The Scientific Revolution in National Context.

Traditionally, we think of science transcending cultural and political boundaries, yet in recent years scholars have carefully located science within various social settings, which is precisely the point of the present collection of essays. In general, the contributors are not so much concerned with making sense of anyone's science in particular as they are in explaining broader patterns of scientific development as they varied from country to country. The emphasis here is on institutions, the sponsorship and social uses of science, scientific style, education, religion, and politics. Studies of individuals tend to focus on those of only local importance. The Scientific Revolution which emerges is thus considerably more diffuse - in terms of actors, activities, and time-frame - than the traditional picture which examines a relatively few major names working in physics and astronomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The result is an enlightening perspective, one that should interest students of the Renaissance, for the authors understand that the crucial recasting of physics and astronomy, mainly the work of the seventeenth century, need not blind us to important and varied cultural continuities with the preceding period. Each chapter is devoted to a particular country or region, and of course the view of the Scientific Revolution differs accordingly. Space does not allow a description of each essay, but the following samples provide a sense of the whole.

Mario Biagioli links the marginalization of Italian science after Galileo to political and economic changes that marked the decline of Italy in general. Italian politics shaped scientific discourse for Galileo in a way quite distinct from Boyle's England, argues Biagioli, who concludes that contemporary science resembles that of Boyle more than Galileo's because Western political systems look more like the seventeenth-century English one than granducal Florence. The claim that Boyle's science was more significant in some important respects than Galileo's is typical of the insights gained when one uses new, social categories of analysis.

In a nice essay on France, L. W. B. Brockliss covers a great deal of ground in linking the development of science in France to the particular relationship between State and Church. Brockliss defines the peculiarly French contribution to the Scientific Revolution in terms of mechanism, mathematics, and observation while showing how the French Catholic Church, unable to keep science entirely under control, shaped powerfully the development of the mechanical philosophy in the hands of Descartes and Gassendi.

Harold Cook's chapter on the Low Countries, especially strong on the sixteenth century, considers the Scientific Revolution mainly in terms of natural history and medicine, pursued in different ways by people from across the social spectrum. The aim was primarily empirical - to get the details of nature right. Cook does a good job of introducing the cast of lesser-known characters of the Scientific Revolution, enabling the reader to understand better the social milieu in which the more familiar names operated.

John Henry's discussion of the Scientific Revolution in England is an excellent, explicit introduction to the aims and assumptions behind the social history of science. Henry revisits the science and religion discussions centered on seventeenth-century England, and argues that we need to understand the achievements of Newton and company in terms of their attachment to a natural philosophy version of an irenic Anglicanism.

Sven Widmalm differentiates the Scientific Revolution in general from Sweden's own Scientific Revolution, which was "effected by 1689" with the lifting of the ban on Cartesianism. The main focus is the later development of institutions, especially in the period 1720-1772 when Swedish parliamentarian politics and a strong dose of patriotism favored the development of a peculiarly Swedish science and made the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences the driving force in organizing the nation's powerful scientific talent to serve the state. With the takeover of Gustav III in 1772, the alliance between science and the ruling Hat party fell apart and with it the sense of national purpose that had animated Swedish science in the previous years. In Sweden, then, the Scientific Revolution was largely an eighteenth-century affair.

The remaining chapters cover the Iberian peninsula, German nations, Scotland, Bohemia, and Poland. The essays in general are very good indeed, and the endnotes are a bibliographical goldmine. This volume succeeds in drawing our attention to the importance of national factors in the development of science and as a result adds considerable richness and complexity to the term "Scientific Revolution."