In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the term “mechanical” had three main senses – all interconnected and all relevant to the history of science. The traditional meaning referred to activities that were practical or manual. In the sixteenth century, the word acquired a new meaning, a revival of a classical sense, connecting it specifically to machines and their design and management. Finally, in the seventeenth century, “mechanical” came also to refer to a doctrine about the natural world. The phrase “mechanical arts” – artes mechanicae in postclassical Latin – had equivalents in a number of European languages. When linked to the first two of these senses, it referred to the skillful practice of a particular practical discipline or handicraft, including the working of machines.

The disciplinary relationships and boundaries observed in the activities and writings of contemporary practitioners of the mechanical arts confirm the relationship of machinery to a wider context of practical work. They also show the importance, increasing over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of bringing mathematics into the characterization of the “mechanical.” This is both because the design and management of machines came to be regarded as a mathematical art and because mathematics became engaged in a range of other practical work. It would be difficult and anachronistic, for example, to define a boundary between the mechanical arts and practical mathematics, as carried on by people we might more readily call “mathematical practitioners” than mechanicians or mechanics, as the practical mathematical disciplines, such as architecture, engineering, gunnery, and surveying (often referred to in English as “the mathematicals”), were directly concerned with machines.

The story of the changing forms of explanation adopted in the early modern sciences is too often told as a story of the wholesale rejection of the systematic Aristotelian treatment of causal questions that flourished in medieval as well as ancient science. Narratives of this sort have ignored a promising alternative way of understanding the multifaceted transformation that occurred in early modern natural philosophers’ beliefs about causality. By focusing instead on the Aristotelian tradition’s contributions to the development of rival forms of explanation, it becomes possible to characterize these new sorts of explanations against a rich conceptual background. Of course, scientific innovators in the period 1500–1800 did widely reject Aristotle’s account of the four kinds of causes as a source of acceptable theories in the specific sciences. But a more tempered view of this rejection may better reveal how the new sorts of explanations were actually conceived by their originators.

THREE NOTABLE CHANGES IN EARLY MODERN SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS

This chapter considers three notable changes in early modern scientific explanations. The first was a change in the overall purpose of scientific research that was initiated by those critics of Aristotelianism who relinquished Aristotle’s goal of understanding the form of each natural substance. Rather than trying to elucidate each substance’s form, early modern innovators in the specific sciences, as well as natural philosophy, sought to determine the fundamental constituent parts – whether elements or atoms – of each kind of material body and also to identify the lawlike regularities exhibited in the organization and motions of these fundamental elements or atoms.

Experimental philosophy came to prominence on a wave of coffee. In the mid-1650s, a group of aspiring Oxford scholars met regularly at a new kind of place. Something like an alcohol-free tavern, it was presided over by an apothecary named Arthur Tillyard. There, spurred by liberal doses of thick, black liquid, they debated the new ideas transforming natural philosophy and the mathematical sciences. Peter Staehl, Robert Boyle’s (1627–1691) German chymist, mounted experimental displays at the same location. This club of scholars moved to London in 1660 and reemerged as what would soon be called the Royal Society. At about the same time, the novel setting in which these rendezvous had originally occurred – the coffeehouse – also moved to London and began an extraordinary surge in popularity there. Together, the coffeehouse and the Royal Society would become perhaps the two most distinctive social spaces of Restoration England. The implications of their advent would stretch beyond England itself. What began in Oxford and London would grow to affect the fortunes of the sciences throughout Western Europe.

Experiment was not the only controversial investigatory practice fostered by the rise of the coffeehouse. In 1659, political philosopher James Harrington (1611–1677) – whose Oceana (1656) had founded republicanism on a natural philosophy of circulating particles – organized regular debates at Miles’ Coffeehouse, in Westminster. Here soldiers, political figures, and ordinary citizens participated in exhilarating exchanges that ranged broadly over the history and philosophy of government. The Rota, as Harrington called this forum, both generated new knowledge and, far more importantly, exemplified a new way of proposing, debating, and resolving claims in general.

The Middle Ages took magic seriously, though it was not a key issue for that period of European history, as it had been in late antiquity. Many medieval theologians treated magic with fear or loathing, in fact, and philosophers were often indifferent to it. But in the late fifteenth century, magic enjoyed a remarkable rebirth, acquiring the energy that kept it at the center of cultural attention for nearly two hundred years, as great philosophers and prominent naturalists tried to understand or confirm or reject it. After Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) took the first steps in the renaissance of magic, prominent figures from all over Europe followed his lead, including Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522), Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, ca. 1493–1541), Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), John Dee (1527–1608), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615), Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615), Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), Johannes Baptista van Helmont (1579–1644), Henry More (1614–1687), and others of equal stature. Eventually, however, as Europe’s most creative thinkers lost confidence in it, magic became even more disreputable than it had been before Ficino revived it. Around 1600, some reformers of natural knowledge had hoped that magic might yield a grand new system of learning, but within a century it became a synonym for the outdated remains of an obsolete worldview. Before examining its extraordinary rise and fall in post-medieval Europe, we can begin with magic as described by one of its most voluble advocates, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), a German physician and philosopher.

The categories of “experience” and “experiment” lay at the heart of the conceptions of natural knowledge that dominated European learning at both the beginning and the end of the Scientific Revolution. The Latin words generally used to denote “experience” in both the medieval and early modern periods, experientia and experimentum, were generally interchangeable, with no systematic distinction between them except in particular contexts to be discussed; both are related to the word peritus, meaning skilled or experienced. Besides these terms and their vernacular cognates, another related Latin term, periculum (“trial” or “test”), began to be used in the late sixteenth century to designate the deliberate carrying out of an experiment (periculum facere), initially in the mathematical sciences. By the end of the seventeenth century, the construal of experience as “experiment” in this sense had acquired a wide and influential currency.

At the start of the sixteenth century, scholastic versions of Aristotelian natural philosophy dominated the approach to knowledge of nature that informed the official curricula of the universities (see the following chapters in this volume: Blair, Chapter 17; Garber, Chapter 2); Aristotle’s writings stress repeatedly the importance of sense experience in the creation of reliable knowledge of the world. Nonetheless, during the seventeenth century, many of the proponents of what came to be called by some (rather obscurely) “the new science” criticized the earlier orthodoxy of what Aristotelian natural philosophy (or “physics”) had become on the grounds that it paid insufficient attention to the lessons of experience. For example, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) wrote in his New Organon of 1620 that Aristotle “did not properly consult experience… after making his decisions arbitrarily, he parades experience around, distorted to suit his opinions, a captive.”

At the end of the sixteenth century, the English lawyer and natural philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) began to fantasize about the locations for knowledge. The Gesta Grayorum (1594), a court revel performed before Queen Elizabeth I and attributed to Bacon, described an imaginary research facility containing “a most perfect and general library” and “a spacious, wonderful garden” filled with wild and cultivated plants and surrounded by a menagerie, aviary, freshwater lake, and saltwater lake. Spaces for living nature were complemented by a museum of science, art, and technology – “a goodly huge cabinet” housing artifacts (“whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff”), natural oddities (“whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced”), and gems, minerals, and fossils (“whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept”). The fourth and final component was a space in which to test nature, “a still-house, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and vessels as may be a palace fit for a philosopher’s stone.” The totality of these facilities, Bacon concluded, would be “a model of the universal nature made private.” This statement suggested a new idea of empiricism that privileged human invention and demonstration over pure observation and celebrated the communal aspects of observing nature over the heroic efforts of the lone observer. Nature had to be reconstructed within a microcosm, creating an artificial world of knowledge in which scholars prodded, dissected, and experimented with nature in order to know it better.

In the late Middle Ages, astronomy, unlike most other natural sciences now recognized, had been studied and practiced for over two millennia. Together with the other ancient sciences of harmonics, optics, and mechanics, it was considered to be a mixed mathematical science, differing from the pure mathematical sciences – arithmatic and geometry – in that astronomy considered number and magnitude in bodies and not in themselves. In the application of this division (which was not always strictly followed), astronomy could only develop and apply mathematical hypotheses: Pronouncements about the true nature of the heavens lay within the province of natural philosophy. Thus astronomers were not recognized as having the authority to decide whether the earth is moving or at rest, or whether comets are celestial or atmospheric. Astronomy’s function was only to describe the apparent positions of the heavenly bodies for the purposes of timekeeping, calendar making, and prediction of celestial influences. (This last task was the function of astrology, which was a respected science in the late Middle Ages, dealing with the effects of the celestial motions, just as natural philosophy treated its causes.)

This division of the science was established on philosophical grounds, and was used by philosophers and physical theorists to keep astronomy and the other mathematical sciences in their place. Astronomers, on the other hand, were never entirely content with their marginalization, and, while they improved the predictive power of their science, they strove to show the natural philosophers that the claims of astronomy could not be ignored.

Long before natural objects became subjects for experimental study in the laboratory, they had been commodities traded in the marketplace. In the early modern period, as European merchant vessels ventured far beyond the Mediterranean, this marketplace expanded rapidly, thereby increasing the variety and geographical diversity of the commodities traded therein. These changes were vividly reflected in the stockpiling of goods in warehouses for wholesale trade and in the accumulation of exotic natural and artificial objects in museums and cabinets of curiosities. From the gigantic warehouses of Amsterdam and the Hague to the bustling ports of Marseille and Venice, early modern collectors busily gathered specimens of exotic flora and fauna, shells, coral, and other objects from distant parts of the world.

The dramatic increase in the pace of trade, population growth, and the rise of credit all led to an expansion of the distribution network: in particular, to a rise in the number and variety of shops. In 1606, Lope de Vega wrote of Madrid, “Todo se ha vuelto tiendas” (“Everything has turned into shops”), while Daniel Defoe lamented that shops in seventeenth-century London had spread “monstrously.” The boom in shopkeeping not only increased the diversity of items available to consumers but also created spaces for conversation and for gaining information about natural and manufactured goods. In the early modern period, craftsmen’s shops were also workshops and were thus important sources of natural and technological information.

Echoing humanist educational ideals, the young Gargantua of Rabelais’s La vie très horrifique du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel (The Most Horrific Life of the Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel, 1534) visited jewelers, goldsmiths, alchemists, weavers, dyers, instrument makers, and other craftsmen to learn about the properties of things.

In the midst of his great Historia animalium (History of Animals, 1551–8), the Swiss-German naturalist Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) offered the following reflection on the process of creating knowledge. “Reason and experience are the two pillars of scientific work,” he affirmed. “Reason comes to us from God; experience depends on the will of man. Science is born from the collaboration of the two.” Gessner’s experience gathering materials for a new history of nature in the mid-sixteenth century gave him direct insight into the problems of combining reason and experience. The more material he uncovered, the more difficult it was to organize the natural world into distinctly logical patterns. By placing great emphasis on experience, Gessner had amassed enough material to write four hefty volumes that far surpassed what anyone had known before about animals. But he confessed that experience alone was an undisciplined kind of knowledge. It was reason that allowed him to give some semblance of order to nature and to interpret the similarities and differences he saw among the natural things of the world.

Gessner’s methodological lessons in the midst of his Renaissance zoology remind us that the natural sciences were an important arena in which new definitions of knowledge arose from an increased emphasis on experience. In the early modern period, natural history was an important, controversial, and much discussed kind of knowledge. Natural history was a truly encyclopedic science in which broad sectors of society participated, although not, at this point, as a unified group. Learned scholars delighted in the questions of terminology that allowed them to use their formidable linguistic erudition, developing a more precise vocabulary for the natural world that conformed to their experience of it.

In 1603, after six years of construction, Count Wolfgang II von Hohenlohe put the finishing touches on a new two-story laboratory in his residence Schloss Weikersheim. Many of the basic elements of his laboratory can be seen in the frontispiece from a work of theosophical alchemy, Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae (Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom, 1609), by the physician and alchemist Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605); see Figure 13.1. Although this frontispiece foregrounds the spiritual dimension of alchemy (for example, in the kneeling figure of the alchemist), it also illustrates the practical tools of the alchemical laboratory that Khunrath would have known from his work with Central European princes and alchemists.

As in the frontispiece, Wolfgang II’s roomy laboratory had large, bright windows with extra-deep sills where vessels could be placed, as well as smaller window vents to allow smoke and steam to escape. One corner was occupied by a raised flat stone hearth or forge (like those used by blacksmiths), and, looming over it, a smoke hood, like the one shown in the engraving, to draw away vapors. (This did not, however, protect the laboratory workers from the many poisonous fumes that often billowed up from operations to fill the room.) A large set of fixed bellows mounted at the side of the hearth fanned the coals in the forge and heated the smaller furnaces that were probably contained within it. Connected to the main chimney of the hearth in the Weikersheim laboratory were four brick furnaces, including one called a Faule Heinz, or Lazy Harry, on which many distillations could be carried out simultaneously; an assaying furnace in which refined gold and silver were assayed to determine their purity and ores were tested for metal content; and, probably, a sublimation furnace in which substances were heated until they vaporized and then condensed back to solidity by rapid cooling.

Three kinds of narratives have shaped the historiography concerning the relationships between science and the Christian religion. Stories about the “conflict between religion and science,” in the words of J. W. Draper, or the “warfare of science and theology,” in the words of A. D. White, captured the imagination of Western secular intellectual elites in the nineteenth century. As Draper put it in 1875, “The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditional faith and human interests on the other.” In stories of this sort, the victory of science over religion lies at the heart of the admirable march of reason that began in Greek antiquity and culminated in the scientism of the nineteenth century. This historiographical tradition rests on a selective, and highly moralized, presentation of a few episodes of real clash between scientific ideas and religious authority, such as the Counter-Reformation Church’s condemnation of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) or nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian rejections of evolutionary theory, framed by an essentialized understanding of science and theology conceived in terms of the self and its enemies.

Although this story remains surprisingly influential, especially in the popular historiography of science, more recent scholars have developed two alternative and contrasting narratives. A number of theologians, scientists, and some historians have argued that the more typical – and more commendable – relationship between religion and science has involved a separate and peaceful coexistence.

In our times, the domain of the physical sciences is reasonably well defined. Although, at its edges, the less empirically grounded parts of the physical sciences may merge into philosophical speculation, it is no compliment to a scientist to characterize his or her work as “philosophical.” In this respect, we have moved a considerable distance from the early modern period. For many European thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an account of the world around them was radically incomplete without a larger background picture in which to embed it, a picture that often included elements such as the basic categories of existence and the relation of the natural world to God. Many shared the sense of the interconnectedness of knowledge and felt the need for what might be called a foundation for the science that treats the natural world.

The project did not have precise boundaries, nor is it easy to characterize what it is that we are talking about when we are talking about the foundations of our understanding of the physical world. In many ways, the enterprise of providing foundations for a view of the physical sciences was shaped by two traditions, the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy and the Christian tradition in theology. As I shall argue in more detail, the Aristotelian tradition was a common element in the intellectual background of every serious thinker of the period and provided a model for what a properly grounded science should look like. Even for many of those who would reject the Aristotelian tradition in favor of other ancient traditions (such as atomism or Hermeticism) or other views of the world not obviously connected with ancient philosophical traditions, the Aristotelian tradition was hard to escape.

It is difficult to refer to the early modern man of science in other than negative terms. He was not a “scientist”: The English word did not exist until the nineteenth century, and the equivalent French term – un scientifique – was not in common use until the twentieth century. Nor did the defined social and cultural position now picked out by “the scientist’s role” exist in the early modern period. The man of science did not occupy a single distinct and coherent role in early modern culture. There was no one social basis for the support of his work. Even the minimal organizing principle for any treatment of the man of science – that he was someone engaged in the investigation of nature – is, on reflection, highly problematic. What conceptions of nature, and of natural knowledge, were implicated in varying cultural practices? The social circumstances in which, for example, natural philosophy, natural history, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, and geography were pursued differed significantly.

The man of science was, however, almost always male, and to use anything but this gendered language to designate the pertinent early modern role or roles would be historically jarring. The system of exclusions that kept out the vast numbers of the unlettered also kept out all but a very few women. And although it is important to recover information about those few female participants, it would distort such a brief survey to devote major attention to the issue of gender (see the following chapters in this volume: Schiebinger, Chapter 7; Cooper, Chapter 9; Outram, Chapter 32).

Between the High Middle Ages and the end of the seventeenth century, the discipline of alchemy underwent a succession of remarkable changes, both in its internal configuration and in its outward dispersion. In a word, alchemy moved from a rather marginal position as a discipline concerned mainly with mineralogy, metallurgy, and the products of chemical technology to the center of the European stage, where it became the basis for a comprehensive theory of matter and the justification of a heterodox new medicine, occupying the best minds of the age. All the same, alchemy retained a striking continuity between its medieval and early modern incarnations. Up to the beginning of the Enlightenment, the writers of the popular new genre of “chymical textbooks” were paying tribute to Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient and numinous figure who supposedly founded the art of alchemy (see Copenhaver, Chapter 22, this volume). Until the last quarter of the seventeenth century, these textbook authors made no strict demarcation between “alchemy” and “chemistry,” and despite a misconception popular among historians, they did not normally disavow the transmutation of metals.

The modern distinction between alchemy and chemistry, wherein the former refers exclusively to the transmutation of base metals into gold, is a caricature popularized above all by the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. In the Middle Ages, alchemy was commonly viewed as a subordinate and artisanal branch of physics, a sort of “applied science” based on general principles supplied by natural philosophy. It was classed within the field of “meteorology,” that is, the study of matter below the sphere of the moon.

During the early modern period, “mathematics” was generally understood to mean the study of number and magnitude, or of quantity in general. There were two varieties: “pure” mathematics and, using a term that became common around 1600, “mixed mathematics.” The former studied number and magnitude in abstraction, whereas the latter studied them in composite occurrence; that is, linked to (mostly material) objects. By 1700, mixed mathematics was extensive indeed: In the German philosopher Christian Wolff’s (1679–1754) paradigmatic Elementa matheseos universae (Elements of All Mathematics, 3rd ed., 1733–42), it comprised mechanics, statics, hydro-statics, pressure in air and fluids, optics, perspective, spherical geometry, astronomy, geography, hydrography, chronology, sundials, explosives, and architecture, both military and civil. By 1500, most of these fields were small if they existed at all; the rapid expansion of “mixed mathematics” is a characteristic feature of the early modern period. Compared with the mixed variety, pure mathematics had fewer domains. Wolff summarized it under the headings arithmetic, geometry, plane trigonometry, analysis of finite quantities (i.e., letter algebra and analytic geometry), and analysis of infinite quantities (i.e., differential and integral calculus); the last two were created in the seventeenth century.

In this chapter, we follow this early modern demarcation of pure mathematics; when using the term “mathematics,” unless explicitly indicated otherwise, we refer to pure mathematics so defined. The demarcation was in terms of the subject matter; it did not correspond to professional dividing lines. Few if any scholars identified themselves exclusively as pure mathematicians. Yet the principal stimuli for development in early modern pure mathematics were internal to its own traditions, stemming from classical and medieval pure mathematics.

As is well known, astrology finally disappeared from the domain of legitimate natural knowledge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the precise contours of this story remain obscure. It is less well known, albeit clearly documented, that astrology was taught from the beginning of the fourteenth century as an important part of the arts and science curriculum at the great medieval and Renaissance universities, including Padua, Bologna, and Paris. There, astrology was studied within three distinct scientific disciplines – mathematics, natural philosophy, and medicine – and served to integrate several highly developed mathematical sciences of antiquity – astronomy, geography, and geometrical optics – with Aristotelian natural philosophy. This astrologizing Aristotelianism provided fundamental patterns of interpretation and analysis in pre-Newtonian natural knowledge. Thus, the history of astrology – and, in particular, the story of its protracted criticism and ultimate rejection as a source of what the learned considered legitimate natural knowledge – is central for understanding the transition from medieval and Renaissance natural philosophy to Enlightenment science. The role of astrology in this transition was neither obvious nor unproblematic. Indeed, astrology’s integration of astronomy and natural philosophy under the aegis of mathematics had much in common with the aims of the “new science” of the seventeenth century. Thus it becomes necessary to explain why this promising astrological synthesis was rejected in favor of a rather different mathematical natural philosophy.

Historians have often linked two quite separate phenomena: the gendering of early modern natural inquiry as a masculine form of activity in theory and, to a large extent, in practice, and the gendering of nature as female in many early modern texts and images. There is no necessary logical connection between these two phenomena, despite persistent and profound historiographical investments in their linkage, most notably as part of broader critiques of the scientific enterprise by writers with feminist commitments. But there are important and interesting historical connections, which this chapter seeks to explore.

The critical focus on the masculine nature of scientific activity has had the longer history. Antivivisection campaigns in nineteenth-century Britain and America, for example, often (though not always) overlapped with feminist concerns. Antivivisectionists saw biological science in particular as indelibly marked by cruelty toward the animals it used as experimental subjects and by an attitude toward nature that placed more emphasis on advancing scientific knowledge than on respect for the natural world. Others claimed more generally that certain qualities of the scientific enterprise reflected its “masculine” character, that is, were rooted in force and power, as were gender relations in society as a whole. One such writer was Clémence Royer (1830–1902), the first French translator of the works of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), a member of Paul Broca’s (1824–1880) Anthropological Society, and a lifelong activist for feminist and other movements of social reform. In her Le bien et la loi morale (The Good and the Moral Law) of 1881, she described science as masculine in its practitioners and thereby “masculine” in its practices.