The “organization of knowledge” is a large and diffuse topic which can be studied at many different levels, ranging from the way an individual orders his or her understanding of the world privately or in publications, to the ways in which communities or institutions order knowledge, notably in pedagogical curricula and textbooks, professional structures, libraries and library catalogs, and other collective projects. Although a few modern philosophers have addressed the problem of classifying knowledge, current practices of classification are mostly studied by anthropologists and sociologists. Modern cultures and subcultures engage in both explicit and tacit classifications of knowledge, but today any particular organization of knowledge is generally acknowledged to involve a number of arbitrary choices and its success is often measured by pragmatic criteria of effectiveness, such as ease of use and economic efficiency. But this skeptical attitude toward the possibility of any organization matching the reality of knowledge or of the world is a fairly modern development, articulated for example in Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s “preliminary discourse” to the Encyclopédie of 1751.

In Renaissance Europe, on the contrary, many thinkers harbored the ambition of implementing the perfect organization of knowledge, though pragmatic, notably alphabetical, arrangements were also widespread in certain contexts. During the Renaissance the difficulty of ordering knowledge was greatly exacerbated in almost every field by the massive influx of material to be included, stemming from newly discovered worlds and newly recovered ancient texts as well as newly printed texts of all kinds, and by concurrent social and cultural changes associated with the development of printing, a rapid growth in higher education, and shifting patterns of patronage and social mobility.

The period of religious transformations covered in this volume corresponds closely in time to a series of major scientific developments traditionally known as the ‘Scientific Revolution’, which is commonly considered to extend from the publication of Copernicus’s heliocentric thesis (in De Revolutionibus, 1543) to that of Newton’s laws of physics (in the Principia, 1687). In the course of these 150 years, Aristotelian natural philosophy, which had been dominant since its introduction to the Latin West c. 1200, came under attack in many quarters and gradually lost its hold on the curriculum. Various alternative authorities and new interpretations of nature were advanced, but by 1650 the new philosophy which had become dominant was a mechanical philosophy premised on the notion that all phenomena could be explained as particles of matter in motion, according to mathematical laws open to empirical observation and experimentation. The historiography on the Scientific Revolution is vast. Alongside detailed studies of the central figures and texts of the Scientific Revolution, we have a rich array of studies which highlight the role of the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts of these developments. Among these, religion has long been and continues to be acknowledged as a particularly important factor.

The historiography on science and religion across the centuries predates the professionalization of the history of science and has from the beginning singled out the early modern period for developments which were taken as paradigmatic both of conflict (the Galileo Affair) and of cooperation (‘Protestantism and science’). Although recent work on the interactions between science and religion has moved away from such starkly articulated theses, the early modern period remains a particularly rich area of study.

“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.

The studies by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, and others, of the impact of the ‘new science’ on seventeenth-century English literature assumed an unproblematic demarcation between science and literature. Since the 1950s this notion has been challenged, both by new trends in ‘literature and science’ (from cyberspace to the rhetoric of science) and by recent historical scholarship. In particular, as this brief sketch will suggest, the historical complexity of the relations between natural philosophy and literature in the early modern period belies not only the traditional assumption of a separate science which ‘influences’ literature, but also the more recent intimations that science simply is literature. In the Renaissance proper (say, until 1630) the methods, goals, and individuals involved in the two clusters of disciplines overlapped in a number of ways. During the seventeenth century new developments in both science and literary criticism tended, sometimes self-consciously, to define the two fields as separate and even opposed. Although one can see in these trends the foundations for our modern sense of a gulf between science and literature, at the time such a gap was not so readily apparent.

Carrying on an ancient tradition, natural philosophy in the Renaissance searched for certain, causal knowledge about nature primarily through the interpretation of and commentary on authoritative texts. Bookish methods promised more exciting results than ever once they could be applied beyond the writings of Aristotle and his scholastic commentators, already central to the medieval curriculum. Thanks to humanism, a vast number of newly discovered ancient works about nature became available: late antique commentaries on Aristotle (for example, Philoponus, Simplicius, and Alexander of Aphrodisias); accounts of pre-Socratic, Epicurean and Stoic, hermetic and Neoplatonic cosmologies and philosophies; and new works and better versions of old ones by still canonical figures, like Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen.