Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T01:04:13.053Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

47 - Natural philosophy and the ‘new science’

from STRUCTURES OF THOUGHT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Glyn P. Norton
Affiliation:
Williams College, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ariew, Roger, ‘Descartes and scholasticism: the intellectual background to Descartes’ thought', in Descartes: the Cambridge companion, ed. Cottingham, John (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis, The works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, J., Ellis, R. L., and Heath, D. D., new edn, London: Longmans, 1857–74, 14 vols. [Facs. Reprint Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1989].Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis, New Atlantis (1624; published 1627)
Blair, Ann, ‘La persistance du latin comme langue de science à la fin de la Renaissance’, in Sciences et langues en Europe, ed. Chartier, R. and Corsi, P. (Paris: Centre Alexandre Koyré, 1996)Google Scholar
Blair, Ann, The theater of nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar
Bruno, Giordano, The Ash Wednesday supper (1584); and Francis Bacon, Essays (1597–1625)
Campanella, Tommaso, The city of the sun (c. 1602)
Colie, Rosalie L.The resources of kind: genre-theory in the Renaissance, ed. Lewalski, B. K., Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Drake, S.Discoveries and opinions of Galileo, trans.(New York: Doubleday, 1957)Google Scholar
Durling, Dwight, Georgic tradition in English poetry (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1964)Google Scholar
Findlen, Paula, ‘Jokes of nature and jokes of knowledge: the playfulness of scientific discourse in early modern Europe’, Renaissance quarterly 43 (1990)Google Scholar
Fraisse, Simone, Une conquête du rationalisme: l'influence de Lucréce en France au seiziéme siécle (Paris: Nizet, 1962)Google Scholar
Galilei, Galileo, Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, trans. Drake, S., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.Google Scholar
Grafton, Anthony, Defenders of the text: the traditions of scholarship in an age of science 1450–1800, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Grafton, Anthony, New worlds, ancient texts: the power of tradition and the shock of discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar
Jo Dobbs, Betty, The Janus faces of genius: the role of alchemy in Newton's thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
Johnson, Francis F., ‘Latin versus English: the sixteenth-century debate over scientific terminology’, Studies in philology 41 (1944)Google Scholar
Jones, Richard Foster, Ancients and moderns: a study of the background of The Battle of the Books, St Louis: Washington University Studies, 1936.Google Scholar
Kepler, Johannes, Somnium, trans. Rosen, E., Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Miernowski, Jan, Dialectique et connaissance dans la Sepmaine de Du Bartas (Geneva: Droz, 1992)Google Scholar
Moss, Jean Dietz, Novelties in the heavens: rhetoric and sciencein the Copernican controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar
Nauert, Charles, ‘Humanists, scientists and Pliny: changing approaches to a classical author’, American historical review 84 (1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, The breaking of the circle: studies in the eFect of the ‘new science’ upon seventeenth-century poetry (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1950)Google Scholar
Olschki, Leonardo, Geschichte der neusprachlichen wissenschaftlichen Literatur, 3 vols.(Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1965), vol. iiGoogle Scholar
Palissy, Bernard, Œuvres, Paris: Blanchard, 1961.Google Scholar
Panizza, Letizia (ed.), Philosophical and scientific poetry in the Renaissance, Renaissance studies 5 (1991).Google Scholar
Panofsky, Erwin, Galileo as a critic of the arts (The Hague: M. NijhoC, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pantin, Isabelle, La poésie du ciel en France dans la seconde moitié du seizième siècle, Geneva: Droz, 1995.Google Scholar
Paré, Ambroise, The apologie and treatise, trans. Johnso, T., New York: Dover, 1968.Google Scholar
Romm, James S., ‘Lucian and Plutarch as sources for Kepler's “Somnium” ’, Classical and modern literature 9 (1989)Google Scholar
Rossi, Paolo, Francis Bacon: from magic to science, trans. Rabinovitch, S. (London: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1968)Google Scholar
Schatzberg, Walter, et al. (ed.), The relations of literature and science: an annotated bibliography of scholarship 1880–1980, New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1987.Google Scholar
Schmidt, Albert-Marie, La poésie scientifique en France au seizième siècle, Paris: A. Michel, 1938.Google Scholar
Schmidt, Albert-Marie, La poésie scientifique en France au seizième siècle, Paris: Albin Michel, 1938.Google Scholar
Schuler, Robert, ‘Theory and criticism of the scientific poem in Elizabethan England’, English literary Renaissance 15 (1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Speroni, Sperone, Dialogo delle lingue, ed. Harth, H., Munich: W. Fink, 1975.Google Scholar
Swerdlow, Noel and Neugebauer, Otto, Mathematical astronomy in Copernicus' De revolutionibus, 2 vols. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1984), vol. iCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tartaglia, Niccoló, Nova scientia, in Mechanics in sixteenth-century Italy, ed. Drake, S. and Drabkin, I. E. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969)Google Scholar
The Cambridge history of Renaissance philosophy, ed. Schmitt, C. B., et al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tieghem, Paul, La littérature latine de la Renaissance: étude d'histoire littéraire européenne (Geneva: Slatkine, 1966)Google Scholar
Vesalius, Andreas, Epitome, trans. Lind, L. R. (New York: Macmillan, 1949)Google Scholar
Wilkins, John, An essay towards a real character and a philosophical language, London: S. Gellibrand and J. Martin, 1668.Google Scholar
Zeeberg, Peter, ‘Science versus secular life: a central theme in the Latin poems of Tycho Brahe’, Acta conventus neo-Latini Torontonensis, ed. Dalzell, A., Fantazzi, C., and Schoeck, R. J. (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance texts and studies, 1991)Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×