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.

During the epistemic shift conventionally called the Scientific Revolution, the study of nature came to depend on images. Investigation of the plant world, which was still tied to medical aims but was beginning to take shape as the morphological discipline we now call botany, is a case in point. The implementation of new printing techniques in the late fifteenth century enabled the production of publications that featured images that were precisely reproducible, at least in theory, and therefore understood as trustworthy. Gradually, standard classical texts such as herbals, which had previously circulated as hand-copied manuscripts, were made available in printed form and came to be heavily illustrated (Figure 31.1). The accessibility of standard visual references in relatively affordable printed editions permitted enterprising doctors, pharmacists, and amateurs of the plant world to compare the plants they had at hand and that grew in their native lands with the plants described by classical authorities, among them the Greek naturalists Theophrastus (third century B.C.E.), Dioscorides (first century C.E.), and the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder (d. 79 C.E.). Numerous varieties not contained in the classical texts were “discovered” by learned botanists throughout Europe. Like prints, drawings also served as a basis for comparison of local varieties with the plants the classical authors had described and, in those cases where the plants at hand could not be matched with plants previously described, came to serve as means for recording and cataloguing them.

If one looks at changes in perceptions of nature through the eyes of physicians, several fundamental themes stand out when considering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Physicians were a highly literate group who expressed themselves on paper while also exhibiting great sensitivity to changes in both the science and the art of their discipline. They were educated in one of the three higher university faculties that awarded a doctorate (the others being law and theology). When those holding the medical doctorate (M. D.) referred to themselves as physicians, they were associating themselves with the study of nature, because the word for nature is Latinized from the Greek word for nature, physis, like our modern “physics” (see Blair, Chapter 17, this volume). Most universities had therefore accepted “physic” as one of the three higher faculties because of the argument that the science of physic was worthy of academic study even if the art of medicine was not. As Aristotle had put it, insofar as physic was a science, it “does not theorize about the individual but the class of phenomena.” Moreover, as Aristotle had also made clear, the rigorous generalizations of science were related to causal reasoning: That is, in its scientific aspects, physic offered not only generalizable but also causal explanations. It was the certainty of causal natural explanation that made physic a science.

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the science of physic had been fundamentally altered. When the eminent physician Samuel Garth (1661–1719) addressed his colleagues in honor of the famous William Harvey (1578–1657) and spoke about their common profession of “physick,” he revealed a view quite different from Aristotle’s.

Classrooms and libraries called up radically different images in the minds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. The ideal classroom, as described by teachers such as Desiderius Erasmus (1465–1536) and embodied in public rooms in universities and colleges, professors’ teaching rooms in their own houses, and tutors’ rooms in palaces and noble villas, was a space of moderate size, designed and equipped as systematically as one of Henry Ford’s factories to produce one sort of product: an educated Christian gentleman. A high pulpit, surrounded by desks with benches, dramatized the central role of the teacher and the knowledge he provided. Axioms in Greek and Latin and pictures of plants, animals, and ancient heroes, the latter equipped with moralizing captions, helped students both to memorize and to internalize their teacher’s lessons. The only voice to be heard, in theory, was that of the teacher, explicating an assigned text. And the only knowledge transmitted was that presented in the texts – ancient knowledge authenticated by its patina of age and cultural authority, and presented in the true, moral light by an informed and upright teacher.

The ideal library, by contrast, offered a radically different vision of knowledge. As Ioannes Meursius portrayed it in his 1625 celebration of Leiden University, a good library was housed in a spacious room, illuminated by tall windows (Figure 10.1). Its books, arranged in bookcases organized by subject matter, covered the intellectual waterfront: They dealt with modern history, mathematics, and astronomy, as well as classical literature and history.

Questions of proof and persuasion are important in the history of the sciences of any period, but they are particularly pressing in the case of early modern Europe. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw more self-conscious theoretical reflection on how to discover and confirm the truths of nature than any period before or since; the same period also manifested a huge range of practical strategies by which investigators of the natural world set about demonstrating their findings and convincing their audiences of their claims. Studying these strategies of proof and persuasion has opened up vistas of opportunity for historians of the sciences in early modern Europe. In a range of disciplines, from the social history of medicine to the history of philosophy, historians of the period have argued for the ineradicable significance of forms of proof and persuasion in understanding their various objects of inquiry. The rhetorical form of texts and even objects has come to be seen as constitutive of their meaning, not separable from it. Furthermore, an increasing number of studies have shown how early modern physicians, mathematical practitioners, and natural philosophers all exploited the different and historically specific resources of proof and persuasion that they had at their disposal.

The study of proof and persuasion provides a further opportunity to the historian: It offers a means of bridging the gap between a text (or a practice) and its reception. As the reception, rather than the genesis, of developments in the sciences has become an increasingly important aspect of historiography, it has also become increasingly apparent that this reception history is often extremely difficult to reconstruct.

From the beginning of European expansion, natural knowledge was both its precondition and its constantly developing product. Over the course of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese voyages of exploration in the western and southern Atlantic and along the coast of Africa promoted the development of new knowledge regarding marine navigation and orientation, as well as the ability to rule the seas. They led to new experiences as new seas were sailed and new coasts explored, as the equator was crossed, and as the stars of the southern hemisphere were described. Geography emerged as an independent discipline concerned with the systematic description of the inhabited earth. Encounters with previously unknown lands, peoples, animals, plants, and minerals expanded the frontiers of the ancient and medieval knowledge of the world and changed theoretical understandings of nature. As Peter Martyr of Anghiera (1457–1526), chronicler for King Ferdinand of Aragon, put it, “our pregnant ocean here bears new children every hour.”

Peter Martyr’s early accounts of the “New World” testify to the richness and scope of the European quest for natural knowledge in the first decades of the sixteenth century. In 1493, a few months after the return of Columbus, the Italian scholar began his tenure as royal chronicler by relating reports of the western discoveries. His accumulated works, consisting of letters to his friend Cardinal Ascanio Sforza and other – mostly Roman – personalities, were included in all important European travel collections from 1507 onward. In 1516, he combined the thirty books (in three “decades”) of his writings into a single edition, published in Alcalà and dedicated to Charles, the young king of Spain who later became Emperor Charles V.

Where did early modern natural inquiry take place? Research by historians of science has begun to suggest that many of the activities crucial to the Scientific Revolution took place not only in such recognizably new and innovative sites as botanical gardens, anatomy theaters, laboratories, and the quarters of scientific societies but also – and often simultaneously – within the seemingly humble and prosaic spaces of natural inquirers’ own homes and households. These domestic spaces in fact saw the production of natural knowledge of all kinds, as their occupants used them as places not just to sleep but also to think, write, calculate, observe, and experiment on natural phenomena. Furthermore, while doing so, they frequently ended up enlisting household members in these projects. In this way, homes and households became crucial sites for the pursuit of natural knowledge in early modern Europe.

Few historians of science have paid attention to these kinds of “private” spaces. One of the main reasons for this is almost certainly the way in which, over the past several centuries, scientific work has gradually come to be conceptualized as occuring primarily outside the home. This particular assumption is itself a historical artifact, stemming from modern changes in the organization of work more broadly. During the nineteenth century in particular, as more and more people abandoned home-based workshops and began to travel to new places of employment, newly labeled “scientists” likewise increasingly came to work outside the home in institutional spaces that were perceived as religiously and emotionally neutral. In the process, considerable ideological boundaries were erected between work and family, and between public and private realms, which have continued to shape modern thinking.

“L’esprit n’a point de sexe” (“the mind has no sex”), declared François Poul-lain de la Barre (1647–1723) in 1673 in an effort to level what he considered “the most remarkable of all prejudices”: the inequality of the sexes. An ardent Cartesian, he set out to demonstrate that the mind – distinct from the body – has no sex. New attitudes toward women, such as those voiced by Poullain and others, raised questions about female participation in natural knowledge, itself a novel enterprise struggling for recognition within established hierarchies. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the relation of natural inquiry to church, king, households (grand and humble), princely coffers, and global and local marketplaces was in a state of flux. Important questions remained to be answered about natural knowledge – its ideals and methods, its proper limits, and who should mold them. The looser institutional organization and openings in attitudes allowed women to enter into natural inquiry through a number of informal arrangements and, in some cases, make important contributions to natural knowledge.

At a time when participation in natural inquiry was regulated to a large extent by social standing, men and women seeking to understand nature came primarily from two distinct social groups: learned elites and artisans (see Shapin, Chapter 6, this volume). The humanistic literati mixed in courtly circles, scientific academies, and salons, while skilled craftsmen and craftswomen fashioned telescopes and astrolabes, made maps, and refined techniques for capturing with exactitude the minutest details of natural phenomena. In addition to these two groups, European peasants, fishermen, women who gathered medicinal herbs, and others served as informants to naturalists.

This chapter is devoted to mechanics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Following a distinction traceable at least to Hero of Alexandria (first century) and Pappus of Alexandria (third century), mechanics can be divided into rational and practical (or applied). The former is a mathematical science normally proceeding by demonstration, the latter a manual art with practical aims. Here I privilege rational over practical mechanics, which is discussed elsewhere in this volume (see Bennett, Chapter 27).

A major problem with writing a history of mechanics during this period concerns the changing disciplinary boundaries and meaning of the term “mechanics.” Traditionally, mechanics had dealt with the mathematical science of simple machines and the equilibrium of bodies. In the second half of the seventeenth century, however, mechanics became increasingly associated with the science of motion. Therefore, in dealing with an earlier period, it is useful to chart not simply the transformations of mechanics as it was understood before the second half of the seventeenth century but also the relevant transformations in the science of motion that belong more properly to natural philosophy.

Mechanics and natural philosophy differed widely intellectually, institutionally, and socially in the period covered by this chapter. Even rational mechanics retained a practical and engineering component but it was also progressively gaining a higher intellectual status with the editions of major works from antiquity and with a renewed emphasis on its utility; initially its role in the universities was at best marginal, however. By contrast, natural philosophy had been a major academic discipline for centuries and had closer links to theology than to the practical arts.

During the early modern period, music (of which acoustics is an offspring) and optics belonged to the “mixed mathematical” sciences. “Mixed mathematics” refers here to those physical disciplines that could be treated by extensive use of arithmetic or geometric techniques, such as astronomy, mechanics, optics, and music (see Andersen and Bos, Chapter 28, this volume).

The study of sound in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot be properly considered to belong to any single discipline but rather is found at the intersection of several fields, including music theory, mechanics, anatomy, and natural philosophy. Thus, no single mixed mathematician of the sixteenth or the seventeenth century can be properly said to have specialized in acoustics. Among the early modern scholars who contributed to the study of sound were mixed mathematician Giovanni Battista Benedetti (1530–1590), musician Vincenzo Galilei (1520–1591), and natural philosopher Robert Boyle (1627–1691), which gives some idea of the variety of disciplinary approaches. It is nonetheless safe to say that the study of music theory provided the common background on the basis of which further studies on sound phenomena would be undertaken. Moreover, in the area of natural philosophy, the classical treatises De sensu (On the Senses), De audibilibus (On Things Audible), De anima (On the Soul), and the Problemata (Problems), all attributed to Aristotle at the time, contained material pertaining to acoustic phenomena and were well known to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars.

The practitioners involved in the study of sound were socially disparate as well, ranging from the choirmaster of St. Mark’s in Venice, Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590); to a schoolteacher in the Netherlands, Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637); to a Minim friar in Paris, Marin Mersenne (1588–1648).

Science and imaginative literature have made a dynamic pair of objects for study ever since they were sharply and categorically separated as activities of the mind and kinds of representations: To study them in tandem, at least for literary historians and critics, is to confront the embarrassing question, What is “literature”? – a question harder and harder to answer, and not to be answered here. The relations between science and literature (and early printed book production) have seemed especially interesting since about 1980, as scholars in historical fields have come more and more to poach on each other’s lands and goods. During the advent of cultural studies, especially in the work and thought of certain French historians and philosophers interested in science (e.g., Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, and Michel de Certeau), the canons of literary history expanded as the study of “discourse” and “representation” relieved it of an older focus restricted to particular authors and genres.

Marjorie Hope Nicolson, perhaps the greatest student of “science and literature” writing in English in the first half of the twentieth century, is known above all for her work on the opening up of “space” (in its modern sense) to the literary imagination in such books as Newton Demands the Muse (1946), Voyages to the Moon (1948), and the articles collected in Science and Imagination (1956). Nicolson’s primary interest was in canonical English literature and the opportunities provided for it by the materials and potential metaphors of the “new science.” Her contemporary, the British historian Frances Yates, brought a similar sense of the relationship of (pan-European) scientific activity and imaginative literature to her account of Love’s Labours Lost (1598) and its real-life model (according to Yates), London’s late sixteenth-century “School of Night,” to which such Renaissance luminaries as Walter Raleigh (ca. 1554–1618), mathematician, linguist, and colonialist Thomas Harriot (1560–1621), the poet George Chapman (ca. 1559–1634), and the renegade philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) belonged or were visitors.