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The Renaissance and Historians of Science1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Harcourt Brown*
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Extract

Twenty years have passed since the Surveys of Recent Scholarship in the Period of the Renaissance were planned for the Committee on Renaissance Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies, offprints of which were grouped in a brochure circulated under the date of 1945. Any review of progress in these fields ought to start with these useful compendia, even though several important areas were not explored at that time. Science was abundantly documented by Francis Johnson and Sanford Larkey, whose critical evaluations afforded a guide to the physical sciences and mathematics, including astronomy, geography, and cartography, as well as the principal parts of biology.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1960

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Footnotes

1

A version of this paper was presented at the twentieth anniversary meeting of the New England Renaissance Conference at Brown University on 16 October 1959.

References

2 Modern Language Quarterly II (1941), 363-401.

3 Thomdike, Lynn, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vols. III and IV, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (New York, 1934)Google Scholar. Vols. V and VI were published in 1941.

4 Sarton, George, ‘Science in the Renaissance’, in The Civilization of the Renaissance, by James Westfall Thompson and others (Chicago, 1929)Google Scholar. (The Mary Tuttle Borden Lectures at Mount Holyoke College.)

5 Quoted by Jean Lindsay in the introduction to A Short History of Science, Origins and Results of the Scientific Revolution, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959, p. xi.

6 The Renaissance, a Symposium (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1953).

7 Princeton, 1943

8 Oxford University Press, 1954-1958.

9 Koyré, A., ‘Galileo and Plato’, Journal of the History of Ideas, IV (1943), p. 400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Reprinted in Wiener, and Noland, , Roots of Scientific Thought (New York, 1957), pp. 147 Google Scholar ff.

10 London, 1949.

11 London, 1954.

12 Partial reprint of Ideas and Men, the Story of Western Thought (New York, 1950).

13 These quotations are taken from Butterfield, Origins, ed. 1951, p. viii.

14 Butterfield, p. 26.

15 Butterfield, p. 41.

16 Butterfield, p. 122.

17 Butterfield, p. 149.

18 In ‘Historical Relations of Religion and Science’, in Science, Religion, and Reality, ed. Joseph Needham (New York, 1928); see especially pp. 121 and 123.