Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:26:41.181Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Historical foundations for a global perspective on the emergence of a western European regime for the discovery, development, and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2013

Patrick O'Brien*
Affiliation:
Department of Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE E-mail: p.o'[email protected]

Abstract

At a ‘conjuncture’ in pre-modern global history, labelled by previous generations of historians as the ‘Scientific Revolution’, the societies and states of western Europe established and promoted a regime of interconnected institutions for the accumulation of useful and reliable knowledge. This placed their economies on trajectories that led to divergent prospects for long-term technological change and material progress. Although the accumulation of such knowledge takes place over millennia of time, and in contexts that are global, critical interludes or conjunctures in a ‘dialogue of civilizations’ have remained geographically localized, and indigenous in nature. Determining the locations, origins, and forms of this particular conjuncture is often dismissed as an exercise in Eurocentric history. Modern scholarship has also preferred to emphasize the roles played by craftsmen in its progress and diffusion – ignoring metaphysical and religious foundations of knowledge about the natural world. My survey aims to restore traditional perceptions that the West passed through a transformation in its hegemonic beliefs about prospects for the comprehension and manipulation of that world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will suggest that the Scientific Revolution's remote antecedents might be traced back to Europe's particular transition from polytheism to monotheism. Thirdly, it summarizes literature that analyses how centuries of tension between Christian theology and natural philosophy led, during the Renaissance, to a displacement of scholastic and beatified Aristotelian conceptions and obstacles to understandings of the natural world. Finally, the survey will elaborate on how new knowledge flowing into Europe from voyages overseas, and medieval advances in technology, together with scepticism arising from religious warfare, stimulated a widespread search for more useful and reliable forms of knowledge throughout the Catholic and Protestant West.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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.)

Footnotes

*

I wish to convey my sincere thanks to the editor of the Journal of Global History, his co-editors, and the referees for their helpful critiques of an article that will hopefully stimulate a heuristic controversy around the role of science in global history.

References

1 Landes, David, The wealth and poverty of nations, New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1998Google Scholar

Pomeranz, Kenneth, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000Google Scholar

Bryant, Joseph M., ‘The West and the rest revisited: debating capitalist origins, European colonialism, and the advent of modernity’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 31, 2006, pp. 403444Google Scholar

Huff, Toby E., Intellectual curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: a global perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011Google Scholar

Wong, R. Bin and Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent, Before and beyond divergence: the politics of economic change in China and Europe, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2011Google Scholar

Parthasarathi, Prasannan, Why Europe grew rich and Asia did not: global economic divergence, 1600–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Allen, Robert C., Bengtsson, Tommy, and eds., Martin Dribe, Living standards in the past: new perspectives on well-being in Asia and Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Broadberry, Stephen and Gupta, Bishnupriya, ‘The early modern great divergence: wages, prices and economic development in Europe and Asia’, Economic History Review, 59, 2006, pp. 231CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Stephen Broadberry and Steve Hindle, eds., ‘Asia in the Great Divergence’, Economic History Review, special issue, 64, 2011, pp. 1184Google Scholar

Allen, Robert C., ‘Agricultural productivity and rural incomes in England and the Yangtze Delta, c. 1620–c. 1820’, Economic History Review, 62, 2009, pp. 525550CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Weber, Max, General economic history, New York: Collier Books, 1950Google Scholar

Weber, Max, The religion of China, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1951Google Scholar

Weber, Max, The religion of India, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958Google Scholar

Needham, Joseph, The great titration, Toronto: Allen and Unwin, 1969Google Scholar

4 Golinski, Jan, Making natural knowledge: constructivism and the history of science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998Google Scholar

Hacking, Ian, The social construction of what?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999Google Scholar

5 Falola, Toyin and Brownell, Emily, eds., Africa, empire and globalization, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011Google Scholar

6 Bala, Arun, The dialogue of civilizations in the birth of modern science, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Wong, Roy Bin, China transformed and the limits of European experience, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997Google Scholar

8 Mokyr, Joel, The gifts of Athena: historical origins of the knowledge economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002Google Scholar

Inkster, Ian, ‘Potentially global: “useful and reliable knowledge” and material progress in Europe, 1474–1914’, International History Review, 28, 2, 2006, pp. 237286CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Inkster, Ian, ‘Pursuing big books: technological change in global history’, History of Technology, 22, 2000, pp. 101129Google Scholar

9 Allen, Barry, Knowledge and civilization, Boulder, CO: West View Press, 2004Google Scholar

Snooks, Graeme D., The dynamic society: exploring sources of global change, London: Routledge, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Reinert, Erick S., ‘Exploring the genesis of economic innovations: the religious gestalt-switch and the duty to invent as preconditions for economic growth’, European Journal of Law and Economics, 4, 1997, pp. 233283CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Nelson, Richard R., ed., National innovation systems, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993Google Scholar

11 Armstrong, Karen, The great transformation: the beginnings of our religious tradition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006Google Scholar

12 Stark, Rodney, One true god: historical consequences of monotheism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001Google Scholar

Tremlin, Todd, Minds and gods: the cognitive foundation of religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lloyd, G. E. R., Cognitive variations: reflections on the unity and diversity of the human mind, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Barnes, Michael H., Stages of thought: the co-evolution of religious thought and science, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000Google Scholar

14 Cohen, H. Floris, The scientific revolution: a historiographical inquiry, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994Google Scholar

15 Tomako Masuzawa, The invention of the world's religions: or, how European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005; Stark, One true god.

16 Bona, James J., The word of God and the languages of man: interpreting nature in early modern science and medicine, vol. 1, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995Google Scholar

17 Lloyd, G. E. R., Adversaries and authorities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996Google Scholar

18 Lloyd, G. E. R., Methods and problems in Greek science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991Google Scholar

19 Colish, Marcia, Medieval foundations of the Western intellectual tradition, 400–1400, New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1997Google Scholar

Grant, Edward, Science and religion from Aristotle to Copernicus 400 BC–AD 1550, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004Google Scholar

Lindberg, David C., ed., Science in the Middle Ages, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2008Google Scholar

20 Bartlett, Robert, The natural and the supernatural in the Middle Ages: the Wiles lectures given at the Queen's University of Belfast, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008Google Scholar

Grant, Robert M., Miracle and natural law in Graeco-Roman and early Christian thought, Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing, 1952Google Scholar

21 Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald L., eds., God and nature: historical essays on the encounter between Christianity and science, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986Google Scholar

22 Montgomery, Scott L., Science in translation: movements of knowledge through cultures and time, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000Google Scholar

Johns, Adrian, The nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Herrin, Judith, The formation of Christendom, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989Google Scholar

24 Smith, Julia M. H., Europe after Rome: a new cultural history 500–1000, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005Google Scholar

25 Gillespie, Michael A., The theological origins of the rise of early modernity, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Huff, Toby E., The rise of early modern science: Islam, China and the West, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993Google Scholar

Lindberg, David C., ed., The beginnings of Western science: the European scientific tradition in philosophical, religious, and institutional context 600 BC to AD 1450, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007Google Scholar

Levine, David, At the dawn of modernity: biology, culture, and material life in Europe after the year 1000, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001Google Scholar

26 Clagett, Marshall, The science of mechanics in the Middle Ages, Maddison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959Google Scholar

Epstein, Stephan R. and Prak, Maarten R., eds., Guilds, innovation and the European economy 1400–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Bert S. Hall and Delno C. West, eds., On pre-modern technology and science: a volume of studies in honor of Lynn White, Jr., Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1976Google Scholar

Gies, Frances and Gies, Joseph, Cathedral, forge, and waterwheel: technology and invention in the Middle Ages, New York: Harper Collins, 1994Google Scholar

Gimpel, Jean, The medieval machine, London: Victor Gollancz, 1977Google Scholar

27 Nelson, Benjamin, ‘Sciences and civilizations: East and West’, in Raymond J. Seeger and Robert S. Cohen, eds., Philosophical foundations of science: proceedings of Section L, 1969, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974, pp. 445493CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Gaukroger, Stephen, The emergence of scientific culture: science and the shaping of modernity 1210–1685, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Hilde de Ridder-Symoens and Walter Rüegg, eds., A history of the university in Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996Google Scholar

Gascoigne, John, Science, politics and universities in Europe, 1600–1800, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998Google Scholar

30 Grant, Edward, A history of natural philosophy: from the ancient world to the nineteenth century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Freely, John, Aladdin's lamp: how Greek science came to Europe through the Islamic world, New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2009Google Scholar

Saliba, George, Islamic science and the making of the European Renaissance, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007Google Scholar

32 Barnes, Stages of thought; and Gillespie, Theological origins.

33 Collins, Randall, The sociology of philosophies: a global theory of intellectual change, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998Google Scholar

34 Lindberg, David and Numbers, Ronald, eds., When science and Christianity meet, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Olson, Richard G., Science and religion, 1450–1900: from Copernicus to Darwin, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004Google Scholar

36 Gellner, Ernest, Reason and culture: the historic role of rationality and rationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992Google Scholar

Hannam, James, God's philosophers: how the medieval world laid the foundations of modern science, London: Icon Books, 2009Google Scholar

37 Crombie, Alistair C., Science, art and nature in medieval and modern thought, London: Hambledon Press, 1996Google Scholar

38 Edward Grant: Planets, stars and orbs: the medieval cosmos, 1200–1687, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994Google Scholar

39 Bulloush, Vincent, ed., Universities, medicine and science in the medieval West, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004Google Scholar

Porter, Roy, ‘The Scientific Revolution: a spoke in the wheel’, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds., Revolution in history, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Harrison, Peter, ed., The Cambridge companion to science and religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Kaye, Joel, Economy and nature in the fourteenth century: money, market exchange and the emergence of scientific thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 Gillespie, Theological origins; Bartlett, The natural and the supernatural.

42 Crombie, Alistair C., Robert Grosseteste and the origins of experimental science, 1100–1700, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953Google Scholar

43 Lindberg and Numbers, God and nature; Gaukroger, Emergence of scientific culture.

44 Noble, David F., The religion of technology: the divinity of man and the spirit of invention, New York: A.A. Knopf, 1997Google Scholar

45 Rossi, Paulo, Philosophy, technology, and the arts in the early modern era, New York: Harper and Row, 1970Google Scholar

Rossi, Paulo, The birth of modern science, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001Google Scholar

46 Eamon, William, Science and the secrets of nature: books of secrets in medieval and early modern culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994Google Scholar

Sargan, Carl, The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark, New York: Norton, 1996Google Scholar

Westman, Robert S. and McGuire, James E., eds., Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution: papers read at a Clark Library seminar, Los Angeles, CA: University of California, 1977Google Scholar

47 Colish, Medieval foundations; Harrison, Science and religion.

48 Rabb, Theodore K., The last days of the Renaissance and the march to modernity, New York: Basic Books, 2006Google Scholar

Linberg, David C. and Westman, Robert S., eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990Google Scholar

Osler, Margaret J., ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49 Dear, Peter, The intelligibility of nature: how science makes sense of the world, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Gellner, Ernest, Plough, sword, and book: the structure of human history, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989Google Scholar

50 Roberts, Lissa L., ‘Situating science in global history’, Itinerario 33, 2009, pp. 147Google Scholar

Shapin, Steven, The Scientific Revolution, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51 Hall, Marie Boas and Hall, Alfred R., The scientific renaissance, 1450–1630, New York: Harper Brothers, 1962Google Scholar

Field, J. V. and James, Frank A. J. L., Renaissance and revolution: humanists, scholars, craftsmen and natural philosophers in early modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993Google Scholar

Long, Pamela O., Openness, secrecy, authorship: technical arts and the culture of knowledge from antiquity to the Renaissance, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001Google Scholar

Ogilvie, Brian W., The science of describing: natural history in Renaissance Europe, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 Livingstone, David N., Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Kurtz, Paul and Madigan, Tim, eds., Challenges to the Enlightenment: in defence of reason and science, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994Google Scholar

Tallis, Raymond, Aping mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the misrepresentation of humanity, Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2011Google Scholar

O'Brien, Patrick K., ‘Historiographical traditions and moral imperatives for the restoration of global history’, Journal of Global History, 1, 1, 1996, pp. 341CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53 Lloyd, G. E. R., Disciplines in the making: cross-cultural perspectives on elites, learning and innovation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54 Bedini, Silvio A., Patrons, artisans and instruments of science, 1600–1750, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999Google Scholar

Rossi, Paulo, Philosophy, New York: Harper and Row, 1970Google Scholar

55 Mendelsohn, Everett, ed., The social production of scientific knowledge, Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1977CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Headrick, Daniel, When information comes of age: technologies of knowledge in the age of reason, 1700–1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000Google Scholar

56 Perez-Ramos, Antonio, Francis Bacon's idea of science and the maker's knowledge tradition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988Google Scholar

Faulkner, Robert K., Francis Bacon and the project of progress, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993Google Scholar

57 Burke, John G., ed., The uses of science in the age of Newton, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983Google Scholar

58 Wootton, David, Bad medicine: doctors doing harm since Hippocrates, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006Google Scholar

Crombie, Alistair, Styles of scientific thinking in the European tradition, vols. 2 and 3, London: Duckworth, 1994Google Scholar

Holton, Gerald, Thematic origins of scientific thought: Kepler to Einstein, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980Google Scholar

59 Dear, Peter, Revolutionizing the sciences: European knowledge and its ambitions, 1500–1700, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001Google Scholar

Jacob, James R., The Scientific Revolution: aspirations and achievements, 1500–1700, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1998Google Scholar

60 Zilsel, Edgar, ‘The genesis of the concept of scientific progress’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1945, pp. 325–399Google Scholar

Butterfield, Herbert, The origins of modern science, 1300–1800, London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd, 1949Google Scholar

Hall, Rupert A., Science and society: historical essays on the relations of science, technology, and medicine, Aldershot: Variorum, 1994Google Scholar

61 Pomeranz, Kenneth, ‘Ten years after: responses and reconsiderations’, Historically Speaking, September 2011, pp. 20–25Google Scholar

Pomeranz, Kenneth, ‘Without coal? Colonies? Calculus? Europe, China and the industrial revolution’, in Ned Lebow, Geoffrey Parker, and Philip Tetlock, eds., Unmaking the West: “what-if” scenarios that rewrite world history, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006Google Scholar

Park, Katharine and Daston, Lorraine, eds., Early modern science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006Google Scholar

Koertge, Noretta, ed., A house built on sand: exposing postmodern myths about science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000Google Scholar

62 Sorrell, Tom, ed., The rise of modern philosophy: the tension between the new and traditional philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993Google Scholar

Westfall, Richard S., Science and religion in seventeenth-century England, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1970Google Scholar

63 Newman, William R. and Grafton, Anthony, eds., Secrets of nature: astrology and alchemy in early modern Europe, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001Google Scholar

Osler, Margaret J., ‘Mixing metaphors: science and religion or natural philosophy and theology in early modern Europe’, History of Science, 35, 1997, pp. 91113Google Scholar

Jones, Richard F., Ancients and moderns: a study of the background of the ‘Battle of the books’, St Louis, MO: Washington University Press, 1936Google Scholar

64 Bono, Word of God; Grant, History of natural philosophy; Lindberg and Westman, Reappraisals.

65 Rublack, Ulinka, Reformation Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005Google Scholar

Feingold, Mordechai, Jesuit science and the republic of letters, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002Google Scholar

Harrison, Peter, The Bible, Protestantism, and the rise of natural science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66 Bagioli, Mario, ed., The science studies reader, New York: Routledge, 1999Google Scholar

John W. O'Malley, ed., The Jesuits: cultures, sciences, and the arts, 1540–1773, Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1999Google Scholar

67 Cohen, I. Bernard, Duffin, K. E., and Strickland, Stuart, eds., Puritanism and the rise of modern science: the Merton thesis, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990Google Scholar

Harrison, Peter, The fall of man and the foundations of science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68 Popkin, Richard H., The history of scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003Google Scholar

69 Feingold, Mordechai, ed., The new science and Jesuit science: seventeenth century perspectives, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Gaukroger, Stephen, The collapse of mechanism and the rise of sensibility: science and the shaping of modernity, 1680–1760, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012Google Scholar

70 Holton, Gerald, Science and anti-science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990Google Scholar

71 Oster, Malcom, ed., Science in Europe 1500–1800, Basingstoke: Palgrave in association with the Open University, 2002Google Scholar

Adas, Michael, Machines as the measure of man: science, technology, and ideologies of Western dominance, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989Google Scholar

72 Selin, Helaine, ed., Encyclopaedia of the history of science, technology, and medicine in non-Western cultures, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1997CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Newman, William R., Atoms and alchemy: chymistry and the experimental origins of the Scientific Revolution, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Smith, Pamela H. and Schmidt, Benjamin, Making knowledge in early modern Europe: practices, objects, and texts, 1400–1800, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007Google Scholar

Golinski, Jan, Science as public culture: chemistry and enlightenment in Britain 1760–1820, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992Google Scholar

73 Levine, Dawn of modernity.

74 Grafton, Anthony, Defenders of the text: traditions of scholarship in the age of science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993Google Scholar

75 Schmitt, Charles B., The Aristotelian tradition and Renaissance universities, London: Variorum Reprints, 1984Google Scholar

Schechner, Sara J., Comets, popular culture, and the birth of modern cosmology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997Google Scholar

opus, H. Floris Cohen's magnus, How modern science came into the world: four civilizations, one 17th-century breakthrough, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010Google Scholar

76 Jacob, Margaret C., Scientific culture and the making of the industrial West, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997Google Scholar

Jacob, Margaret C., The Scientific Revolution: a brief history with documents, Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010Google Scholar

77 Osler, Margaret J., Divine will and mechanical philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on contingency and necessity in the created world, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994CrossRefGoogle Scholar

78 Cohen, How modern science; Dear, Revolutionizing the sciences; Osler, Divine will; Bono, Word of God; Gillespie, Theological origins.

79 Jesuit philosophers and proto-scientists formed the last bastion for the defence of an Aristotelian natural philosophy. See O'Malley, Jesuits; Feingold, Jesuit science.

80 Gooding, David, Pinch, Trevor, and Schaffer, Simon, eds., The uses of experiment: studies of experiment in the natural sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989Google Scholar

81 Friedel, Robert, A culture of improvement: technology and the Western millennium, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007Google Scholar

Landes, David S., Revolution in time: clocks and the making of the modern world, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983Google Scholar

82 Smith, Pamela H. and Findler, Gerald, eds., Merchants and marvels: commerce, science, and art in early modern Europe, New York: Doubleday, 2002Google Scholar

Meli, Domenico B., Thinking with objects: mechanics in the seventeenth century, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006Google Scholar

83 Albert Van Helden and Thomas L. Hankins, eds., ‘Instruments’, Osiris, special issue, 9, 1994Google Scholar

Roberts, Lissa L., Schaffer, Simon, and Dear, Peter, eds., The mindful hand: inquiry and invention from the late Renaissance to early industrialisation, Amsterdam: Koninkliijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007Google Scholar

84 Schechner, Comets.

85 Kuhn, Thomas S., The Copernican revolution: planetary astronomy in the development of Western thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957Google Scholar

Wilson, Curtis, Astronomy from Kepler to Newton, Aldershot: Variorum, 1989Google Scholar

86 Wallace, William A., Galileo, the Jesuits and the medieval Aristotle, Aldershot: Variorum, 1991Google Scholar

87 Cromer, Alan, Uncommon sense: the heretical nature of science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993Google Scholar

Olson, Richard, Science deified and science defiled: the historical significance of science in Western culture, vol. 2, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990Google Scholar

88 Bono, Word of God; Gillespie, Theological origins.

89 Jacob, Margaret C., The cultural meaning of the Scientific Revolution, New York: Knoft, 1988Google Scholar

Cardwell, Donald S. L., ‘Science and technology in the eighteenth century’, History of Science, 1, 1962, pp. 3043CrossRefGoogle Scholar

90 Moran, Bruce T., Distilling knowledge: alchemy, chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005Google Scholar

Newman, William R., Promethean ambitions: alchemy and the quest for perfect nature, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar

91 Cook, Harold J., The decline of the old medical regime, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986Google Scholar

92 Newman, Atoms and alchemy; William R. Newman, Alchemy tried in the fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the fate of Helmontian chemistry, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

93 Lloyd, G. E. R., Demystifying mentalities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Smith, Pamela H., The business of alchemy: science and culture in the Holy Roman Empire, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994Google Scholar

94 Crosby, Alfred W., The measure of reality: quantification and Western society, 1250–1600, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997Google Scholar

95 McKnight, Stephen A., Science, pseudo-science, and utopianism in early modern thought, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1992Google Scholar

Kuhn, Thomas S., ‘Mathematical vs. experimental traditions in the development of physical science’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7, 1976, pp. 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar

96 Stewart, Larry R., The rise of public science: rhetoric, technology, and natural philosophy in Newtonian Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992Google Scholar

Moran, Bruce T., ed., Patronage and institutions: science, technology, and medicine at the European court, 1500–1750, Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991Google Scholar

97 North, John D., The Norton history of astronomy and cosmology, London: Norton, 1994Google Scholar

Margolis, Howard, It started with Copernicus: how turning the world inside out led to the Scientific Revolution, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002Google Scholar

98 Inkster, Ian, ed., History of Technology, 25, 2004Google Scholar

99 Cohen, I. Bernard, Revolution in science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985Google Scholar

100 Vogel, Hans Ulrich and Dux, Gunter, eds., Concepts of nature: a Chinese–European cross-cultural perspective, Leiden: Brill, 2010Google Scholar

101 Four recent essays by distinguished historians of Western science – Paula Findlen, Steven J. Harris, Mario Bagioli, and Lorraine Daston – suggest that their academic community should revive big pictures of the scientific revolution; see Configurations, 6, 2, 1998. They might wish to go global?