impetus to the progress of scientific study, and this was low on the Hermetic agenda. He suggests we should replace the "Hermetic tradition" with the "occultist tradition." That this will be a difficult task is shown by the fact that in the next essay William B. Ashworth, Jr. equates "magic" and "hermetic" (313). Ashworth notes that traditional historiography gives natural history no role in the Scientific Revolution because historians have been looking for the origins of the modern biological sciences. He counters that the abandonment of emblematic natural history between 1550 and 1650 was part of the Scientific Revolution. William Eamon discerns a shift in consciousness marked by the publication of books of secrets and suggests that the publication of the Philosophical Transactions starting in 1665 made the Royal Society Europe's leading scientific institution. Michael Hunter looks at the relationship between heterodoxy and the new science. Although he agrees with the Jacobs that there was an alternative road to the Enlightenment, he finds it in a kind of skepticism that flourished among a fashionable elite in society.

Overall, the authors in this volume substantially modify Butterfield's claims, but they do reaffirm an early modern revolution in scientific thought.