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).