We now think that any serious religious person would be dismayed by the Bible scholarship of Spinoza and Father Richard Simon. But, though they shocked many of the theologians of the late seventeenth century and afterward, they also carried further historical and critical inquiries about the biblical text that had been developing from the late Middle Ages and through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Isaac Newton, who devoted about sixty years of his life to studies about the Bible seems to have been affected positively by points made by Spinoza and Simon. And this is curious in that two hundred years later Newton's own exegesis of the books of Daniel and Revelation was republished by the former head of the British Medical Association, Professor William Whitla of Queens College, Belfast, as an answer to the higher criticism of the Bible that had been developed from the ideas and methods of Spinoza and Simon by German scholars in the nineteenth century.

First, did Newton actually know the texts of either of these radical biblical exegetes? We know that he knew of Simon's work, since he owned copies of five of his books, and cited them occasionally in his own work. We know he had ample opportunity to know of Spinoza's writings, especially the work that deals extensively with the Bible, the Tractatus Politico Theologicus It was in the library of Isaac Barrow that Newton had cataloged. The work was known to his colleagues at Cambridge, Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, both of whom were exercised about Spinoza's views and attacked them in print.

During the second half of the seventeenth century two men in particular occupied a prominent place in the world of natural philosophy. Inhabiting respectively the capital cities of Rome and London, they had much in common. Both were deeply religious men, committed to the study of nature as a sure path toward the revelation of divine wisdom, who began their academic careers as professors of mathematics. Both valued the learning of the ancients, searching ever further into the pagan and Christian past in hope of illumination. For significant portions of their respective careers, that knowledge was found in the occult sciences. In all these respects, they typified the Christian encyclopedic approach to nature that humanists had practiced since the fifteenth century. They were quite probably, along with Leibniz, the last great humanist natural philosophers of the early modern period.

Despite these many similarities we do not usually place the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) and the English philosopher Isaac Newton (1642–1727) side by side. For almost two centuries, they have inhabited the separate worlds created by modern histories of science and, to a lesser degree, articulated by intellectuals at the end of the seventeenth century who had begun to make these distinctions themselves.

Lecturing on Newtonian mechanics and dynamics around 1800, the natural philosopher John Dalton employed all the standard demonstrations in what had become by then a well-established genre of scientific education. On his tabletop he used oscillating devices, pendulums, balls made of various substances, levers, pulleys, inclined planes, cylinders of wood, lead in water, and pieces of iron on mercury to illustrate phenomena as diverse as gravitation, the “3 laws of motion of Newton,” impulse or the “great law of percussion,” force and inertia, specific gravity, attraction and magnetism. There was nothing extraordinary in what Dalton was doing, first in his Quaker school then at New College in Manchester. The genre of British lecturing focused on Newtonian mechanics had begun in the second decade of the eighteenth century with the travels and publications of Francis Hauksbee, Jean Desaguliers, and Willem s'Gravesande who lectured in the Dutch Republic. Dalton was deeply indebted to their legacy. His terse manuscript notes on his lectures – charred from a fire in 1940 – tell us that in one lecture he used a “machine with mercury, watercork,” and it was intended to illustrate, of all things, the effect on the planets of the “Cartesian Vortices.”

In talking about the Cartesian vortices, and in explaining how wrongheaded they had been as a conceptual device for understanding planetary motion, Dalton was repeating an old Newtonian trope. In the process he was flogging a truly dead horse. Indeed, even in French colleges after the 1750s Descartes's horse had survived only in a few places and then by artificial resuscitation.

One result of the dominance of the concept of the “Scientific Revolution” over the study of early modern thought about nature has been that different cultural practices concerning the natural world have been conceived as either on the side of the revolution or against it. Recovery of occult or “unscientific” belief such as astrology or alchemy has either claimed that these activities contributed to the advance of science, as Richard Westfall describes alchemy as part of the Scientific Revolution, or ascribed a positive value to the occult and a negative one to the Scientific Revolution itself. However, to rethink the Scientific Revolution requires the examination of the uses of nature in the early modern period without presupposing either the “scientific” nature of these practices or the “revolutionary” nature of their changes and conflicts. This essay is an attempt to read the English reception of a particular incident – the “Black Monday” solar eclipse of March 29, 1652 – not as an episode in the Scientific Revolution (although such a reading is possible), but as the clash of a variety of positions on natural phenomena and their meaning for humanity.

The English Interregnum, the period between the execution of King Charles I in 1649 and the Restoration of his son Charles II in 1660, saw a passionate debate on both the popular and learned levels on the validity of judicial astrology. The two most influential discussions of the decline of judicial astrology in early modern England have been those of Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), and Patrick Curry, in Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (1989).

On May 1, 1633, Lady Venetia Digby, the wife of Sir Kenelm Digby, died. Before her body was prepared for burial, however, Digby called upon his good friend, Anthony Van Dyck, the renowned Dutch painter of the Caroline court, and asked him to come to his home immediately and paint a portrait of Venetia as she lay in her deathbed. Van Dyck had already painted her portrait twice before, once sitting alone and again in a family portrait with Digby and their two children. Van Dyck agreed immediately to undertake a final painting of Digby's beloved wife.

Serenity dominates the result of his efforts, titled Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby, on Her Deathbed (Figure 5.1). In the portrait we view Venetia through parted bed curtains and, if we did not know better, we might think she was merely falling asleep. Her head is propped up and resting delicately on the open palm of her hand right hand. She is dressed in a white gown and cap, a pearl necklace gracing her neck, reclining in luxurious comfort, supported by numerous pillows and enveloped in sumptuous, velvety bedding. Yet it is the moment that captivates us: her left eye is almost but not quite closed, as if we are forever witnessing Venetia's last moments on earth. Drifting into an eternal slumber, her portrait conveys to us not only serenity but the immediacy of the moment as well.

As people learned of Robert Boyle's exciting air-pump experiments, published in 1660 as New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects, the question of whether a vacuum could exist in nature was more keenly debated than ever before. Matthew Hale remarked that the subject of the experiments “is seeingly trivial …yet it hath exercised the wits and pens of many learned men.” Some of the “many excellent Philosophers” debating the possible existence of “that brave nothingness” continued to uphold the view that nature was frightened by empty space, that “fearful void,” and would fight to prevent it. This view had long been accepted as a fundamental tenet of Aristotle's, who had predicted that after reading arguments in his Physics the concept of “the so-called void will be found to be really vacuous.”

In the 1660s, however, the view that nature abhors a vacuum was no longer widely held. Of course, the Cartesian version of the mechanical philosophy of nature reflected the Aristotelian notion that there were no empty spaces in nature. The atomic version of mechanism, however, asserted the existence of void between the atoms.

Friends and colleagues, it is an honor to be asked to speak to you this evening, and I thank you for the occasion. It is, however, entirely possible that you will regret granting me this forum, for I intend to undermine one of our most hallowed explanatory frameworks, that of the Scientific Revolution – almost always written with capital letters, of course.

I am well aware that something happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that human beings have since come to regard as revolutionary – revolutionary, that is, in the modern sense of that word: in I. B. Cohen's definition of political revolution, “a change that is sudden, radical, and complete” Or, in the words of Arthur Marwick, who has scant patience with overuse of the term, “a significant change in political structure carried through within a fairly short space of time.” Marwick's examples are the French revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848; the Russian one of 1917; the Mexican one of 1906. We must keep in mind that the modern meaning of revolution did develop in the political sphere. When we use it for scientific thought, we are in fact using a metaphor.

But as Cohen demonstrated so well in 1985, the word “revolution” hardly began to acquire its modern meaning until the eighteenth century; before then the term had carried the implication of a cyclical turning, a turning around, or even a turning back, a return to an original position, just as Copernicus used it in the title of his book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.

The most satisfying tribute a scholar can receive is serious consideration of his or her work by other scholars. When Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs died suddenly and prematurely on March 29, 1994, 1 decided to invite a number of her colleagues, students, and friends to contribute papers to a volume in memory of her scholarly interests and the impact of her work. Dobbs's groundbreaking studies of the meaning of Newton's alchemy irrevocably altered our understanding of the Scientific Revolution and early modern natural philosophy. The scholarship of her associates reflects this impact – in spirit as well as detail. This volume stands as a tribute to her contributions.

Dobbs herself articulated some of the far-reaching ramifications of her work on Newton in her History of Science Society Distinguished Lecture, “Newton as Final Cause and First Mover,” in which she challenged the received understanding of the Scientific Revolution. This essay, which was originally published in Isis, opens the volume and sets the themes for the chapters that follow. Richard S. Westfall contributed an essay that went head-to-head with Dobbs's and which provides an eloquent defense of the utility – indeed necessity – of thinking in traditional terms about the Scientific Revolution. The debate between these two giants about the central concept in our field provides the broader context for the chapters in the volume. Subsequent events altered the direction of the volume after it was well underway. Westfall's sudden death on August 21, 1996, reinforced my decision to construct the volume in terms of their debate and, at the same time, to honor Westfall's memory along with Dobbs's.

It is clear that at present there is a growing interest in alchemy. This new attention to a subject long dismissed out of hand as a field for serious scholarly inquiry is in large part due to the successful linkage of alchemy with prominent figures of early modern science, especially Sir Isaac Newton. Once the extent of Newton's involvement with traditional alchemy was made manifest by the labors of B. J. T. Dobbs, Karin Figala, Richard S. Westfall, and others, alchemy could no longer be uncomplicatedly rejected as mere fraud or gullibility without impugning Newton himself. Thus, whereas Newton's status as the rationalist par excellence initially made his alchemical involvement seem unbelievable, that status helped to rehabilitate the much-maligned subject of alchemy. Since the revelation of Newton's alchemical interests, other figures of the early modern period have begun to reveal their own alchemical dimensions. Most notable among these is Robert Boyle. Recent studies demonstrate that the “Father of Chemistry” was equally a son of traditional alchemy. Far from repudiating traditional alchemy, as is commonly believed, Boyle pursued it with great avidity. He strove, for example, to discover the secret preparation of the transmutatory Philosophers' Stone, of whose real existence and powers he was certain. Significantly, Boyle's interest in and devotion to alchemy actually increased over the course of his career rather than being repudiated as a youthful whim. These findings in the case of Boyle strongly reaffirm the conclusions regarding the importance of alchemy in the early modern period, which were drawn from earlier investigations of Newton.

The Scientific Revolution is probably the single most important unifying concept in the history of science. Usually referring to the period from Copernicus to Newton (roughly 1500 to 1700), it is considered to be the central episode in the history of science, the historical moment at which that unique way of looking at the world that we call “modern science” and its attendant institutions emerged. It has been taken as the terminus ad quern of classical and medieval science and the terminus a quo of all that followed. Not itself an explanatory concept, the Scientific Revolution has become the reference point for questions that guide historians of science, questions about what it was, what exactly happened, why it happened, and why it happened when and where it did.

Traditional histories of the Scientific Revolution have customarily focused on a list of canonical individuals who explored a canonical set of subjects. The individuals usually include Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, Vesalius, Harvey, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton. The subjects are astronomy, physics, mathematics, anatomy, physiology, and chemistry. This book reflects the problematization of the canon in recent scholarship. The traditional canonical figures often devoted themselves to noncanonical subjects and frequently resembled many of their contemporaries who have not found a place in the Scientific Revolution's hall of fame. Moreover, the subjects that engaged their attention do not readily map onto the canonical list of modern sciences. Questioning the canon leads us to inquire why and how it was formed. And this inquiry, in turn, causes us to interrogate our own presuppositions as historians and how those presuppositions affect what we see in the past.

In the past few years both Boyle and Newton have received considerable scholarly attention, and today we know much more about these two paragons of the “Scientific Revolution” than did previous generations of scholars. The “Newtonian Industry,” as Richard S. Westfall has termed it, has undergone a radical transformation in at least two areas. First, the image of Newton as a significant influence in the establishment of Enlightenment deism has been considerably modified by scholars such as James E. Force, Edward B. Davis, and Betty Jo Dobbs, and it is now widely recognized that even though the Newtonian system could be (and indeed was) associated with a deistic world view, this was most definitely not what Newton himself intended. Second, Newton's alchemical pursuits, long kept secret, and even longer misunderstood, have finally been brought to light by J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, and have been interpreted by Betty Jo Dobbs in such a way that their relationship to Newton's thought as a whole finally makes sense.

Where Boyle studies are concerned, there has been a virtual explosion of activity, due primarily to the efforts of Michael Hunter to make Boyle's unpublished manuscripts and correspondence available to scholars unable to travel to the Royal Society of London, as well as his efforts to establish and maintain a network of communication among the present generation of Boyle scholars. This activity has resulted in a better understanding of all aspects of Boyle studies, including his own alchemical pursuits, his view of the relationships between theology, natural philosophy, and epistemology, and the details of his experimental program.

Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs not only shifted the boundaries of Newton scholarship, she changed its center. Her first book The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy shifted the boundaries of inquiry by insisting on the importance of disciplines outside the canonical sciences in understanding the scientific tradition. In The Janus Faces of Genius she took the further step of arguing that religion, not science, was the real center of Newton's thought. Although Dobbs's main work focused on Newton, it would be a great loss to historical scholarship if we failed to draw the wider historiographical consequences of her work – consequences she herself made plain in her 1993 History of Science Society Lecture “Newton as Final Cause and First Mover.” In the present chapter I support Dobbs's contention that these historiographical shifts and recenterings are important in understanding the history of science well before Newton and his time. The period I consider begins with the Reformation and concludes with the career of Johann Kepler. My main concern involves Lutheran natural philosophers and astronomers, and especially those trained at Wittenberg after its reform by Philip Melanchthon. After briefly reviewing earlier opinions on the relation between science and religion in this period, I go on to document the role of Lutherans in spreading Copernicus's ideas, and the pervasive positive effect of their religion on Lutheran scientific thought. I suggest that Kepler's early work, in particular, should be read as centrally religious.