Academics all over the world rightly desire to understand how modern science has come about. Indeed there was a time when historians of science had on offer a clear-cut conception of how that happened. But ongoing innovation in historiographical approaches has rendered the period from Galileo to Newton ever more elusive. Its monolithic coherence has been dissolved, a mood of sceptical resignation reigns in the profession over the very possibility of treating seventeenth-century science as more than a string of loosely connected episodes. I argue that, without returning to a historiographical past definitively behind us, coherence may be restored at a higher level of sophistication. Cross-cultural comparison, and unusual ways of dealing with historical concepts and causes, are proper tools to revitalize the issue and come up with partly novel answers to a question that in any case refuses to go away.