An English courtier of the twelfth century lamented that “In the court I exist and of the court I speak, what the court is, God knows. I know not.” The same difficulty affects court studies; no one definition of a courtly “site” can stand equally well for all periods, places, and historical circumstances. In the early modern era, political patronage and clientage networks functioned as effective means of government administration; this made the court a “point of contact” in the ongoing exchange and political maneuvering between a ruler and those seeking to influence the direction of royal or princely power, rather than a physical location. Some members of the court resided at a distance from the ruler himself, maintaining a more remote presence as part of a courtly circle. A court was thus more than a household, more than buildings, and more than ritualistic events based in legal custom or ceremonial-administrative protocols. It was also an “abstract totality,” a society of individuals in service to, but not necessarily in immediate attendance upon, a sovereign.

The court was an “ethos” as well as an institution, and particular courts gave rise to particular sorts of cultures, each with its own attitudes and habits, its own system for judging merit and value, and its own social and symbolic mechanisms for directing the behavior of its members. Courts also varied according to size and relative number within specific linguistic regions. In politically fragmented areas, courts were larger in number but smaller in territories of jurisdiction.

“Natural philosophy” is often used by historians of science as an umbrella term to designate the study of nature before it could easily be identified with what we call “science” today. This is done to avoid the modern and potentially anachronistic connotations of the term “science.” But “natural philosophy” (and its equivalents in different languages) was also an actor’s category, a term commonly used throughout the early modern period and typically defined quite broadly as the study of natural bodies. As the central discipline dedicated to laying out the principles and causes of natural phenomena, natural philosophy underwent tremendous transformations during the early modern period. From its medieval form as a bookish Aristotelian discipline institutionalized in the universities, natural philosophy became increasingly associated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with new authorities, new practices, and new institutions, as is clear from the emergence of new expressions such as the “experimental natural philosophy” of Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and the Royal Society of London or the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687) of Isaac Newton (1642–1727).

Traditional natural philosophy (that is, of the bookish, largely Aristotelian variety) continued to prevail in university teaching through much of the seventeenth century (see Grafton, Chapter 10, this volume), but it, too, was transformed by the innovations of the period, which prompted attempts at adaptation as well as staunch resistance. By 1700, it had yielded definitively in all but the most conservative contexts to the mechanical, mathematized natural philosophies of Cartesianism and Newtonianism.

There can be little argument with the claim that early modern science and technology developed in large measure within a limited set of localized sites that ranged from state-supported scientific academies and observatories to botanical gardens, aristocratic collections, and apothecary shops. Nor can there be any question of the importance of local, face-to-face interactions in the creation of the “forms of life” that were characteristic of these social microenvironments. Yet it is equally true that local knowledge was very often embedded in geographically extended networks of communication and exchange. These multiple, often overlapping networks directly facilitated the gathering of information and natural objects as well as the dissemination of the natural knowledge produced at those sites. Indeed, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, European knowledge of the natural world depended increasingly upon expert practitioners who were entrusted with providing reliable information and authentic natural specimens while traversing ever larger and ever more remote geographical tracts. Broadly stated, the early modern period witnessed unprecedented growth in the scale of scientific practice in regard to both the number of formally trained practitioners and the geographical range over which they traveled.

THE EXPANDING HORIZON OF SCIENTIFIC ENGAGEMENT

Although networks of travel and correspondence grew extensively during the late Middle Ages, they were almost without exception confined to the lands of Europe and the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. Moreover, even within these geographical limits, networks of exchange lacked the density they were to achieve later. Transnational postal services connected only the major capitals and were primarily limited to the administrative and diplomatic correspondence of states (especially the Holy Roman Empire) and the papacy.

It is a sad historical fact that during the Renaissance, one of the richest and most dynamic intellectual periods in Europe’s history, there was also almost continuous warfare across the entire continent. The English and the Scots fought, the English and the French fought, the English fought with the Burgundians and the Spanish, and the English fought among themselves (the War of the Roses); the French also fought among themselves, the French and the Burgundians fought, the French and the Italians fought, the French and the Germans fought, and the French even fought with the Portuguese; the Burgundians and the Swiss fought, the Burgundians fought with the Germans, and the Burgundians fought on numerous occasions with their Low Country subjects; the Germans fought with the Italians, and the Germans fought among themselves; the Italians fought among themselves; the various Iberian kingdoms fought among themselves and against Spanish Muslims; the Danes fought with the Swedes, and both fought with the Norwegians; the Teutonic Knights fought with the Livonians and the Russians; and everyone tried (in vain) to fight against the Ottoman Turks. These wars would continue sporadically throughout the early modern period until they culminated in another period of continuous European warfare from 1688 to 1815, dates that correspond to another rich and dynamic intellectual period, the Enlightenment.

Unsurprisingly, this state of almost continuous warfare bore important fruits in the theory and the practice of the military arts, encouraged by both political and military leaders. Indeed, the cultivation of these fields was necessary for the survival of these leaders in an age some historians have called “The Military Revolution.”

This volume of the Cambridge History of Science covers the period from roughly 1490 to 1730, which is known to anglophone historians of Europe as the “early modern” era, a term pregnant with expectations of things to come. These things were of course mostly unknown and unanticipated by the Europeans who lived during those years, and had they been asked to give their own epoch a name, they would perhaps have called it “the new age” (aetas nova). New worlds, East and West, had been discovered, new devices such as the printing press had been invented, new faiths propagated, new stars observed in the heavens with new instruments, new forms of government established and old ones overthrown, new artistic techniques exploited, new markets and trade routes opened, new philosophies advanced with new arguments, and new literary genres created whose very names, such as “news” and “novel,” advertised their novelty.

Some of the excitement generated by this ferment is captured in Nova reperta (New Discoveries), a series of engravings issued in Antwerp in the early seventeenth century, after the late sixteenth-century designs of the Flemish painter and draftsman Jan van der Straet (1523–1605). The title page shows numbered icons of the first nine discoveries celebrated in the series: of the Americas, the compass, gunpowder, printing, the mechanical clock, guaiacum (an American wood used in the treatment of the French disease, or syphilis), distillation, the cultivation of silkworms, and the harnessing of horses (Figure 1.1). Later editions of the series include depictions of the manufacture of cane sugar, the discovery of a method for finding longitude by the declination of the compass, and the invention of the techniques of painting using oil glazes and of copper engraving itself.