Overview

This volume contains specialised essays, offering broad reflections on the Scientific Revolution, by a group of leading scholars actively engaged in the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science. Although the volume's thirteen original essays display a wide variety of methods and approaches, all share the aim of re-examining fundamental assumptions and questioning established interpretations of the Scientific Revolution. Some of the essays deal with questions of method, audience, and social context. Others examine the conceptions of science held by the major figures in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science, reconsider the relationship of metaphysics to scientific inquiry, investigate the ideology of scientific openness and its origins, and revise traditional estimates of the place of science within the universities. Still others reconsider the map of scientific knowledge as viewed during these two centuries, and the relationship of occult traditions to other features of the Scientific Revolution.