In this volume we have brought together more than a dozen new studies about the Dutch natural philosopher Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637). Today, his important role in the initial stages of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century is contested by no one, if only because of his decisive influence on the young René Descartes. Yet, the origins of Beeckman's innovative ideas about the constitution of the natural world and the mechanisms that lay behind natural phenomena deserve more historical investigation. Also, the social and cultural context in which he operated and which partly shaped his ideas and practices awaits further scrutiny. Moreover, his notebook and his particular way of philosophizing shed new light on the cultures of knowledge in the early seventeenth century, especially in the Dutch Republic. By exploring all these different issues, by extending the research into areas that were previously underexplored, and by re-thinking categories of thought that have been taken for granted for too long, we hope that this volume will contribute to a better and richer understanding of the early modern history of knowledge.

On the final pages of the previous chapter, John Schuster undertook a delightful exercise in ‘as if’ history. In the present chapter I take up the idea by imagining Beeckman to accept an invitation by the Royal Society to detail his relationship with the late René Descartes.

Domini praeclari, Most learned Fellows of the Royal Society for the improvement of naturall knowledge by Experiment (it is, to say that right away, not clear to me how experiments could possibly help us improve our understanding of the natural world).

At the age of 80 back in your country for the third time, it is my honour and my great pleasure to stand in this festive hall at Gresham College and to consider from a variety of viewpoints the topic that you have invited me to address. What are the origins, as I see them, of what you here in Britain have of late accustomed yourself to calling ‘the mechanical philosophy’? To be more specific, the wording of the very flattering letter that your most diligent secretary, Mr. Henry Oldenburg, Esq., has sent me leaves some room for the suspicion that your innocent-sounding question is really aimed at learning how, if asked, I would assess my own scholarly achievement in comparison to that of the man meanwhile known all over Europe as the great pioneer of the mechanical philosophy – my regretted friend, the late René Descartes.

Riding Orders: ‘What Was Beeckman Doing – in the Context of the Scientific Revolution?’

I have been concerned about Isaac Beeckman as a figure in the Scientific Revolution for just short of 50 years, having begun to read his Latin writings on mechanics in 1971, under the guidance of the late Michael S. Mahoney in the Princeton History of Science Program. Mahoney and I started terming the early mechanists such as Beeckman, Descartes, Hobbes and Gassendi, ‘corpuscular-mechanists’. Stimulated by another faculty member, Theodore K. Rabb, we began to think of the generation in which corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy was invented as the critical stage in a multiphase process of the Scientific Revolution. Mahoney pointed out to me that in 1618 Beeckman had recalled the young Descartes to study, including the study of corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy. Later, in my doctoral dissertation, the Beeckman/Descartes relationship covered 80 pages out of about 750.

However, I am not a fully-fledged Beeckman scholar. Believing in the importance of Beeckman in the Scientific Revolution and having a particular interest in his relations with Descartes, I have had a watching brief on Beeckman scholarship. When the organizers of the Middelburg Beeckman conference invited me to deliver a plenary lecture on the topic that is now the title of this chapter, I requested more guidance about my assignment. Klaas van Berkel asked me: ‘What do you think Beeckman was doing?’ My answer in the plenary talk and this chapter is that Beeckman was practising natural philosophy, in a novel register.

The telescope was crucial in bringing about a methodological shift in seventeenth-century natural philosophy. It legitimized the use of observational aids in the study of natural phenomena, and thus furthered the very role of observation in seventeenth-century inquiry. Nonetheless, many questions about its emergence, and its interaction with the evolving science of optics, remain unanswered. Isaac Beeckman's notes carry all the potential to shed light on a uniquely early and local reception of the telescope. In this chapter I will analyse how Beeckman gradually developed an understanding of the working principle of the telescope.

My analysis partly picks up on the recent historiography of the telescope. I will argue how Beeckman's familiarity with late-sixteenth-century optical innovations is larger than his modern editor, Cornelis de Waard, assumed. Still, if these innovations in optics were characterized by an increased attention for the mechanism of refraction of light in lenses, Beeckman's understanding of the telescope was only partially embedded in these. From his first notes onwards, Beeckman's reasoning based on refraction was complemented with a working principle resulting from a physical interpretation of the agents of vision, species, borrowed from other branches within the multifaceted sixteenth-century optical tradition. In Beeckman's early notes, these distinct contributions blended into a coherent whole. Interestingly, it was chiefly his physical interpretation of species that Beeckman subsequently merged in his maturing mechanistic ideas, arriving at a conception of the telescope that was original, and that was surprisingly adequate, too. It allowed Beeckman to understand the telescope as a device that brings remote things nearby, rather than an instrument that produces larger images.

On 6 September 1618, Isaac Beeckman received his doctorate in medicine from the university of Caen. Although Beeckman pursued a number of occupations in his life, such as candle maker, schoolmaster and lens grinder, the received opinion is that he never really put his medical degree into practice and that his medical interests were mainly theoretical. This is illustrated by the many notes in the Journal on medical disputations, often in relation to his developing mechanical philosophy of atomism. However, apart from writing about medicine from an exclusively theoretical angle, Beeckman also engaged with illness and bodily ailments he encountered during his everyday life, including a few cases in which he himself was the patient. Considering the fact that he was a trained man of medicine, the question arises: in what manner did Beeckman write about his everyday aches and illnesses? Did he follow the common narrative of many patients at that time, or was he primarily looking at himself, and perhaps even others, through the lens of a trained physician?

The study of lay perceptions of illness and medicine, in addition to the common approach to the physician's view, has become a major subject in the field of medical history since Roy Porter's famous 1985 article ‘The Patient's View: Doing Medical History from Below’.

Introduction

Throughout the Middle Ages, Latin had been the dominant language of learning and knowledge in Europe. Any conversation between educated men, and occasionally women, about learning or about science would be conducted in Latin. Its dominance remained the standard in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, although it gradually received more and more attention. Around the beginning of the sixteenth century, the functions of language in general and the relationship between Latin and the vernacular languages in particular developed into a significant and critical subject of discussion for religious and social reformers. At this time, multilingualism was not a new concept; Europeans were accustomed to the many different dialects and languages within and between the countries of Europe. Around the second half of the sixteenth century, however, these encounters with various languages sparked something described as a ‘fascination with language’. The Latin language, in particular, received increasing attention in these changing views. It became a popular idea to look at the riches and poverty of a certain language and to compare these to those of other languages. The comparison between a vernacular language and Latin generally resulted in an emphasis on the poverty found in the former in terms of vocabulary. In order to tackle this, some proposed to borrow words from different languages, while others preferred to invent new words.

Isaac Beeckman played a significant role in the history of science, since he devised a physico-mathematical philosophy to investigate nature that influenced, if not inspired, René Descartes amongst others. Yet, Beeckman's role in the history of science should not be restricted to his precarious relationship with Descartes. On the contrary, he held a pivotal position that lays bare an important attempt to account for natural phenomena and bodies within a systematic theory of mathematical physics. His Journal (written between 1604 and 1637, and published in its entirety only in 1939-1953) is a useful source for unearthing the attempt to apply a systematic theory of mathematical physics to the study of nature. In other words, his natural philosophy combines mechanical ingenuity and mathematical methodology with a theoretical view. By means of his method, he fostered, if not anticipated, the modern approach to nature. In this sense, Beeckman was a son of his country. The Dutch Provinces of the time were a laboratory of practices and ideas and a crossroads between cultures, systems, and knowledge, as Delphine Antoine-Mahut and Catherine Secretan have recently shown.

Moving from these premises, in this chapter I explore Beeckman's focus on plants, one of the less-studied subjects of his broad range of interests. Although Beeckman may not be defined as a botanist nor as a botanical virtuoso in a strict sense, his attempt to deal with vegetation within his corpuscular, atomistic, and mechanical theory importantly surfaces in a few notes in his Journal and significantly anticipates a modern understanding of the vegetal realm of nature.

The discovery and publication, in the first half of the twentieth century, of Isaac Beeckman's Journal made it possible to understand the role played by Beeckman in the development of the new ‘mechanistic’ physics, of which the principal actors were already well-known: Marin Mersenne, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Thomas Hobbes. In this context, Beeckman was first perceived as the missing piece in an already fully-formed puzzle, one in which he simply had to be fitted, with perhaps some rounding off at the edges where the new piece failed to fit perfectly into the space allocated for it. Since then, studies more specifically centred on Beeckman – including Klaas van Berkel's eminent and pioneering work – have made it possible to better understand the particularities of Beeckman's ‘mathematico-physical’ philosophy without measuring him against the standards of this ‘greater picture’ in which his philosophy had haphazardly been integrated, as was done previously.

A third step, which I aim to sketch here, might involve trying to understand how Beeckman's original philosophy was created by situating itself into a fabric of local relationships, through intensive and ongoing exchanges on specific well-defined questions that bore not so much on the great scientific discoveries of Galileo Galilei or Johannes Kepler, but on what made these discoveries possible in the first place.

No historian of science has contributed more to the study of Isaac Beeckman than Cornelis de Waard, the somewhat reclusive teacher of mathematics and physics from the city of Vlissingen in the Dutch province of Zeeland. Before 1905, the year in which De Waard rediscovered Beeckman's long-lost scientific notebook, the latter, a schoolmaster from Dordrecht, was just a shadowy figure in the margins of the study of Descartes, both in France and elsewhere. Through Adrien Baillet's biography of Descartes (1691), scholars knew that Beeckman was in some way involved in the maturing of Descartes’ ideas, but little else was known. After 1905, however, Beeckman gradually became better known to historians of science and philosophy. Certainly after De Waard's masterful edition of the Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634 in 1939-1953, it was possible to reconstruct Beeckman's own ideas about nature and its mechanisms, to study his dealings with Descartes and others, and to assess how he fits into what came to be called the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.

De Waard's edition of the Journal was a major contribution to the history of science, but, as we know, every edited publication is in some ways a distortion, and the Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 à 1634 is no exception. Every editor has to make choices about what to include and what not, how to arrange the material, and how to proceed with the annotation.

Introduction: Beeckman and the Zilsel Thesis

Isaac Beeckman was both a craftsman and a scholar. He was trained by his father as a candle maker and a constructor of waterworks, but he also studied philosophy, mathematics, theology and medicine. This mixed education seems to be the key to Beeckman's innovative attitude towards the study of nature. In his 2013 monograph on Beeckman his biographer Klaas van Berkel claims that this early modern researcher ‘was the first to devise a completely mechanical philosophy of nature, and thus introduced an approach that would become a cornerstone of the new science’. Van Berkel even goes further to stipulate that ‘Beeckman played a crucial but not always recognized role in the early stage of the Scientific Revolution’, even in such a way that Beeckman could be seen as ‘the missing link between artisanal knowledge and mathematical science’. With this latter statement Van Berkel refers to the thesis formulated in 1942 by Edgar Zilsel, namely that the new science emerged from the empirical work of artisans and from the interaction between craftsmen and scholars. Hands-on knowledge of materials and craftsmanship, combined with theoretical academic knowledge, or, succinctly put, ‘the union of hand and mind’, had resulted in the empirical and experimental methodology that formed the core of the new science of the seventeenth century.

In 1634, the Polish naturalist Jon Jonston (1603-1675) complained to the London-based intelligencer from Elbląg, Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600-1662), that ‘the rector of Dordrecht Beeckman has something like a thousand experiments and sounds like a great philosopher, but he is morose and incommunicative’. Indeed, the only text that Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637) published during his lifetime was his 1618 dissertation for a medical degree at Caen. This survives in only a single, incomplete imprint. Beeckman kept his extraordinary body of scientific work confined to his manuscript daily notes, the Loci communes. Yet, in Hartlib's next and only other discussion of Beeckman in his own copious daily notes, the Ephemerides, Hartlib noted Beeckman's desire to establish a ‘college of inventions’, hardly the mark of an incommunicative individual. How might we square Hartlib's two remarks and make sense of Beeckman's communicative strategies?

In his chapter in this volume, Arjan van Dixhoorn argues that Beeckman should be understood through the lens of a very long-standing culture centred on sociable communication: the consten-culture of the chambers of rhetoric, which prized joking, ingenuity, and cognitive exercises through engagement with the liberal arts. Van Dixhoorn argues that through the consten-culture, ‘explicit, bookish, academic, theoretical learning and tacit, bodily, artisanal, practical, experience-oriented knowledge had already been “interpenetrating” for two centuries’. Van Dixhoorn's criticisms of a misleading dichotomy between artisanal and textual approaches and identities are well taken. However, waves of emigration cutting across national and linguistic boundaries brought varied and sometimes competing forms of knowledge into conversation and spurred dynamic experiments in how to communicate and collaborate. Beeckman's ‘college of inventions’, which he called the Collegium Mechanicum, was one such experiment that distinguished itself from already extant forms of sociability, such as the joyful companies gathered by chambers of rhetoric.

Isaac Beeckman included around 240 images of his own making in his Journal. In addition, there are some musical scores and images taken from books studied or referred to by Beeckman and inserted in the Journal by its editor, Cornelis de Waard. In itself, the number of 240 images is not excessively high. The printed Journal has some 1,270 pages, so, on average, there is an image on every fifth page of the book. Nevertheless, it is a substantial number, and it is therefore strange that Beeckman's images have not been the subject of scholarly study before. All the more so since we know that Beeckman himself had a strong preference for Anschaulichkeit (picturability), both in the context of discovery and in the context of the dissemination of natural philosophical ideas. Beeckman only accepted explanations that could be represented by a real or mental image. Until the 1980s, historians of science in general were inclined to overlook the presence of images in texts and manuscripts. Since then, however, the importance of these visual tools has become widely recognized. It is therefore about time to ask what kind of images Beeckman used in his notebook, what these images were used for and, most importantly of all, what they tell us about the development of his mechanical philosophy. I will argue that these images are not merely illustrations of the text, but form an integral part of the argument that Beeckman wishes to make.

Isaac Beeckman has paid much attention to music all his life, and it seems likely that the seed for this fascination was laid during his youth. Middelburg appears to have had a lively musical culture in Beeckman's times; yet, it has never been mapped out. This essay aims to give an impression of a number of aspects related to music in Beeckman's hometown and its environment, and in doing so, to sketch a background that may have influenced Beeckman in his earlier years.

Although it is difficult to determine with certainty to what extent Beeckman possessed musical talent, the many remarks related to music in his Journal reveal a profound interest that is beyond any doubt. Beeckman does not discuss polyphonic music from the Renaissance in his Journal. By contrast, much attention is paid to Genevan Psalms, in particular relating to questions of modality, intonation, the practice and notation of leading tones (musica ficta), correct harmonization, etc. Born in 1588 in the Reformed milieu of a city in which many Protestants had settled down after the fall of Antwerp in 1585, this cannot come as a surprise. The explicit presence of keyboard instruments (organs, harpsichords) and bells (the introduction of the carillon) in Middelburg as well as the tuning of keyboard instruments seem to have aroused Beeckman's serious interest: he discusses matters of tuning (and the differences between organs and harpsichords related to this) rather in depth. The ‘floating’ of a pitch which is out of tune (against a properly tuned tone) is described by him with a fine term, wywauwen – in Dutch serving as an onomatopoeic word.