THE ORIGINS OF MODERN SCIENCE

The Origins of Modern Science is the first synthetic account of the

history of science from Antiquity through the Scientific Revolution in
many decades. Providing readers of all backgrounds and students of
all disciplines with the tools to study science like a historian, Ofer Gal
covers everything from Pythagorean mathematics to Newton’s
Principia, through Islamic medicine, medieval architecture, global
commerce and magic. Richly illustrated throughout, scientific
reasoning and practices are introduced in accessible and engaging
ways with an emphasis on the complex relationships between
institutions, beliefs and political structures and practices. Readers
gain valuable new insights into the role played by science both in
history and in the world today, placing the crucial challenges to
science and technology of our time within their historical and cultural
context.

Ofer Gal is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the

University of Sydney and has been teaching the history of science
for over a quarter century. He has won numerous prizes and has
published monographs, edited volumes and articles, especially about
early modern physical sciences, but also on global knowledge,
eighteenth-century chemistry and various philosophical issues.
THE ORIG INS OF M OD ER N
SCIENCE
From Antiquity to the Scientific
Revolution
Ofer Gal
University of Sydney
 University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

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www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316510308

DOI: 10.1017/9781108225205

© Ofer Gal 2021

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the

provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any
part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University
Press.

First published 2021

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 ISBN 978-1-316-51030-8 Hardback

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For Yi
 Contents
List of Figures
Note from the Publisher
Acknowledgements

1 Cathedrals
The Cathedral
Ways of Knowing
Tensions and Compromises
Conclusion: Reflections on the History of Knowledge
Discussion Questions
Suggested Readings

2 Greek Thought
Knowing-About as Know-How
Plato and the Culture of Theory
Parmenides’ Problem and Its Import
Aristotle and the Science of Common Sense
Conclusion
Discussion Questions
Suggested Readings

3 The Birth of Astronomy

Looking Up
Making the Phenomena
 Making Time
Saving the Phenomena
The Moving Earth Hypothesis
The Legacy of Greek Astronomy: Ptolemy’s Orbs
Conclusion
Discussion Questions
Suggested Readings

4 Medieval Learning
The Decline of Greek Knowledge
The Encyclopedic Tradition
Christianity and Learnedness
The University
Muslim Science
Discussion Questions
Suggested Readings

5 The Seeds of Revolution

Monotheism and Pagan Science
The Renaissance
The Movable Press and Its Cultural Impact
Global Knowledge
Global Institutions of Knowledge
Conclusion
Discussion Questions
Suggested Readings

6 Magic
Spectator vs. Participant Knowledge
 Magical Cosmogonies
Magical Epistemology
Magical Cosmologies
Scientific Magic
Magic and the New Science
Conclusion
Discussion Questions
Suggested Readings

7 The Moving Earth

Introduction
The Copernican Revolution
After Copernicus
Kepler and the Physicalization of the Heavens
Galileo and the Telescope
The Galileo Affair: The Church Divorces Science
Conclusion
Discussion Questions
Suggested Readings

8 Medicine and the Body

Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood
The Learned Tradition
The Healing Tradition
The New Medicine and the New Body
The Rise of Anatomy
Conclusion: Tradition, Innovation and the New Body
Discussion Questions
 Suggested Readings

9 The New Science

Galileo’s Mechanical World
Descartes and the Mechanical Philosophy
Founding the New Science
The Experimental Legacy
Conclusion: The Independent Life of the Instrument
Discussion Questions
Suggested Readings

10 Science’s Cathedral
The Two Savants
The Correspondence: Forging a New Question
Setting the Question Right
Conclusion: The New Celestial Mechanics
Coda: The Principia
Discussion Questions
Suggested Readings

Index
 Figures
1.1 Chartres Cathedral, southern façade. agefotostock /
Alamy Stock Photo.

1.2 Diagram of Chartres Cathedral, southern elevation.

Georg Dehio and Gustav von Bezold, Die kirchliche
Baukunst des Abendlandes (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1887–
1902).

1.3 Chartres Cathedral, front façade.

1.4 Jean Fouquet’s The construction of the Temple of

Jerusalem by King Solomon (c. 1475). Miniature by Jean
Fouquet, in Josephus Flavius, "The Antiquities of the Jews"
(c. 1470–1476), man. fr. 247, fol. 163 v. BN, Paris, France.
Leemage / Corbis / Getty Images.

1.5 Left: the scratch plough (Morgan Library & Museum. MS

M.399, fol. 10v. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–
1913), 1910). Right: the horse-drawn plough (Wellcome
Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)).

1.6 Twelfth-century Gothic arches and vaults, Wells

Cathedral Michael D Beckwith / Pixabay.

1.7 Weight distribution in the Roman arch. Illustration by

Cindy Hodoba Eric ©.

1.8 Left: the Colosseum, Rome (putative3 / Pixabay). Right:

Pont du Guard, France (Paul Harrison / Pixabay).
1.9 Left: the scratch plough (Morgan Library & Museum. MS
M.399, fol. 10v. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–
1913), 1910). Right: the horse-drawn plough (Wellcome
Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)).

1.10 Left: a cinqfoil, Cordoba Mezquita. Right: dome of the

cathedral on top of the mosque. Images original to the
author.

1.11 Chartres Cathedral's floor plan. J. Fergusson, The

Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (London: John Murray,
1855), p. 671.

1.12 Illustration of the Cosmos. Hartmann Schedel, Liber

Chronicarum (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493). Library of
the Ruprecht Karl University, Heidelberg. Fine Art Images /
Heritage Images / Getty Images.

1.13 The Christian Great Chain of Being. Didacus Valades,

Rhetorica Christiana (Pervsiae [Perugia]: Apud
Petrumiacobum Petrutium, 1579), p. 220.

2.1 Diagram representing the discovery of the “Higgs Boson”

at the CERN particle accelerator. Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory, "Updated Combination of CDF and DØ's
Searches for Standard Model Higgs Boson Production with
up to 10.0 fb-1 of Data, Preliminary Results"
(https://tevnphwg.fnal.gov/results/SM_Higgs_Summer_12/,
June 2012).

2.2 Illustration of the fable of Pythagoras’ discovery of the

mathematical laws of musical consonances. Franchino
Gafori, Theorica Musice (Milan: Philippium Mantegatium,
1492). Hulton Archive / Handout / Getty Images.
2.3 Pythagorean mathematical regularities. Illustration by
Cindy Hodoba Eric ©.

2.4 Pythagorean classes of numbers and the relations

between them. Illustration by Cindy Hodoba Eric ©.

2.5 Proofs of the first Pythagorean theorem (left) and the

third (right). Illustrations by Cindy Hodoba Eric ©.

2.6 The Rhind Papyrus, c. 1650 BC. DEA PICTURE

LIBRARY / De Agostini / Getty Images.

2.7 Aristotle’s elements. Left: illustration by Cindy Hodoba

Eric ©. Right: Hartmann Schedel, Liber Chronicarum
(Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493).

3.1 The sky dome, as it would have looked above Jerusalem

on August 3, 70 C E . I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y C I N D Y H O D O B A E R I C © .

3.2 The motion of the Sun and stars across the sky dome
(Northern Hemisphere). Illustration by Cindy Hodoba Eric ©.

3.3 The Two Spheres model of the cosmos. Illustration by

Cindy Hodoba Eric ©.

3.4 The celestial motions according to the two spheres

model. Illustration by Cindy Hodoba Eric ©.

3.5 The Zodiac. Sixth-century mosaic in Beit Alpha, Israel.

IAISI / Moment / Getty Images.

3.6 Retrograde motion. Image by Tunç Tezel ©.

3.7 Naked-eye astronomical observation instruments. Left: a

Cross Staff; right: a sextant. John Seller, Practical Navigation
(London: J. Darby, 1669). By permission of Document
Provision Service, Biblioteca Nacional de España.
3.8 A seventh-century BCE Babylonian table recording lunar
longitudes. Courtesy of The British Museum, Library of
Ashurbanipal K.90 (AN851897001) (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

3.9 The constellations, as they could have been observed

from Jerusalem on August 3, 70 CE. Illustration by Cindy
Hodoba Eric ©.

3.10 A woodcut of Aristotle’s Cosmology. Peter Apian,

Cosmographia (Antwerp, 1539). Universal History Archive /
Getty Images.

3.11 Illustration of Eudoxus’ system of rotating spheres (left)

and the way it explains retrograde motion (right). By Cindy
Hodoba Eric ©.

3.12 The Antikythera Mechanism. José Antonio Peñas /

Science Photo Library.

3.13 Aristarchus’ calculations of the relative sizes of the

Moon and the Earth from a copy of his On the Sizes and
Distances (Greece, c. 10 CE). Abbus Acastra / Alamy Stock
Photo.

3.14 Saturn’s epicycles in a Latin edition of Ptolemy’s

Almagest (1496). SSPL / Getty Images.

3.15 The Ptolemaic System and its geometrical tools.

Illustration by Cindy Hodoba Eric ©.

4.1 Raphael’s The school of Athens fresco, 550 × 770 cm,

1509e1511. Stanza della Segnatura, Apostolic Palace,
Vatican City Italy. Leemage / UIG via Getty Images,

4.2 Alexander’s conquests (336–323 BCE). ExploreTheMed

©, http://explorethemed.com/Alexander.asp?c=1.
4.3 A unicorn from a Dutch edition of Pliny’s Natural
(Handelene van de Natuere (Amsterdam, 1644). 12 /
Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

4.4 Mediaeval Illustrations of Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis

PhilosophyPhilologiæ et Mercurii (The Marriage or Philology
and Mercury). Left: Martianus Capella, Les Noces de
Mercure et de Philologie (Xe siècle). Commentaire partiel de
Rémi d'Auxerre. BnF, Manuscrits, Latin 7900 A fol. 132v ©
Bibliothèque nationale de France. Right: Interfoto / Alamy
Stock Photo.

4.5 Depiction of a scriptorium, in a fifteenth-century

manuscript. BN, Paris, France. Leemage / Corbis / Getty
Images.

4.6 Verge-and-foliot escapement. Illustration by David

Penney ©.

4.7 A medieval diagram of Hellenistic astronomy. Abbo of

Fleury, Opinion concerning the System of the Spheres (c.
945/950–1004). By permission of University of Glasgow
Library, Special Collections.

4.8 Left: a fifteenth-century lectura at the University of

Bologna. Leemage / Universal Images Group / Getty
Images. Right: a sixteenth-century disputation from the
Statutes Book of the Collegium Sapientiae. By permission of
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

4.9 An illumination from the didactic poem Der Wälsche Gast

(c. 1100–1200), representing the university curriculum's
seven liberal arts. Interfoto / Alamy Stock Photo.

4.10 Annotated page of Johannes de Sacrobosco, De

Sphaera Mundi (Venice, c. 1230 copy). Thomas Fisher Rare
Book Library, University of Toronto.

4.11 Two heavily annotated multilingual fourteenth-century

manuscript leaves. MSS Misc 1832, Fragment of Two
Medical Treatises, Stanford University. Courtesy of the
Department of Special Collections, Stanford University
Libraries.

4.12 A modern and fourteenth-century diagram of the Tusi

Couple. Left: illustration by Cindy Hodoba Eric ©. Right:
FLHC 49 / Alamy Stock Photo.

4.13 The observatory in Galata, Constantinople. From an

illuminated manuscript (c. 1754). Universal History Archive /
Getty Images.

5.1 Left: the Piazza del Duomo, Florence. Blom UK via Getty
Images. Right: Jim Anderson’s depiction of Brunelleschi’s
perspective spectacle. Jim Anderson ©.

5.2 Illumination of a manuscript of Jean Froissart, Chronicles

(1369), Ms. Royal 14EIV, f.244 v. London, British Library.
Photo 12 / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

5.3 Piero della Francesca’s Ideal City (c. 1470). © Arte &
Immagini srl / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images.

5.4 A revolving crane built for the work on the Duomo.

Bonaccorso Ghiberti, Banco Rari manuscript 228, 106 r.
(1366–1368). Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale
(National Library). DeAgostini / Getty Images.

5.5 The punch, matrix and mold of the movable press.

Theodore de Vinne, The Invention of Printing (New York:
Francis and Hart, 1876). Reproduced with permission of the
Rare Books and Special Collections Library, The University
of Sydney.

5.6 The basic stages of the Guttenberg printing press.

Hartmann Schopper, “The Printer's Workshop." in Panoplia
(Frankfurt-am-Main, 1568). Oxford Science Archive / Print
Collector / Getty Images.

5.7 The table of contents of Petrus Rams, Dialectica libri duo

(Frankfurt: Andera Wechelius, 1594). Reproduced with
permission of the Rare Books and Special Collections
Library, The University of Sydney.

5.8 Two mappae mundi. Left: The Picture Art Collection /

Alamy Stock Photo. Right: 1657, Visscher Map of the Holy
Land or the Earthly Paradise. Sepia Times / Universal
Images Group / Getty Images.

5.9 A presentation copy of Diogo Ribeiro, Padrón Real

(1529). Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images.

6.1 Depiction of a female practical physician in John of

Arderne, Medical Treatise (England, second quarter of
fifteenth century), f. 177. By permission of the British Library.

6.2 The twenty-two letters of the Hebrew Alphabet in Elijah

ben Solomon Zalman's interpretation of Sefer Yetzira (c.
1700–1800). By permission of the National Library of Israel.

6.3 A diagram of the ten Sefirot. Moshe Cordovero, Pardes

Rimonim (Orchard of Pomegranates) (1592). By permission
of the National Library of Israel.

6.4 A page from a Latin translation of Ghaˉyat al-Hakıˉm,

Picatrix (c. 900–1000 CE), Biblioteka Jagiellonska,
Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Ms. BJ 793, f. 189v.
6.5 The frontispiece of a printed edition of Witelo,
Perspectiva (or Opticae libri decem, c. 1270) (Nuremberg: Io
Petreius, 1535). By permission of the Max Planck Institute
for the History of Science, Berlin.

6.6 The “Philosophical Tree” produced by Lawrence Principe

in his laboratory. Lawrence Principe ©.

6.7 Hugh of Saint-Cher wearing spectacles. Found in the

Collection of Chiesa di San Nicolò, Treviso. Fine Art Images /
Heritage Images / Getty Images.

6.8 The frontispiece of Natural Magick, the 1658 English

Translation of Giambattista della Porta's Magia Naturalis
(Naples, 1658). Universal History Archive / Getty Images.

7.1 Heliostatic diagrams in Copernicus, De Revolutionibus

(Nuremberg: Johannes Petreius, 1543). Reproduced with
permission of the Rare Books and Special Collections
Library, The University of Sydney.

7.2 The Copernican Hypothesis. Illustration by Cindy

Hodoba Eric ©.

7.3 From left to right: map of the Island of Ven, with the
Uraniborg observatory managed by astronomer Tycho Brahe
(Sweden, 1586). De Agostini Picture Library / Getty Images.
Tycho Brahe, Astronomiæ instauratæ mechanica (Tyskland:
Wandsbek, 1598). Danish Royal Library LN 432 2°. Tycho
Brahe, Observationes planetarum (Denmark, 1596). Danish
Royal Library GKS 316 2º, papir, 208 ff.; 34.5 × 20 cm, 136.

7.4 The frontispiece of Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s

Almagestum Novum (Bologna, 1651). Oxford Science
Archive / Print Collector / Getty Images.
7.5 Left: a diagram of nested perfect solids. Johannes
Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). SSPL / Getty
Images. Right: a diagram of the motions of Mars. Johannes
Kepler, Astronomia Nova (1609). Reproduced with
permission of the Rare Books and Special Collections
Library, The University of Sydney.

7.6 Diagrams of Kepler’s two ‘laws’ from his Astronomia

Nova (1609). Left: illustration by Cindy Hodoba Eric ©. Right:
reproduced with permission of the Rare Books and Special
Collections Library, The University of Sydney.

7.7 Galileo’s drawings of the Moon,1609. Left: Wellcome

Library no. 46269i, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Right: Galileo, "Sidereus, nuncius magna longeqve
admirabilia spectacula pandens, suspiciendaque proponens
vnicuique praesertim vero philosophis, atque astronomis"
(Venice, 1610), p. 88. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0).

7.8 Galileo’s notes documenting his discovery of the moons

of Jupiter. University of Michigan Library (Special Collections
Research Center).

7.9 The phases of Venus. Left: Science History Images /

Alamy Stock Photo. Right: illustration by Cindy Hodoba Eric
©.

7.10 Lodovico Cardi, The Assumption of the Virgin. Fresco

(Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, Cigoli, Rome, 1612).
Bridgeman Images.

8.1 Diagram of William Harvey’s ligature experiments. S.

Gooden, Nonesuch edition of De Motu Cordis (London:
1928). Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC
BY 4.0).

8.2 Painting commissioned by John Banister of himself

delivering The Visceral Lecture, London, 1581.

8.3 The four temperaments, from an undated and unsigned

medieval manuscript. Bettmann / Contributor / Getty
Images.

8.4 A leaf from The Leechbook of Bald (c. 900 CE). Royal
MS 12 D XVII, f.109R v. London, British Library.

8.5 A drawing of a blackberry from Dioscorides’ On Medical

Material in the original Greek. ÖNB / Wien, Cod. Med. Gr. 1,
fol. 83r.

8.6 Surgical instruments from a manuscript of Abu’l-Qasim

al-Zahrawi’s (Albucasis’) Al-Tasrif (c. 1000 CE). Leiden
University Libraries, Or. 2540, fols. 93v–94r.

8.7 Two diagrams of skeletons from Johann Ludwig

Choulant’s History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration
(Leipzig: Rudolph Weigel, 1852). Wellcome Library no.
566150i.

8.8 Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the cardiovascular

system and principal organs of a woman from c. 1509–10.
Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
2019.

8.9 Left: frontispiece of Andreas Vesalius' De humani

corporis fabrica (c. 1543). Fine Art Images / Heritage Images
/ Getty Images. Right, Vesalius' Tabulae Anatomicae (1538).
By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special
Collections.
8.10 The anatomical theater in Palazzo Bo of the University
of Padua. DeAgostini / Getty Images.

9.1 Left: a woodcut of a steelyard. Gaultherus Rivius,

Architecture . . . Mathematischen . . . Kunst (Nuremberg,
1547). World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo. Right: a
Roman steelyard. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0).

9.2 Left: a diagram of simple machines. John Mills, The

Realities of Modern Science (New York: Macmillan, 1919).
History and Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo. Right: an
engraving from a drawing of the principle of a lever. Cesare
Cesariano, from a 1521 Italian translation of Vitruvius’ De
Architectura. Mondadori Portfolio / Getty Images.

9.3 Cannon ball trajectories. Niccolo Tartaglia, Nova Scientia

(Vinegia: Stephano da Sabio, 1527). Top: a diagram of
Tartaglia's ‘triplicate’ trajectory. Universal History Archive /
Universal Images Group via Getty Images. Bottom: the
frontispiece of the 1550 edition. JHU Sheridan Libraries /
Gado / Getty Images.

9.4 Guidobaldo’s protocol of his experiments with Galileo.

Guidobaldo, Meditatiunculae Guidi Ubaldi ex pmarchionibus
Montis Sanctae Mari (c. 1600–1700), p. 236. Bibliothèque
nationale de France. Département des manuscrits. Latin
10246.

9.5 One of Galileo’s attempts to reduce a chain line into a

parabola. Biblioteca Galileo Nazionale Centrale, MS72, 43 r.
By permission of Biblioteca Galileo Nazionale Centrale,
Firenze.
9.6 Left: Galileo’s stopped pendulum. Galileo Galilei, Two
New Sciences (Padua, 1638). Right: Galileo’s pendulum
clock design. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, 85
gal, f 50 r. DeAgostini / Getty Images.

9.7 Descartes’ diagram of a stone swung in a sling,

demonstrating his laws of nature. By permission of Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

9.8 Descartes’ analysis of the rainbow. René Descartes,

Meteors (France: Ian Maire, 1637). By permission of Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

9.9 The Royal Society’s emblem, engraved by Wenceslaus

Hollar as the frontispiece to Thomas Sprat, History of the
Royal Society of London (London: T. R. and J. Allestry,
1667). © The Royal Society.

9.10 Diagram of Hooke's air pump for Boyle. Wellcome

Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

9.11 Reconstruction of Berti’s vacuum pump experiment

from 1640/41 (left) and Torricelli and Viviani’s 1644 vacuum
experiments (right). Gaspar Schott, Technica Curiosa
(Wurzburg, 1663 and 1664). By permission of Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

10.1 Images from Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: The

Royal Society, 1665). Left: his microscope and accessories.
Right: a fly’s eyes. Reproduced with permission of the Rare
Books and Special Collections Library, The University of
Sydney.

10.2 Newton's calculation of the centrifugal force of the

planets (from c. 1666–1669 manuscript). Cambridge
University Library, Portsmouth Collection, MS-ADD-03958 fol
87r.

10.3 Newton’s drawing of his “Crucial Experiment." New

College Library, Oxford, MS 361/2, f. 45v ©. Courtesy of the
Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford.

10.4 Page of Galileo’s experimental investigation into the

trajectory of a projectile as composed of two independent
motions. By permission of Biblioteca Galileo Nazionale
Centrale, Firenze.

10.5 Newton’s diagram from his Nov. 28, 1679 letter to

Hooke. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College
Cambridge.

10.6 Hooke’s diagram from his Dec. 9, 1679 reply to

Newton's claims in 10.5. By permission of the Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale.

10.7 Newton’s diagram from his letter to Hooke of Dec. 13,

1679, challenging Hooke's conclusion from 10.6. © The
British Library Board, MS Add. 37021, f.56 124.

10.8 A page from Newton's first manuscript version of De

Motu Corporum in Gyrum (On the Motion of Orbiting Bodies).
Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library.

10.9 Diagram and explanation of Newton’s demonstration

that Kepler’s Law of Areas applies to all bodies orbiting
around a center of attraction. Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis
Principia Mathematica (London: The Royal Society, 1687).
Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library.
10.10 Diagram of a cannonball assuming a planetary
trajectory. Newton, A Treatise of the System of the World
(London: F. Fayram, 1728).
 Note from the Publisher
This book attempts to introduce to its readers major chapters in the
history of science. It tries to present science as a human endeavor –
a great achievement, and all the more human for it. In place of the
story of progress and its obstacles or a parade of truths revealed,
this book stresses the contingent and historical nature of scientific
knowledge. Knowledge, science included, is always developed by
real people, within communities, answering immediate needs and
challenges shaped by place, culture and historical events with
resources drawn from their present and past.
Chronologically, this book spans from Pythagorean mathematics
to Newton’s Principia. The book starts in the High Middle Ages and
proceeds to introduce the readers to the historian’s way of inquiry. At
the center of this introduction is the Gothic Cathedral – a grand
achievement of human knowledge, rooted in a complex cultural
context and a powerful metaphor for science. The book alternates
thematic chapters with chapters concentrating on an era. Yet it
attempts to integrate discussion of all different aspects of the making
of knowledge: social and cultural settings, challenges and
opportunities; intellectual motivations and worries; epistemological
assumptions and technical ideas; instruments and procedures. The
cathedral metaphor is evoked intermittently throughout, to tie the
many themes discussed to the main lesson: that the complex set of
beliefs, practices and institutions we call science is a particular,
contingent human phenomenon.
 The wide scope and varied audience of this book required
sacrificing footnotes for the sake of fluency – not without some
professional anxiety – and I provide exact references only for direct
quotations. The place of referencing within the text is taken by a list
of Suggested Readings at the end of each chapter, and the book’s
main resources are in the “Secondary Sources” part of these. For
any factual error I bear full responsibility. The “Primary Texts” listed
in the Suggested Readings are easily accessible, English
translations of sources from the period or theme discussed. For the
instructor, they should serve as suggestions for tutorial readings; for
the student, they present an exercise in the interpretation of texts
remote in place and time. The discussion questions are offered to
help the instructor in preparing for tutorials, and the reader may find
in them clues to the main insights that the story attempts to convey.
 Acknowledgements
This book is a tribute to the intellectual value of university teaching,
and in that, indebted to almost everyone whose classroom I attended
over the years – formally or informally, literally or figuratively. This
assembly of scholars far too large to reconvene here, so beyond the
authors of the works populating the book’s reading lists, I will have to
directly thank only those from whose scholarship I have benefited
directly, as my immediate teachers or colleagues: Rivka Feldhay,
Sabbetay Unguru, J. E. McGuire, Peter Machamer, Bernard
Goldstein and the late Marcelo Dascal belong to the former category;
Alan Chalmers, John Schuster, Hanan Yoran, Ohad Parnes, Daniela
Helbig, Dominic Murphy, Victor Boantza, Snait Gissis and especially
Raz Chen-Morris – to the latter. Victor volunteered to serve as a
scientific editor at the very last stage of writing, saved me some
serious factual embarrassments and forced me to shorten sentences
and sharpen arguments.
With some scholars I have not had an opportunity to study in an
official setting, but still consider my teachers: Hal Cook, Ben Elman,
Dan Garber, Tony Grafton, Simon Schaffer and the late Sam
Schweber. For the very idea of a bold yet careful account of science,
wide ranging but rich with details, I am the venerating disciple of the
people who first taught me such courses: the late Amos Funkenstein
and Yehuda Elkana. I am still in awe at their erudition, depth and
intellectual courage.
 Blessed as I have been with the intellectual support for this
book, for which Hagar and Yi provided an essential (if sometimes
unwitting) foundation, it would still not have come into being without
the professional and dedicated help of the people at Cambridge
University Press: Lucy Rhymer, Lisa Pinto, Maggie Jeffers, Sophie
Rosinke and Charlie Howell, to whom I am deeply grateful. Many
librarians went out of their way to help assemble the book’s images,
and among those I owe special thanks to Tom Goodfellow of Sydney
University Library and Urte Brauckmann and her team at the Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
But first and foremost, this book is indebted to the graduate
students who have served as my tutors throughout the years in
Sydney. The weekly meeting with them has always been the most
intellectually exciting hour of the week. Alan Salter taught me history
of medicine, and Ian Wills the history of technology. James Ley is my
teacher of classical thought and many matters pedagogical, and
Kiran Krishna of all things medieval. Jennifer Tomlinson, who helped
me tremendously by editing early versions and gathering exciting
images, also forced me to find the voice of women – especially that
of Jane Sharp. Sahar Tavakoli joined her with instruction about early
modern midwives and Megan Baumhammer about the power and
mysteries of the visual. To Ian Lawson I owe my understanding of
the delicate balance of instruments and their environs and to Claire
Kennedy – the fascination with maps. Arin Harman, a visitor from
better rooted disciplines, was my master of pedagogical smooth
sailing, and Nick Bozic contributed a powerful philosophical mind.
Paddy Holt taught me all I know about the Royal Society; to Laura
Sumrall I owe whatever insight I have into magic and Cindy Hodoba-
Eric retaught me early modern natural philosophy. Cindy also
contributed skills, intelligence and passion without which the book
would never have been completed: editing for style and content;
gathering images and copyrights; designing and drawing
complicated diagrams.
It is the joy of working with my tutors that I try to capture in this
book, and it is dedicated to them.
 1
Cathedrals
◈

They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God,

With winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven,
Inhabited the sky with hammers, defied gravity,
Deified stone, took up God’s house to meet him,
And came down to their suppers and small beer …
John Ormond, The Cathedral Builders
 The Cathedral
This is the Gothic cathedral, the marvel that inspired Ormond’s
poem. The one in the picture (Figure 1.1) is perhaps the grandest of
them all: the Notre Dame Cathedral at Chartres, south-west of Paris.
It is a breathtaking accomplishment: 130 meters in length, it would
cover a Manhattan block and a half; its vaults are 37 meters in
height, higher than a modern ten-story building; its southern,
Romanesque tower is 107.5 meters tall, and the northern, Jehan de
Beauce tower, 114 meters – a 30-storey skyscraper of “hewn rock …
hoisted into heaven.”

Figure 1.1 Chartres Cathedral, southern façade. The bridge-like

structures between the Romanesque tower and the transept
(marked by the rose window) and around the rear on the eastern
side are the ‘flying buttresses’ supporting the walls.
 We don’t know much about the people who “climbed on sketchy
ladders” to build the Chartres Cathedral. We know that the Cathedral
was founded on the site of an ancient temple and an early medieval
church. We think that its construction in its current form commenced
in 1145, stopped and then resumed after a fire in 1194. We know that
it was completed in the early part of the thirteenth century – very
rapidly in medieval terms – but very little beyond that.
This is not just an unfortunate gap in our historical knowledge; it
is an integral part of the story of the Chartres Cathedral in particular
and the Gothic cathedral in general. The cathedral has no architect.
Its construction has no exact beginning or end, and no blueprint for it
to follow. It is an achievement of many hands – a grand
achievement, and all the more human for it. This is also true of
science, and is the main reason we have started the book with the
cathedral: it will serve us as an ongoing metaphor with which to think
about the coming-into-being of science.
We need such a guiding metaphor as it is difficult to see, at first
sight, what a history of science might be. We commonly use
‘science’ to mean the correct and proper way in which we know how
the world is and works; so in what sense does science have a
history? We may think of such a history as a list of all the ways our
predecessors used to get it wrong until we got it right, but little insight
into our predecessors’ ways of attaining knowledge – and our own
indebtedness to these ways – can be gained by such an approach.
And even if we took this approach as an idle but innocent curiosity, it
is completely unclear where such a list should start and where it
should end. Why should we bother about any mistake and
superstition more than any other?
The English word ‘science’ comes from the Latin scientia: ‘true
and well-supported knowledge.’ But scientia is science’s ideal. In
reality, science is a cathedral: it is an achievement – grand, yet
human. Like all human knowledge, like all beliefs and ways of
developing and supporting them, science is particular, local and
historical.
 Philosophy: The Cathedral that is Science
It is difficult to think of science as having a history. It is obvious that
people in earlier epochs knew the world differently than we do. But
since we are rightly impressed by our own knowledge of the world –
by our science – it is very tempting to assume that they were simply
wrong, and that science’s past consists of a march towards its
present. In other words, it seems as if the reason for our beliefs lies
in their truth. It seems that if we gather and produce knowledge the
way we do, it is simply because these are the proper methods to do
so. It seems that if we support our knowledge by the evidence and
arguments we use, it is because these are reliable evidence and
valid arguments. And it seems that if people of yore thought
otherwise, it is because they didn’t yet know what we already do.
This is a tempting thought, but an entirely misleading one. It
puts the cart before the horse: we think the way we do because we
followed a route laid down by our predecessors. We think that bodies
have ‘mass’ because Isaac Newton needed to explain to himself and
to his rivals how bodies attract one another. We no longer think of
matter or mass the way Newton thought – he didn’t ‘get it right.’ But
we still use his concept and his mathematics – had Newton lost
some of his debates, which might very well have happened, we
would have had a different physics. We have the ‘unconscious’
because Sigmund Freud was intrigued and fascinated by women
who were blind despite healthy eyes or paralyzed despite healthy
limbs. But we no longer have hysteria, the malady that Freud
explained psychologically; Freud didn’t discover for us something we
now know to be true. Yet ‘unconscious’ is still as integral a part of
psychology as it is of general culture. Had there not been Freud, we
would have had a different psychology.
This is what it means for science to have a history. It means that
we are not the aim and final cause of the work of people of the past.
Rather, we are the product of their work. Our thoughts and beliefs
are not the correction of their mistakes but the outcome of their
struggles with the challenges that they faced, in their time, with the
resources available to them. Had they come up with different ways to
accommodate those challenges, we would have different beliefs. We
rightly hold our beliefs as true, but they are true because of the effort
put into making them so. Their truth is not the cause of this effort but
its outcome.

Figure 1.2 The Dream of Harmony: a modern, scaled diagram of

the south elevation of the Chartres Cathedral, from G. Dehio and
G. von Bezold, Die Kirchliche Baukunst des abendlandes
(Stuttgart: Cotta, 1887–1902).
 This is a difficult insight – that our knowledge is truly contingent,
determined by its history, like every other human affair. Thinking
about cathedrals makes this idea easier to come to terms with. Here
is an example. Observed with an admiring eye, the Gothic cathedral
looks like the marvel of order and harmony represented in Figure
1.2. The cathedral does reflect a very particular, strict idea of order: it
aspires to be a cross whose parts relate to each other in musical
proportions (more on this below). But even a casual examination of
the actual building, rather than its idealized drawings, reveals that it
falls far short of this ideal. Look at Figure 1.3 and you’ll note the
uneven spires, the differently sized windows and, in general, the
asymmetry and inconsistency. Yet these imperfections should not be
looked down upon. They are marks of a living, evolving human
undertaking: fire or earthquake damage repaired; a new spire
erected; balustrades and cornices added or remodeled; a pipe organ
installed or removed. Moreover: the cathedral doesn’t have to be,
and never is, complete. Perfect order may be the proper
representation of the worshipped God, but it is not required for actual
worship: ancient chapels can be used while the grandiose nave is
under construction; a wooden roof can be installed if a proper dome
isn’t affordable. Like any human artifact, especially one created over
centuries, the cathedral carries all the marks of the changing
opportunities, resources and aspirations of the many people building
it, as well as the difficulties which faced them and their imperfect
solutions.
 Figure 1.3 The Asymmetrical Reality: the Chartres Cathedral’s
façade. Note that while the center – built more or less continuously
– is properly symmetrical, the two towers, and especially the
spires – built some four centuries apart – are growingly
asymmetrical.

This is not to say that the cathedral does not embody ideals of
order, perfection and harmony. Quite the opposite: these were
exactly the ideals of the people who “climbed on sketchy ladders
towards God.” But it is this very point that needs to be stressed:
harmonious order was an ideal to which the people building the
cathedral subscribed, not a template they could follow. This is the
way we need to think about science. We know that the claims of our
science are ‘true,’ but this truth is an ideal which guides science. It is
not some thing, existing prior to and independently of the inquiry,
waiting to be revealed. When evidence and argument convince
scientists that some claim is true, it does not mean that they have
reached something that was always there, obscured by error and
misjudgment. It definitely does not mean that this ‘something’ will
always be there. What it does mean is that they have succeeded in
using their resources to solve a current challenge in a way that they
find satisfactory, even though they are most likely well aware that
this solution is temporary, and so is the challenge. Like the building
of the cathedral, scientific work has moments of satisfaction, even
glory, but is never completed. And like harmony for the building of
the cathedral, truth is an ideal that guides scientific research; like the
cathedral, science is the product of people striving towards this ideal,
not its accomplishment.
Yet another reason to turn to the cathedral as a metaphor for
science is that like the cathedral, and like most human
accomplishments, science is a work of many hands (Figure 1.4). It
has no single architect, no single design, no single vision it follows. It
is forgivable that we concentrate, in this book and in the
historiography of science in general, on the exciting contributions of
great thinkers such as Aristotle, Galileo and Newton. But great
contributions should not be construed as great leaps forward. In
science, as in the building of the cathedral, all hands are necessary
and every “winch and pulley” is indispensable. Of course, some
craftspeople are more skilled than others, and some crafts are more
difficult to acquire and replicate. But at no point can the master
mason completely transcend the work of the youngest and least
experienced stone-chipper; it is always the “hewn rock” produced by
one that the other has to use. A Copernicus or a Kepler may
construct a new way to look at the astronomical relations between
Heaven and Earth, but he can only do so using the available
intellectual resources developed by the astronomers,
mathematicians and natural philosophers of his and earlier
generations.
 Figure 1.4 Work of many hands: Jean Fouquet’s The Construction
of the Temple of Jerusalem by King Solomon (c. 1475) – a
miniature illustration from a manuscript edition of Josephus
Flavius’ The Antiquities of the Jews (man. fr. 247, fol. 163 v. BN,
Paris. Josephus’ text is from c. 94). Fouquet depicts the king
visiting what he imagines as a construction site of a cathedral
(modeled on the Notre Dame in Paris), populated by a swarm of
workers engaged in different facets of the construction, requiring
different tools and expertise.

The way in which knowledge is rooted in a particular time and

place is yet another philosophical insight about science and its
history that the cathedral metaphor illustrates. Science is the most
global of all modern-day endeavors: laboratories and computer
programs, theories and empirical procedures, are fundamentally the
same in the United States and China, in Australia and Sweden. We
tend to assume that this globality means that scientific knowledge is
in its very essence universal. We are commonly told that by
developing a ‘scientific method,’ allegedly independent of time and
place, we are now discovering ‘scientific truths’ that are independent
of time and place. Looking at the cathedral, we can once again see
that this assumption of universality confuses historical cause and
effect.
Like science, one finds Gothic cathedrals all over the globe: they
dot Central and Western Europe, there are many in Asia, and
especially South America. There is even one, built using traditional
materials and techniques, on West 110 St., New York. Yet no one
would suggest that there is something inherently universal about
cathedrals. We can easily see that they originated in a certain place
and at a certain time, taking their shape for the religious, aesthetic
and practical reasons in play there and then (we will consider these
briefly below). The reasons why they are to be found in this
distinctive shape in so many places and so far away from their
origins are different. The global presence of Gothic cathedrals no
longer relates to the preferences of the people who originally shaped
them in the independent communities of small and enclosed Europe,
but to what these cathedrals came to symbolize in the political and
religious circumstances of empire and mission, two, three and four
centuries later. The globality of the Gothic cathedral has little to do
with what actually makes it a Gothic cathedral.
Similarly, the globality of scientific theories and procedures is
not a sign of an inherent universality; not any more than the globality
of the Gothic cathedral is a sign of an inherent universality of the
pointed arch or the flying buttress (see Figure 1.1). The universal
aspirations of scientists are important for understanding the global
reach of their work, and the religious aspirations of those who “took
up God’s house to meet him” are important for understanding why
they built similar cathedrals around the globe. But the point is that
science and cathedrals are everywhere because they were exported.
The universality of science is the outcome of its history, not its
cause. This is what it means for science to have a history.
Science has a history because it’s a unique human cultural
phenomenon. It is the unique – indeed diverse and incoherent –
cluster of beliefs and practices being taught, exercised and
sanctioned by the relevant social institutions of today: universities,
governmental research institutes, scientific journals. But just as the
global presence of science doesn’t imply that scientific knowledge is
inherently universal – that its claims and procedures are independent
of the places and times where they are produced and implemented –
the unique character of science doesn’t imply that scientific
knowledge has a unique access to truth or a unique hold on
rationality.
This claim is in no sense a retreat from the point stressed
above: that science is a marvelous achievement. It is just a reminder
that it is a human achievement, and as such its accomplishments
can only be measured against the challenges it was set to meet by
the people who set them. There were and there are many other such
clusters of beliefs, techniques, tools and institutions; such ‘systems
of knowledge,’ complex and rich in their own right, fulfilling a crucial
role in their own cultures, satisfying the curiosity and practical needs
of their practitioners. As on-lookers from our own culture of science,
we may find some of them particularly admirable and recognize that
they comprise capacities that science doesn’t provide: Polynesian
seafaring and navigation techniques; ancient Chinese medicine;
Australian Aboriginal fire technology; Inca astronomy; and certainly
many more.
But none of these types of knowledge is ‘science.’ To say that
science has a history means that we don’t use this term as an
honorific title. We don’t bestow it to label types of knowledge that
impress us or that we believe in, nor deny it from those we don’t
approve of. ‘Science’ is a proper name – the name by which we call
those things taught and exercised in contemporary science faculties.
It is the history of these beliefs, practices and institutions that we will
follow below, and we will touch upon other beliefs and practices only
if they have crossed paths with that particular history, as resources,
competition, context or alternative for science-to-be.
 History: The Cathedral as a Turning Point
The cathedral helps us understand what it means for science to have
a history, and it’s also a good place to start telling this history. This is
because science’s history, like all histories, has no clear beginning
but many interesting turning points, and the great Gothic cathedral
represents one of them. It was in the time of the cathedral – the era
in which Chartres was built (see above), ‘the High Middle Ages’1 –
and often inside and around the cathedral, that many of the modes,
practices and institutions of science began to emerge.
The time of the grand cathedral is pivotal in the emergence of
science, first, because it is a moment in European history when
building a cathedral has become materially and socially feasible. The
commitment towards such an undertaking – as science would also
become – is extreme. It takes resources, which in agrarian
communities are always scarce, and divests them into a very
expensive project that takes not only years but generations to
complete, and which would not contribute to the material welfare of
the community even in the long run. The communities in urban
centers like Paris, Cologne, Florence and Barcelona, but also in
more rural areas like Noyon, Soisson and of course Chartres were
strong, affluent and independent enough to undertake such a
venture. The reasons are many and complex, but some of them are
directly relevant to us: they have to do with knowledge. New
technologies – wind and water mills, looms and deep ploughs (which
we will discuss below) – significantly improved the economic
conditions of European peasants and burghers, and brought with
them dramatic social changes. The ambitious project that science
would develop into could not have been imagined before these
changes.
The age of the Gothic cathedral is also the culmination of an era
in which the central and unifying force in Europe, culturally and
politically, was an institution whose core was intellectual: the Catholic
Church. The medieval Catholic Church drew its legitimacy and claim
to power from the erudition of its leaders and the knowledge – mainly
divine but also profane – which its emissaries garnered and imparted
as priests, scholars and educators. The Church of this era
represents a unique bridge between the political and the learned and
between the mundane and the abstract that was essential to the
coming to being of science and the intellectual and institutional form
it would take. One of the expressions of this bridge is the
establishment of the institution of research and teaching most
identified with science from its inception until today: the university.
Fundamentally religious, many of the early universities found their
first homes in cathedrals.
Finally, the age of the cathedral also witnessed the appropriation
into Christian learning of the great achievements of Greek thought
(originating from the realm of Hellenistic2 culture and originally
written in Greek): metaphysics, astronomy, logic, cosmology,
philosophy of nature, medicine, mathematics. If one has to choose a
starting point for the history of modern science from the simple
perspective of content, Greek knowledge is definitely the most
obvious choice. But beyond content, the importation of the Greek
corpus into Christian Europe is also a mark of the uniqueness of the
cultural-historical moment represented by the Gothic cathedral. The
European search for this knowledge was driven by the new
universities’ urge to acquire teaching material. The knowledge – in
the form of manuscripts in Greek and Arabic – was available
because of the gradual collapse of the Byzantine Empire and
because of the shoulder-rubbing with the thriving Muslim culture in
the west, south and east. And because of these cross-cultural
sources, the quest for Greek knowledge set in motion a translation
project unlike any in history.
 Historiography: Culture and Knowledge
Finally, the cathedral is a synecdoche3 of high medieval knowledge,
and looking at it we can ask: what kind of knowledge does it take to
build a cathedral? What knowledge of the world does the cathedral
reflect? And more generally: what does it take to tell a history of
knowledge? What kind of history is it?
One can start by asking the most straightforward type of
question: how did the builders of the cathedral move such a grand
amount of stone – some 80,000 tons for a large cathedral – from its
place of quarry to the building site, which could be many miles
away?
This is a simple question, and the short answer also seems
simple: with horses. In fact, this answer turns out to be rich and
complex.
The decline of horseback warfare in Europe in the second half
of the Middle Ages4 made draft horses cheaper and available to
agriculture. Originally bred to carry heavily armored knights as well
as their own armor, they were big, strong and agile, so they could
operate a new kind of agricultural technology: the heavy plough
(Figure 1.5, right). Replacing the shallow scratching of the traditional
plough (Figure 1.5, left), the heavy plough dug deep into the ground
and turned the soil, eliminating the need to let the soil ‘rest’ and
revitalize often. It thus enabled shifting from two to three planting
seasons a year and growing grains like wheat and oats. Conversely,
these crops enabled raising horses. Being finicky animals, horses
can’t subsist on grass, which is sufficient for oxen – the traditional,
emblematic beasts of burden. The better mobility of the horse,
compared to the ox, also allowed peasants to live further away from
their fields and freed arable land for cultivation (look where the
village is in Figure 1.5, right). The effects of all these changes were
far-reaching: more and better food enabled population growth, and
the concentration of residences away from the fields led to the
growth of large villages. The need to invest in more complex
equipment and expensive animals and crops created new economic
and social networks in these communities, which were already
relatively prosperous, and, because of their size and relative density,
almost urban. These are exactly the essential conditions for
investment in the cathedral: the workhorse enabled hauling stones
for the cathedral, but it was also an integral part of the social, cultural
and economic fabric that made the cathedral possible and desirable.
 Figure 1.5 Ploughing. On the left: an engraving by M. van der
Gucht (1660–1725) of a scratch plough drawn by oxen. Note the
shallow furrows that the plough raises. On the right: September –
an illumination by Simon Bening for Da Costa’s 1515 Book of
Hours (Liber Chronicarum – see Figure 1.12 for another example
of this kind of text. This particular manuscript is now in Morgan
Library, MS M.399, fol. 10v) of a heavy plough drawn by two
horses. Note the wheels and the heavy flat frame weighing on the
share.

Hauling stones is a kind of know-how: the type of knowledge by

which we do things such as make a cake or ride a bicycle. Know-
how usually cannot be, and does not have to be, fully captured in
words, because it is encoded in and operated by muscles, tools and
materials. One may think of it as a simple kind of knowledge –
manual, even menial. But as we saw with the horse, even an
innocent question concerning one aspect of the know-how put into
the cathedral cannot be answered without reference to an endlessly
expandable web which relates economic and technological factors to
social, cultural and even religious significations. The point becomes
even clearer when one considers the meaning of the horse to
medieval culture: not just in war and at work, but in defining social
and gender roles in art and poetry. ‘Chivalry’ is the heart of medieval
culture.
The ability to carry heavy loads is a very general form of
knowledge, but the answer to ‘how did they do it’ does not become
less historically intricate when we inquire about more specific
challenges. For example: how did the builders of the cathedral “hoist
hewn rock into heaven”? How did they build to such a height? The
short answer here is: ‘by arch and vault’ (Figure 1.6), which is of
course hardly a short answer. The history of the knowledge
embedded in the arch is as intricate as that related to the use of the
horse.
Figure 1.6 Arches and vaults in Wells Cathedral (south-west
England) from the twelfth century. Note the pointed – ‘Gothic’ –
arches, holding vaults of different rises and spans.
Ways of Knowing
 Know-How: The Arch
It is not difficult to explain what makes the arch an efficient tool in the
hands of the cathedral builders: it distributes the weight it carries
obliquely, through its haunches, to the piers and onto the ground
(Figure 1.7). The weight is thus supported not only by the strength of
the building material – stone or brick in our case – but also by the
structure. This enables much larger spans than could be carried by
straight slabs on columns, such as those comprising the famous
Greek temples. The medieval masons knew how to make use of this
structural efficiency in constructing the arch: they’d fill the rise with
scaffolding, arrange the stones and, once the keystone was put in
place, the arch was stable and the scaffolding could be removed.
 Figure 1.7 Elements of the Roman arch. The weight is distributed
through the haunches and the piers to the ground, enabling much
larger spans than horizontal beams could hold. However, because
it is a segment of a circle (usually a semi-circle), the rise and span
determine each other, and because weight in fact does not
naturally distribute itself circularly, the piers need to be massive to
resist the horizontal pressure.

But as it was with the horse, this apparent simplicity of know-

how is misleading. Like the horse, the arch was as intricately woven
into the culture that adopted it.
Histories of the arch commonly begin with ancient Rome, but
the Romans did not invent the arch. Arches can be found in various
corners of the ancient world, and it is thought that the Romans came
across it when they conquered the Middle East and adopted it from
there. Yet the Romans turned the arch, literally and metaphorically,
into the foundation of their great political and material culture. Arches
made the grandiose constructions – temples and theaters – by which
their cities were known (Figure 1.8, left), as well as the walls that
separated them from their immediate environs. Arches also made
the grid of paths and routes which connected the city to its rural
surroundings and remote frontier – the roads, bridges and aqueducts
that brought provisions and taxes into the city and dispatched orders
and soldiers to the provinces (Figure 1.8, right). Arches defined
center and periphery and the relations between them; they were the
infrastructure of an empire.

Figure 1.8 Stacking arches vertically enabled the Romans to build

the tall, storeyed buildings, which epitomized their cities, like the
Colosseum in Rome on the left. Linking them horizontally enabled
the construction of long structures connecting these cities to their
rural periphery and to the provinces through roads, bridges and
aqueducts like the Pont du Guard in Southern France on the right.

The Romans didn’t only use the arch – they thought about it and
considered it theoretically, and this allows us to think about the
history of knowledge from a different perspective. Vitruvius, a Roman
master of architecture and technology of the first century BCE,
provides an excellent example. In the eighth book of his De
Architectura libri Decem (Ten Books on Architecture), he explains
how to “discharge the load of the walls by means of archings
composed of voussoirs (see Figure 1.7) with joints radiating to the
centre.” Vitruvius engages with the same structure that is so
important for the masons, but the knowledge he offers is of a
different kind to theirs: we may call it knowing that.
The distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that is
crucial for the history of science. Horse raising is a clear example of
the former: medieval Europeans knew how to raise and use horses.
It was a matter of practice, tradition, trial and error: it is hard to
imagine the medieval farmer, almost certainly illiterate, having
abstract principles or general equine theories. Vitruvius’ is an
example of knowing-that: knowledge carried and communicated in
written words, developed and supported by arguments and
evidence, aspiring for the general and often the abstract.
The ancient and medieval builders obviously knew how to build
arches. But did they know, or bother with, the type of knowledge
offered by Vitruvius? Did they know that the arch, as an idealized
geometrical curve, is an efficient carrier of weight? Did they ask
themselves why this curve was so efficient? Did they have the
vocabulary to ask such questions? It is unlikely that medieval
masons could read at all, let alone ancient Latin, or that they had
access to such literature as a Roman technical treatise. Their
knowledge was in their bodily skills, and it passed from generation to
generation through tutoring and apprenticeship rather than bookish
learning. This is in the very nature of know-how, distinguishing it
from the scripted, transcribed, argued and taught knowing that, and it
is well grounded in social and institutional structures.
But if farmers could raise horses and masons build cathedrals
strictly with know-how, why should the history of science even bother
with knowing-that? Or conversely, if science is knowledge like
Vitruvius’, why should we concern ourselves with the masons? We
can better understand why both are necessary by returning to the
question ‘how did they build so high?’
The answer to that highlights another important feature of the
historiography of science: the surprising contingency of many
developments – namely, the fact that there was nothing necessary in
them. Yet the ability to build the Gothic cathedral to such heights was
not only a contingent development: it came about as a solution to a
different challenge. The Roman arch is very simple to conceive,
design and measure because it is a segment of a circle. But for the
cathedral builder this harbored a problem. Unlike the ancient church,
which, following Roman architecture, was a simple barrel-shaped
basilica, the cathedral aspired to a cross shape and contained many
separate spaces of different status and function. Naves, aisles,
chapels, etc. called for different ceilings of different heights and
openings of different spans. The Roman arch, being circular, had the
same height and width – the same rise and span – so connecting the
different hallways and enclosures required raising the smaller vaults
on columns and supporting them with heavy piers (Figures 1.7 and
1.9, left) – dangerous, unseemly and expensive.
The solution contrived by the medieval masons was simple and
ingenious. Like the other issues considered in this chapter, it
represents a phenomenon that will capture our attention throughout
the book: a local solution to one particular problem, which carries
much wider and more general implications. It turned out that the arch
does not have to be circular. One can pull the arch by its top, as it
were, making it pointy, thereby separating the rise and the span
(Figure 1.9, right). That way, arches and vaults of different spans
could be connected at one height, allowing for the intricate grid of
paths and halls that is the Gothic cathedral. And it turned out that the
pointed arch (named ‘Gothic’ actually as a derogative, by those who
thought it was vulgar and graceless in comparison to the elegant
Romanesque style it supplanted) had another, much more significant
advantage: it was more stable than the circular arch and allowed
building to the tremendous heights we mentioned at the very
beginning.
 Figure 1.9 The advantages of the pointed Gothic arch over the
circular Roman one. The diagram on the left, from Alberti’s De re
aedificatoria (originally 1485, the image is from the 1552 French
edition: Leon Battista Alberti, L’architecture et art de bien bastir
(Paris: Jacques Kerver, 1552)) shows clearly how all dimensions
of the vaults are mutually determined. Gothic arches, as in the
diagram on the right of Cologne Cathedral (whose construction
started in 1248), enabled much higher vaults, as well as
connecting vaults of different spans and heights. This image is
from an 1897 wood engraving.

But this account of know-how cannot tell us the ‘why.’ Why build
so high? Why build arches of different heights? Why replace
supporting walls with flying buttresses? In general: what did the
builders of the cathedrals know about their world – and their place in
it – that prompted them to build this way? The Gothic arch was a
piece of know-how which enabled the medieval masons to construct
very high buildings; it didn’t dictate building them so.
We can’t tell the history of science without paying close attention
to both knowing-how, knowing-that and the relations between them,
because both are necessary and neither one determines the other.
Here is a more specific illustration of this idea: the Mezquita in
Cordoba, Spain. It was built through the ninth and tenth centuries as
the grand mosque of Al-Andalus – the southern part of the Iberian
Peninsula, under Muslim rule from the eighth through the fifteenth
centuries – and then turned into a cathedral in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, after the city was conquered by the Christians.
The Muslim masons, the first to introduce the pointed arch, used it
extensively in the original mosque, but they apparently were not
completely happy with its aesthetics. They camouflaged it under
circular ornaments (Figure 1.10, left) and were never tempted to use
the added structural efficiency to “defy gravity” and stretch their
mosques into the sky. They remained loyal to the sprawling,
repetitive forest of circular arches which gives big mosques their
almost hypnotic atmosphere. When the Christians took over,
however, they not only adopted the engineering feat of the pointed
arch; they turned it into their main architectural tool, piling soaring
Gothic arches and domes on top of the circular, modestly elevated
original ones (note how the bright white and gold Christian dome
towers over the Muslim red and brick arches in Figure 1.10, right).
“Hoist[ing] hewn rock into heaven” was a choice, determined not by
knowing how to do so but by what the builders knew and thought
about their world.
 Figure 1.10 Know-how does not determine its application, as
exemplified in the Mezquita in Cordoba. The structure on the left
(known as cinqfoil) is a part of the original mosque. The Muslim
masons who built it camouflaged the real weight-bearing
elements, which are the five pointed arches, with four circular
arches. Similarly, they obscured the pointed shape of the two
arches on both sides (of which we see only half) with three circular
adornments on each voussoir (see Figure 1.7). On the right is the
high dome of the cathedral erected on top of the mosque. The
Christian rulers who had it built made no attempt to hide the
pointed arch. They celebrated the enormous height allowed by this
piece of Muslim know-how and the superiority this height implied.

But what did the people who “inhabited the sky with hammers”
know and think? Did they reflect on the fact that the most perfect
curve – the circle – turned out not to be the most physically efficient
one? Did they ask themselves why the pointed arch is more stable
and how its stability relates to its shape? It is very hard to tell. They
did not write down what they knew.
 Knowing-That: The World of the Cathedral Builders
Yet some clues of what the masons, their employers and the
members of their communities knew about the world they lived in are
borne by the cathedral itself. Height is of course one of them: the
cathedral builders were making a dangerous and costly effort to
“inhabit the sky”; the reasons for this effort are that other kind of
knowledge. Another clue is light. The Gothic cathedral is full of light.
It’s not simply lit, or situated so as to allow as much light as possible
into its imposing halls. Rather, the cathedral draws light in through
large, elevated windows, and dyes it with spectacular stained-glass
panes. It was a new know-how – new pigments and new
technologies of glass-making – that enabled this spectacle. But it is
the use of this know-how – the drive for such new capabilities and
this keen interest in light – that tells us what the cathedral builders
knew about their world.
A third clue is the surprising cobweb appearance of the
cathedral’s masonry. It is as if the builders purposefully avoided
matter, replacing it wherever possible with massless structures:
instead of massive supporting walls they introduced slim flying
buttresses; in the walls they could not avoid building, they tore huge
windows; and in the remaining wall space they dug ornate apertures.
The cathedral builders had a clear preference for structure over
matter, and for certain structures in particular, which is the final clue:
the high-medieval, Gothic cathedrals were built according to the
fundamental musical consonances. Between the nave, the transept
and the aisles, the builders used the ratios of 1:1, 1:2, 2:3 and 3:4;
the ratios which constitute the harmonious intervals of tones –
unison, eighth, fifth and fourth correspondingly – from which music
can be produced (Figure 1.11; we will discuss later the Greek
discovery of these ratios and the significance they assigned to
them).
Figure 1.11 The musical harmonies embedded into Chartres
Cathedral. The ‘crossing’ – the intersection of the nave and the
transept – is a square, so the ratio between its length and its width
is 1:1, which stands for the musical ‘fundamental,’ or unison. The
ratio between the width of the nave and the width of the side aisles
and between the length of the transept and its width is 2:1,
corresponding to the octave, or eighth. Between the total length to
 the length of transept the ratio is 3:2 (fifth), and between choir’s
length and width: 4:3 (fourth).

These are the clues about the world the cathedral builders knew
as they knew it. It is this knowledge that interests us, so let’s begin
by summarizing what we know about it.
Politically, it was the world of the so-called Holy Roman Empire;
famous for being neither holy, nor Roman, nor really an empire. It
called itself Holy for its Christianity, Roman as a self-aggrandizing
reference to the great empire that last ruled much of Europe and
Empire for its own aspirations. In effect, it was a conglomerate of
mostly Germanic kingdoms, princedoms and fiefdoms. They were
dominated by the Franks, and their emperor was elected by the most
powerful kings after the previous emperor died. The original Roman
Empire was much more Mediterranean than ‘European,’ but the
appropriation of the name was not innocent. It meant that the
German rulers of medieval Northern Europe were claiming authority
over the territories taken by the Romans at their height of power,
around the turn of the Christian era. More crucial for us: they were
claiming allegiance to the Greek culture that the Romans adopted
when they conquered the Hellenistic realm at that time.
If politically it was a world with little structure and no clear
center, it was, in the eyes of its dwellers, a very orderly whole. This
order had the religious and aesthetic meanings that the builders
encoded into the cathedral, because it was the benevolent creation
of God. God made the world physically compact, perfectly round,
with Man in its center and the Heavens encompassing it in
concentric spheres. God, His angels and His saints were in the outer
spheres, keeping a loving and caring eye from above (see Figure
1.12). (As is often the case, by the time this beautiful image was
produced – a year after Columbus’ first journey – the ideas it
conveyed were quickly becoming obsolete.) The same order which
God bestowed on the physical world permeated all aspects of life
and thought: all that existed was organized in the ‘Great Chain of
Being,’ with God at the top and matter at the bottom. Humans
inhabited the middle region, below angels and above beasts, their
reason partaking in the pure and active form which was God, their
body made of profane, passive matter. Among humans, the political
order reflected the metaphysical-ethical one: the king and the bishop
were up and the peasant was down, each where they belonged, and
the pope, God’s emissary, was also the highest political authority.
Figure 1.12 The Cosmos according to Hartmann Schedel’s Liber
Chronicarum, known as the Nuremberg Chronicle (folio 5v,
woodcut by Michael Wolgemut’s workshop; see also Figures 3.10
and 5.8, right). The Chronicle was printed in Latin and German in
1493, so it belongs to the first generation of printed books
(incunabula – see Chapter 7), and is one of the very first illustrated
ones. Comprising a Biblical paraphrase and a history of some
European cities, books like that synthesized Pagan and Christian
knowledge in general, and this image illustrates this synthesis in
cosmology. It does not pretend to be to scale, but the compact
orderliness it reflects is intended. At the very center rests the
Earth, surrounded by the other three elements – Water, Air, then
 Fire. The realm of the elements is circumscribed by the lunar
sphere (the Moon drawn at the upper right above the sphere of
fire) and above it the planets (with the Sun directly above the
Earth). Around the planets is the Biblical Firmament, identified with
the sphere of the fixed stars and represented by the signs of the
Zodiac; and around it the crystalline heaven and the unmoved
mover – the Primum Mobile. The saints, angels and archangels
populate the upper realm, presided over by God on his throne.

The marvelous simplicity and perfection of the musical ratios

were perhaps the most spectacular reflection of this harmonious
order, and reason enough to embed them in the structure of the
cathedral. These ratios were, indeed, embedded in the relations
between other parts of the cosmos – the heavenly bodies in
particular – and this meant the world was not only orderly and just,
but also beautiful: the spheres literally sang the praises of the Lord.
Light was another such marvel. It was the closest to pure form which
people could find here, in the realm of matter; the best, most
beautiful and harmonious entity in this world. Light was both the
carrier and the symbol of God’s grace: flowing freely and abundantly,
without being diminished or exhausted, bringing life and happiness.
Tensions and Compromises
 Belief and Authority: The Church
Science is like a cathedral: a grand human achievement; magnificent
yet imperfect; purposeful yet contingent. It is an artificial creation,
carrying signs of the particular historical processes by which it was
made. The cathedral is like science: it embodies much know-how
and represents much knowing-that. It was built by masonry, arches,
horse breeding; each was an evolving tradition of knowledge, with
complex relations to the culture, society, economy and religion in
which it was embedded. Beyond the metaphor, we noted that the
Gothic cathedral and the era of its construction – the High Middle
Ages – are a good starting point for the very contingent story of
science’s coming into being. So we’ve now moved into inquiring
about the world that the builders represented in their cathedral, their
place within it and in relation to their God.
The religious aspect is crucial – and crucial for understanding
science – because it was a world studied and taught by the Christian
Church. The Church provided the rules of worship, the venues for
congregation, an authoritative interpretation of the scriptures and
much more. With its hierarchical-bureaucratic structure, its center in
Rome and its loyalty to an ancient yet evolving code of law, the
Church was the most centralizing political-cultural force of medieval
Europe, and the kings and emperors were crucially dependent on
the legitimation it granted them (see Chapter 4). The Church not only
withheld and disseminated the scriptures: it provided an elaborate
and extensive system of education. By the time of the cathedrals it
had developed a sophisticated philosophy of nature, alongside
mathematical sciences such as astronomy, music and mechanics.
The synthesis of Aristotle’s legacy with the fundamental principles of
Christianity provided the intellectual framework for these studies,
from the main topics and the basic assumptions, through modes of
argumentation, to the criteria for evidence. This synthesis is an
important part of the coming into being of modern science, and we
will return to it in detail later.
Almost all scholarly labor during the age of the cathedral was
done under the auspices of the Church, and the Church scholars
venerated ancient knowledge. The most thorough formulation of this
complex of ideas they found in a corpus that was, by their time,
almost a millennium old. It was the works of St. Augustine, perhaps
the most influential Christian thinker ever, whose life spanned the
last decades of the Roman Empire (354–430).
Augustine was not European: apart from four years of schooling
in Rome and Milan, he spent his life in the North African provinces of
the declining Empire, where he became the bishop of Hippo, near
Carthage (today’s Annaba in Algeria). His life and thought are an
emblem of this era of change, when Late Antiquity – the era of the
rise and decline of the Roman Empire – was transforming into the
Middle Ages. Augustine himself moved from the Paganism of
Antiquity, through the Manichean Gnosticism of his time, to the up-
and-coming Christianity; a painful metamorphosis of both reason and
belief, which he recounted in his personal and moving Confessions.
But he was a rhetorician by education, and the large part of his
writings were anything but personal. Most powerful among them is
his sprawling treatise on the superiority of Christianity: The City of
God. He also wrote hundreds of letters and homilies elucidating the
Christian doctrine in an era when many more religious options were
still open and competing around the Mediterranean: Jewish
monotheism and Canaanite paganism from Greater Syria; Hellenistic
paganism from the Aegean; the worship of Isis and Osiris from
Egypt; Zoroastrianism from Persia.
 Augustine and the Problem of Evil
Augustine’s intellectual and religious program was deeply rooted in
this unique cultural setting, but it was shaped by a worry with which
we can still identify and which was definitely relevant for the
cathedral builders a millennium later. The cathedral aspires to
capture and praise God’s omnipresence and grace; but if, as
Christianity tells, God is with us and He is all-good and all-powerful,
then why is the world so evil? Why is there pain, sickness, famine,
war? Why are God’s creatures so cruel to one another? The
medieval Europeans, with little medicine to protect them from malady
or force to protect them from violence, experienced pain and
suffering as a constant and overbearing presence. To the thinking
Christian, in an era when other religions were still immediately
present alternatives, these were pressing questions, especially for
those who, like Augustine, had taken on Christianity only after
conscious deliberation and choice.
The Greek and Roman pagans were of course as aware of the
hardships of human life as their Christian successors. But for them
these hardships did not present a philosophical or religious mystery:
their gods were not particularly benevolent – in fact they were in
many respects caricatures of human failings – and never avowed
responsibility for human well-being. The Manicheans, the Gnostic
sect to which Augustine belonged in his youth, did consider evil as a
religious dilemma, but their religious-metaphysical solution was
remote from anything a Christian would consider. At the core of
Gnosticism in its various forms was the belief that The Evil is just as
real and present in the world as The Good. In the Gnostic worldview,
matter itself was evil and spirit had to be released from it to unite
with The Good.
Christian thinkers could adopt neither the Gnostic solution nor
the Greek indifference. Monotheism, despite its title, is distinguished
from paganism not in having only one god, but by the role this god
assumes. One can easily claim that Christianity, with its trinity,
angels and saints, has as many demi-gods as any pagan religion.
What makes it monotheistic is that its Godhead is all-powerful and
all-good. Monotheism is the belief that God created this world and is
responsible for it. For Christianity, in particular, this responsibility
entails compassionate care – Grace. So it cannot accept that matter,
the infrastructure of a world created by the benevolent, caring and
omnipotent God, is bad. Moreover, central to Christian mythology is
God’s material embodiment as a man – thus matter cannot be evil.
In terms of the people for and by whom cathedrals were built, if
matter were essentially evil, there would be no cathedrals, because it
would mean that human effort in this world is futile, and no material
artifact can give glory to the immaterial God. From its very early days
through the time of the cathedral builders over a millennium later, it
has been essential for Christianity that God the Creator is morally
responsible and involved, and the world, insofar as it is created in
His image, must be perfect and perfectly good.
In his Confessions, Augustine undertakes this difficult
intellectual task: to explain why, despite all the evil – both the evil
afflicting people and the evil done by people – his readers should still
believe that God is both benevolent and intimately concerned with
every human person, attentive to every move that he or she makes.
Augustine’s strategy is to emphasize the transcendence of God: He
is radically different from the world. God is everything the world is not
– abstract, immaterial, eternal, unchanging – and thus cannot be
held responsible for the failings of this world.
Yet this solution creates a problem which is crucially important
for us here – a problem concerning our capacity to know. If God is
absolutely transcendent, completely outside our grasp as temporal,
material beings, how can He be known at all? Does this not mean
that Christianity is irrational – demanding that we believe in the
unknown and unknowable? To avoid this quandary Augustine
introduces into Christian thought a very pagan metaphor: that of
light. The knowledge of God, he explains, comes to us through direct
‘enlightenment.’ We know God through an unmediated absorption
and recognition of His presence and goodness, just as we
experience light. Unlike knowledge of this world, which demands
careful and active inquiry, we receive divine illumination passively,
the way we see light. We cannot but be enlightened by God if we
open our mind’s eye and allow the knowledge of His presence and
goodness to flow into our souls. Unlike knowledge of this world,
which is always tentative, our enlightenment by divine light is clear,
certain and unequivocal.
These are epistemological considerations – considerations
about knowledge – and are therefore crucial to what science would
become. And with this the relation between the cathedral and
science transcends the metaphorical: similar dilemmas were vested
in both. Europe of the cathedrals was deeply Christian, and
Christianity, from its earliest days, has always been deeply worried
about what we can know and how. The Church Fathers, before and
including Augustine, shaped Christianity with the ambition to depose
Greco-Roman paganism and take over its cultural place (the
competition with Judaism ran on different grounds and is outside our
scope here). It is therefore not surprising that they conceived the
challenge in terms of contest about knowledge: knowledge –
philosophy – was the great pride of Hellenistic culture. For early
Christian thinkers, this contest allowed no compromise. Jesus was a
relatively recent history, almost a living memory, and being only a
century or two removed from God having been among them in the
flesh they had no doubt that He would return very soon, and with
him, the end of this world. Studying this world, as Greek philosophy
did, was thus a diversion of attention from the eternal to the transient
and insignificant. One of the most influential among these thinkers,
Tertullian (160–230), who lived in Carthage, not far from where
Augustine would reside two centuries later, put it succinctly:
“philosophy is the material of the world’s wisdom, the rash interpreter
of the nature and dispensation of God.” The philosophical diversion
was not just a waste of time, but morally and religiously wrong: the
mind should concentrate on the world beyond, “for heresies are
themselves instigated by philosophy.” It should be free and humble
to accept the learning of the true religion, unhampered by the
possible doubts philosophy might plant: “Our instruction comes from
the porch of Solomon,” says Tertullian, “who had himself taught that
the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart.” His conclusions
were fierce:

What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the

Academy to do with the Church? What have heretics to do with
Christians? … Away with all attempts to produce a Stoic,
Platonic, and dialectic Christianity! We want no curious
disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after
receiving the gospel! When we believe, we desire no further
belief. For this is our first article of faith, that there is nothing
which we ought to believe besides.

Tertullian, Against the Heretics, ch. 7

(www.newadvent.org/fathers/0311.htm)

Tertullian, a self-appointed sage of an oppressed sect, could treat

worldly knowledge as abomination. But by Augustine’s time
Christianity was the Roman Empire’s official religion, and Augustine
was a bishop: he was not only a religious mentor, but also a
mainstream political leader. Augustine had worldly responsibilities to
his flock and had to seek and respect the knowledge necessary to
discharge those responsibilities. The compromise he devised in
order to fulfill this double role became the Catholic Church’s official
attitude towards knowledge for centuries to come and would
determine its role in the shaping of science:

Pagan learning is not entirely made up of false teachings and

superstitions. It contains also some excellent teachings, well
suited to be used by truth. These are, so to speak, their gold
 and their silver, which they did not invent themselves, but which
they dug out of the mines of the providence of God, which are
scattered throughout the world.
De Doctrina Christiana, II, LX
(https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/augustine/ddc.html)

In the epistemology that Augustine formulated and that the Church

has adhered to ever since, secular knowledge – knowledge of this
world (seculum in Latin) – is always inferior to the knowledge that
God bestowed on us directly, through his Book and his apostles. It is
always hypothetical, discursive and subject to doubt, unlike the
certainty of the sacred, revealed knowledge, which we receive by
illumination. But this material world was also created by the
benevolent God, and thus knowing it, even in this imperfect way,
cannot be bad. So “pagan learning … contains also some excellent
teachings” and can be useful, because it is also “dug out of the
mines of the providence of God.” The good Christian is not ‘simple’;
she’s a person who knows. “A Christian,” says Augustine, “is a
person who thinks in believing and believes in thinking” (De
Praedestinatione, 1:5, www.newadvent.org/fathers/15121.htm).
Augustine’s concept of knowledge is crucial for two reasons.
The first is historical: his compromise between sacred and secular
knowledge, as we said, served the Church for almost two millennia.
For most of this period it allowed the Church to take the acquisition
of knowledge – not just of the divine but also of this world – as an
integral part of its mission. The second reason is more philosophical:
the ideas that allowed this compromise are still deeply entrenched in
our concept of ‘scientific knowledge.’ With his notion of the
supremacy of the abstract over the material and the metaphor of
illumination, Augustine forms the link between his pagan
predecessors and his scientific successors – us.
 Augustine’s Resources: Plotinus
We have been telling our story backwards: from the know-how of the
medieval masons we proceeded to the arches of Roman antiquity;
from the cultural hints they encoded in the cathedral to the teachings
of Augustine, a millennium earlier. We’ll discuss soon the reasons for
this chronological reversal, but for the time being let’s continue in this
order and ask: what was there before Augustine? Or more
specifically: what were the resources from which Augustine drew
these solutions to his cluster of religious, moral and ultimately
epistemological worries?
Augustine picked up these ideas from the writings of a pagan
philosopher who lived a century before him: Plotinus (204–270). Like
Augustine and Tertullian, Plotinus was a product of the North African
periphery of the Roman Empire: born in Cairo, he was drawn to that
great cultural center of antiquity, Alexandria. There he was not only
mentored in the thought of Plato and his school, the Academia
(which Tertullian mentioned above and to which we’ll return in
Chapter 2), but also studied Persian and Indian philosophy. He was
almost 40 when he tried his luck as a soldier. When that failed, he
moved to Rome in 245, where he spent the rest of his life and
gained, already in his lifetime, a powerful reputation for the novelty
and boldness of his interpretation of Plato. But unlike Augustine, as
we said, Plotinus was a pagan, and his intellectual challenge was
quite different. The problem of evil, which is such a theological
dilemma for the Christian Bishop of Hippo, is a secondary (though
interesting) question for the pagan philosopher. What mainly
intrigues Plotinus is the metaphysical conundrums that troubled the
Greek philosophical tradition he chose: how can our world be so
varied and changing, yet still maintain unity and order? Or in the
language favored by this tradition: how can being be reconciled with
becoming?
Plotinus’ answers to these questions will sound very esoteric to
the modern ear, but it is worth paying attention to them. As our
discussion of Augustine began to reveal, these worries and these
deliberations played a crucial role in shaping what we consider as
our own scientific thought. The fact that the roots of this thought
spread so very far afield is part of what it means for science to have
a genuine, human history. We’ll return to discuss it below, so it’s
important to note exactly how particular and unique Plotinus’ solution
to the mystery of order vs. change is, how much it is an integral part
of a specific tradition and a specific intellectual context.
The core of this solution is the conviction that existence is a
consequence of thought. At the origin of everything, writes Plotinus,
is “The One,” which is pure thought – it thinks itself into existence; it
exists in thinking. The One is also The Good and The Beautiful,
because in this state of complete unity, all positive properties are one
and the same. In thinking, The One creates an object of its thought
and this separation – the separation of the Thinking One into the
subject and the object of its own thought – is Plotinus’ answer to the
question ‘how can unity breed variety?’ In this state, of a subject-
thinking-an-object, The One becomes what Plotinus calls the Nous –
the intellect of the cosmos. The Nous comprises the ideal forms of all
the many things in the world – variety in unity.
The Soul is the next phase of this descent of The One into the
many; of the continuous differentiation by which being gives rise to
becoming. Every living being partakes in this world soul; though only
in humans does the soul strive towards the intellect. But whereas the
intellect contemplates the forms purely, as they are in themselves,
the soul also acts upon its thoughts. In its action the soul embodies
the pure forms; it actualizes them into the realm of passive matter,
differentiates them into particular material beings and relates these
beings to one another. Creation is thus spontaneous activity of the
soul, unceasing and undiminishing – an emanation like the flow of
light. Materiality is nothing but the privation of this activity, the
privation of form.
One can see what kind of intellectual tools a Christian thinker
would find in this complex philosophy. To begin with, Plotinus’
concept of “The One” provided a means to make sense of the
difficult idea of a completely abstract God. With this concept at hand
Augustine could explain how God could be both all-powerful and all-
good while having no material existence. No less important, Plotinus
provided an account of the place of the human soul within God’s
creation and in relation to Him. The soul occupies the middle of the
Great Chain of Being, of which The One is at the top and matter at
the bottom (see Figure 1.13). The soul should aspire to ascend
towards its maker, but often loses itself and descends into the realm
of matter, forgetting that it is illusory, a figment of its own creation. In
this, the pagan Plotinus offered the Christian Augustine the
wherewithal to understand evil – it is but an error, caused by human
imperfection.
Figure 1.13 The Christian version of Plotinus’ Great Chain of
Being, presenting the descent from pure divine form, through the
mixtures of form with matter – humans, animals, plants, minerals –
to pure profane matter. Christian and didactic, this image also
presents Hell at the very bottom and falling angels on the right. It’s
taken from Rhetorica Christiana – a Franciscan textbook written
and illustrated in Mexico by Didacus (Diego) Valadés (the scroll at
the bottom right, just above hell, says Valades fecit), and
published in Perugia, Italy in 1579. Valadés was the first Mestizo
 to join the Franciscan order and his book was the first of an
American author to be printed.

It was in this difficult, Pagan, and seemingly esoteric philosophy

that Augustine found the intellectual resources to shape
Christianity’s approach to knowledge. Here was the strict dichotomy
and hierarchy between the realm of matter and the realm of spirit
and pure form: spirit stands for divinity, beauty and grace; matter is
plurality and transience. And here also was the conviction that true
knowledge is to be found only in the soul searching for the unity and
eternity of the form, not in the body’s dwellings in profane matter. Yet
one important element of Plotinus’ philosophy could not be accepted
by Augustine: the idea that creation emanated; that it flows from the
deity spontaneously – like light. This was exactly where Christianity
distinguished itself from Pagan belief and philosophy: in the
affirmation that God created the world by an act of will – that he
decided to do so and could have decided otherwise. So Augustine
modified the metaphor of light: it was no longer the way in which The
One bestowed existence on everything; it was the way in which God
bestowed knowledge to humans. The idea that the goodness of God
flows marvelous and undiminished like light remains; but Pagan
emanation is rejected for Christian creation.
 Conclusion: Reflections on the History of
Knowledge
Here, then, is the reason for the chronological reversal we noted
above; for telling this history backwards. It is to turn our attention
towards these types of compromises, to this attitude of thinkers
towards their knowledge as tools and towards ideas from the past as
resources – towards the deep relations between knowing-how and
knowing-that. Resorting to the metaphor of the cathedral illuminates
these considerations: in constructing his theology Augustine is not
unlike the mason building a flying buttress or a pointed arch.
The mason constructs a stone structure and Augustine a
religious-philosophical one, but both are using existing tools and
materials to erect some new edifice. The mason’s tools are material;
Augustine’s are intellectual – but they are tools nonetheless. Both
builder and scholar face challenges: the mason recognizes a
material-structural difficulty, like connecting arches of different spans
to create a cross-shaped building; Augustine is troubled by an
intellectual-theological problem – the problem of evil. They find their
respective problems too complex to solve with the tools at their
immediate disposal, so they reach for other tools. It can be an
ancient tool, originally devised to meet other challenges: the mason
may resort to the pointed arch, invented by his Muslim predecessors
to solve a completely different stability problem (the Muslim masons
obviously had no interest in crosses). Augustine, similarly, may find
that Plotinus’ solution to the problem of existence can be used to
resolve the mystery of evil. Tools never fulfill their task perfectly,
especially if adopted from one use to another, so they have to be
modified and adapted to their new use. The mason would discover
that the pointed arch allows building to great height, but also creates
stability problems demanding flying buttresses for support. Augustine
would find that Plotinus’ philosophy carries unacceptable remnants
of its pagan origins, forcing him to alter the way the metaphor of light
is being used, from that of creation to that of knowledge. In both the
material and the intellectual case, the modifications don’t completely
erase the marks of the original use: the Gothic cathedral will always
carry the Muslim twist of its pointed arches; Augustine’s theology will
always be, like Plotinus’ philosophy, Neo-Platonist (we will discuss
the meaning of this term in Chapter 6).
 Discussion Questions
1. Does the cathedral make sense as a metaphor for science?
Where does the analogy break? Can it be pushed even further?

2. How convincing is the distinction between knowing-how and

knowing-that? Where is it useful? Where does it collapse?

3. Is there an important difference between thinking of the history of

science in terms of ‘resources’ rather than ‘sources’ and ‘influence’?

4. What kind of relations between knowledge and religion are

suggested in this chapter? Is there a difference when the knowledge
is science? When the religion is Pagan or Monotheistic?

5. Figure 1.4 is supposed to describe the building of the Temple of

Solomon, but in fact depicts the construction of a cathedral
(apparently Notre Dame de Paris). What can one learn from this
about the way a culture conceives its real and imaginary past? How
it relates it to its future? Does this entail specific lessons for the
historiography of science?
Suggested Readings
 Primary Texts

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book II, chs. 27–30; 39–42,

www.newadvent.org/fathers/12022.htm.

Grosseteste, Robert, On Light, Clare C. Riedl (trans.) (Milwaukee,

WI: Marquette University Press, 1942).
 Secondary Sources

John Ormond’s “Cathedral Builders”:

Ormond, John, Collected Poems, Rian Evans (ed.) (Bridgend,

Wales: Poetry Wales Press, 2015).

On cathedrals and their place in Medieval Science:

Heilbron, John L., The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar

Observatories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

On science as a human achievement:

Golinski, Jan, Making Natural Knowledge (Cambridge University

Press, 1998).

On the impact of horses on medieval culture and on the

relations between technology and culture in general:

White, Lynn Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford

University Press, 1966).

On the uniqueness of Know How:

Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical

Philosophy, corr. edn. (University of Chicago Press, 1974).

On Augustine:
Evans, Gillian Rosemary, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge University
Press, 1982).

Hollingworth, Miles, Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual

Biography (Oxford University Press, 2013).

On Plotinus:

Uždavinys, Algis, The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Enneads

(Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2009).

On light and knowledge in Christianity:

Edgerton, Samuel, The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

1 ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Dark Ages,’ as will be discussed in Chapter 5,

are titles coined in hindsight, by scholars of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. They used them to refer to the previous
thousand years, stretching from the final collapse of the Roman
Empire in the fifth century to their own era, which they called
‘Renaissance’ – rebirth. These terms demonstrate the problems
with historians’ categories: people living through this millennium
obviously didn’t experience their life and times as being just ‘in
between.’ For them, these were by far the most important times.

2Throughout the book I’ll use ‘Hellenic’ to refer to the ethnically

Greek and their indigenous realm and ‘Hellenistic’ to their culture
as it spread beyond that.

3 ‘Synecdoche’ means ‘in a nutshell’; a part or a detail that

represents the whole.
4 Wars were obviously still abundant, but the knights seem to have
noticed that they were being most un-chivalrously massacred by
longbow-holding peasants on foot.
 2
Greek Thought
◈
 Knowing-About as Know-How
The cathedral metaphor suggested an important distinction: between
what its builders knew how to do – in order to erect the cathedral –
and what they knew about the world – according to which they
attempted to shape the cathedral. Going back in time, searching for
the resources they drew on, we have also revealed the limits of the
distinction: knowledge about the world, it turns out, is itself a kind of
know-how. Both types of knowledge require skills, tools, materials;
they involve recognizing problems and seeking solutions; searching
for resources, adopting and adapting them to new use.
With this insight – that thinkers handle ideas like masons handle
stones and chisels – comes another insight, crucial for the
historiography of science: that ideas don’t have life or history of their
own. They don’t evolve or ‘influence’ one another. People create
them, use them, adopt or eschew them, change them for changing
needs, sometimes simply neglect or forget them, and sometimes
search for and rediscover them. Ideas have no agency: history of
science and history of knowledge, like any history, is told of people.
Augustine, a Christian, in Hippo of the fifth century, needed to
solve a problem about knowledge: how can we know a God
completely detached from the world, and how can we reconcile our
knowledge of Him with our knowledge of His creation? To that end,
Augustine found, appropriated, modified and used ideas that
Plotinus, a pagan in Rome of the third century, used to solve the
mysteries of existence and order: how can the many come from the
one? How can variety maintain uniformity? Plotinus, for his part, was
working on interpreting and developing ideas that were first
formulated some 700 years earlier, in fourth-century BCE Athens, by
Plato (we will return to Plato’s life and times soon). Few people’s
thought had impact similar to Plato’s, but by now we know how to
understand such a claim: when we say that Plato’s ideas were
extremely influential, we are not describing some force they had
within themselves. We are saying that the intellectual tools that Plato
developed to meet the challenges of his time and place were
reshaped and reapplied for different challenges in different places
and different times – centuries, indeed millennia, later.
Plato and the Culture of Theory
 Plato: Truth and Episteme
Compared to the work of Augustine and Plotinus, the relevance of
Plato’s work to the history of science is straightforward: his
fundamental problem is exactly how is knowledge of this world
possible. His answer, as his disciples may have made us expect,
would come through the metaphor of light and vision: “the soul is like
the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the
soul perceives and understands” (Republic, Book VI,
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.7.vi.html).
To know, Plato reasons, is to get hold of Truth – this is the very
meaning of what knowledge is. Truth, by its very essence, is what
does not change; what is always and everywhere the very same;
“becoming” is the opposite of “Truth and being” (Republic, Book VII,
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.8.vii.html). Yet no object we
perceive is ever the same: it looks different from every perspective
and with every change of light or background; it feels different at
different times and in different contexts. The same room looks wide
from this angle and narrow from that; is warm if we come in from the
cold, cold if we sit in it for a while. Worse: the impossibility of gaining
knowledge from our surroundings may not only be the problem of
our own fickle senses. The material world itself is constantly
changing, and we change with it; what my body was a year ago is
not what it is today; what could be said about this tree yesterday no
longer holds today; even the mountain is no longer what it is while
we point at it.
 Knowledge, Plato concludes, simply cannot be such a relation
between the changing and the changing – between our changing
body and the changing world. It has to be a direct acquaintance
between that part of us that does not change – our soul – and a
reality which is also always one and the same. So if we know of this
particular horse that it is indeed a horse, and of that horse over there
that it is also a horse, and that it is in fact the same horse we saw
just a little while ago in a different part of the field, there must be a
real, ideal, exact and specific Horse, with which our soul is
acquainted, and which it can then recognize in both these horses
and in any one of their different and changing brethren we encounter
is this world. There must be a realm of reality that is pure, eternal
and always the same with itself, with which the soul can acquaint
itself directly, a realm in which “the use of the pure intelligence
[assures] the attainment of pure truth” (Republic, Book VII). Our
world, the material world, can only be a reflection – an imperfect
image or representation – of this realm of true reality. Only the pure
forms – eidos – that populate this realm can be objects of true
knowledge – Epistêmê. The most pure, general and exact of these
forms are the mathematical ones and knowledge of them –
mathematical knowledge – is the paradigm of episteme. The way we
fumble about in the material world, our changing and unreliable
familiarity with the ever-changing and unreliable objects which we
commonly mistake for knowledge, is mere doxa – unwarranted
opinion, vague approximation, grasping at shifting shadows.
Shadows and light are indeed the metaphors through which
Plato explored his epistemology, or his ideas about knowledge. He
presented these ideas in dialogues, in which his mentor Socrates is
featured as the main interlocutor, and in his dialogue The Republic
he has Socrates call upon his readers to imagine prisoners in a long,
dark cave. The prisoners are chained to their seats since birth, their
backs to the narrow entrance. Behind them is a great fire, in front of
which objects are held and moved above a wall, as in a puppet show
behind their backs. They are only able to look forward, at the cave’s
wall, where the shadows of these objects fall. For the prisoners,
then, shadows are all there is. If one of them were released and
allowed to turn around, he would not, at first, see anything else or
any better; he’d be blinded by the light. As his eyes gradually adapt
and he climbs out of the cave to see real objects, he will find
returning even harder. Blinded again, this time by the darkness upon
return, he would hardly be able to convey to his mates what he had
seen. Worse – his new knowledge would be of little use, indeed an
interruption for those who still dwell in the shadows. “Strange
prisoners,” Plato has the interlocutor remark; “no stranger than us,”
replies Socrates.
The brazen may say that only ‘strange’ is appropriate for Plato’s
ideas. Why should we think of ourselves as sitting in the dark,
watching only shadows? The idea that the world we know so well is
but a reflection of some remote and unreachable Real is not
particularly appealing. The material things surrounding us give us
our notion of hard facts (both literally and metaphorically). Horses,
tables and mountains are recalcitrant; they resist our touch and are
oblivious to our wishes, and this seems to be the very foundation of
what we think of as real and true. And why should we accept this
stark distinction between idealized ‘episteme’ and flawed ‘doxa’? It’s
not clear what’s to be gained from thinking that our acquaintance
with our world is a mere approximation and Truth can be attained
only by having our mind depart from it. Why should we even be
interested in the strange ideas of a person who lived almost 2,500
years ago, in a culture so different from ours?
 Estrangement
We should, because these are still our ideas. We also think that the
table in front of us is hard only to us. That in true reality, it is actually
almost a vacuum, comprising particles with no size, moving at
unimaginable velocity. We think that this reality is beyond our daily
experience and available only to a select few; that it can only be
captured by mathematics because it is, in effect, a purely
mathematical reality. Figure 2.1 provides a nice illustration of this
approach. It’s a diagram of the discovery – one of the most important
empirical achievements in decades – of the so-called ‘Higgs boson’;
a particle named after the mathematical physicist who predicted its
existence. It is perhaps not surprising that the prediction was based
on a mathematical analysis of an abstract, mathematical theory.
What is particularly telling is that the empirical discovery, made at the
great CERN particle accelerator, is also mathematical: it is registered
as a statistical difference on a graph plotted by a computer. Like
Plato, we think it naïve to expect an elementary ‘particle’ to have the
same material existence of a sand particle: to have a distinct
location, to be hard and impenetrable, to be accessible to the
senses. Like Plato, we believe that the infrastructure of our world,
the realm where elementary particles reside, is mathematical.
 Figure 2.1 A diagram representing the discovery of the ‘Higgs
boson’ at the CERN particle accelerator. The particles and the
relations between them can only be perceived and described
mathematically: in terms of frequencies, rates of decay, etc. Even
the discovery – an emblematic empirical achievement – is
fundamentally mathematical: it involves computing a very large
amount of data to detect statistically significant differences
between levels that the theory predicts in the case of the presence
of the Higgs boson and in the case of its absence.

Plato’s answer to the question of knowledge is strange. It is very

particular. Both his worries and his solutions make sense only
against the backdrop of a particular Greek culture, at a particular
time in its history, reflected on by a member of a particular class. Yet
it is still ours. Not because we are still troubled by the ancient
Greeks’ dilemmas or can truly sympathize with their solutions. Even
less so because their questions or answers have some universal
power by which they transcended their origins – like cathedrals,
questions and answers do not travel by themselves; they have to be
actively exported and imported. Rather, Plato’s vision happens to be
also ours because we are – albeit distant, indirect and well-modified
– products of his line of thinking. We still believe in a version of his
vision, because, for different reasons and in different and complex
ways, people of remote times and places (remote from Plato as
much as from us) adapted these ideas for their own purposes,
producing, finally and contingently, us.
It is as crucial to realize that being ours does not make the ideas
any less strange. This is one of the very important benefits of
learning history: it allows what the great playwright Berthold Brecht
called estrangement – the ability to look at ourselves from the
outside, as if we were strangers. From the estranged perspective we
can see that beliefs we take for granted are not self-evident at all:
they have surprising origins and depend on surprising assumptions
we didn’t know we held. We can see that we, too, are completely
particular. We are contingent products of historical processes that
could have evolved in completely different ways; we are the effect of
such processes, not their reason or their end. Understanding this
about science, about what we know to be true, is all the more
revealing.
Plato formulated the combination of ideas that we discussed in
Chapter 1 in their later pagan and Christian versions: the abstract is
superior to and ‘more real’ than the material; truth resides in an
independent abstract realm, outside our world; and true knowledge
is like light – flowing uninterrupted and forcing itself on us irresistibly.
He also provided a strong clue as to his own resources, in claiming
that at the apex of this pyramid of existence, most abstract and
general, eternal and unchanging, are the pure mathematical forms,
and hence that mathematical knowledge is our best example of
certain knowledge; of true episteme. This reverence of mathematics
was the teaching of a peculiar philosophical-religious sect, to which
Plato – though he never explicitly said so – apparently belonged: the
Pythagoreans.
 The Pythagoreans and their Mathematical Reality
It’s unclear whether Pythagoras was a real person; he was
supposedly born and died on the island of Samos in the sixth century
BCE, and led an itinerant life. But the story that the Pythagoreans
told about the events that moved him to establish their religion nicely
capture their fundamental beliefs. Curiously, their tale about the
greatness of pure mathematical knowledge begins with a strictly
empirical inquiry: Pythagoras was walking by a smithy, so the story
goes, when he was struck by the beauty and harmony of the sounds
coming from the metal being hammered inside. He decided to
investigate the issue, so he took home some pieces of metal, and
then other materials, and examined how harmonious sounds could
be produced from them. The sounds were not pleasant (or
unpleasant) in themselves, of course, but only in relation to others:
two or more different sounds would sound beautiful together if they
were in harmony, or in consonance. His great discovery was the one
that would still enchant the cathedral builders millennia later: the
sounds produced were harmonious, he discovered, if the length of
the pieces producing them related to one another in the simple ratios
between the first four digits – 1:2 produced what we call the eighth
(do and do; re and re, etc.); 2:3 produced the fifth (do and sol; sol
and re); 3:4 produced the fourth (do and fa; fa and ti minor). Most
important: these harmonies were completely independent of the
material used or the way the sound was produced: metal, wood or
hair; beating, blowing or plucking; the same mathematical ratio
always created the same harmonic consonance (the story and the
ideas are beautifully represented in Figure 2.2).
Figure 2.2 The fable of Pythagoras’ discovery of the mathematical
laws of musical consonances: hearing the harmonies from the
blacksmith (upper left), Pythagoras experiments and establishes
that the musical consonances are completely determined by
mathematical proportions, whether realized in the metal of the bell,
the water in the glass, the thread of the string or the wood of the
pipe. The illustration is from Franchino Gafori’s Theorica Musice
(Milan: de Lomatio, 1492).
 For the Pythagoreans, this meant that mathematics exists prior
to and independently of matter; that the beauty of Pythagoras'
consonances spoke of matter ‘partaking’ in these ratios.
Mathematics was not merely a means to measure or calculate parts
of the material world – it was the true essence of all existence. More
particularly, it meant that the world was structured by the whole
numbers ( 1, 2, 3 and so on), and the ratios between them (1:2, 1:3,
2:3, 2:4, etc.). The simplicity was not accidental: it told of perfection.
The consonances and their beauty captured this deep truth, a truth
of metaphysical and religious significance. We don’t know how the
Pythagoreans worshipped and what their rituals were – they kept
them secret – but we do know quite a lot about what they
established in their mathematical inquiries, which in themselves
clearly were of religious significance.
What particularly enchanted the Pythagoreans was the orderly
structure and surprising symmetries between the whole numbers.
Plato made one such structure famous in his Timaeus. This
dialogue, very popular among scholars of the age of the cathedral,
tells a Pythagorean, mathematical-magical story of creation, in which
a workman-like god, whom Plato calls the demiurge, constructs the
world from numbers and figures. Plato presents a series of numbers,
which came to be called ‘the lambda,’ after the triangular-shaped
Greek letter (Figure 2.3). When one arranges the squares of two in
sequence on the left-hand side of the lambda and the squares of
three on the right, the musical consonances (1:2; 2:3; 3:4) appear in
order, and the numbers on the right become interesting sums of the
precious ones in the series: 3=2+1; 9=4+2+3; and 27 is a sum of all
the former numbers. The fact that these regularities seemed to
emerge simply from the geometrical arrangement of the numbers
captivated the Pythagoreans, and they moved to classify the
numbers accordingly, as triangular, square and pentagonal numbers
(Figure 2.4). These classes (which can continue indefinitely) had,
again, surprising and exciting relations between them. For example:
every square number is the sum of two successive previous
triangular numbers (known as the Pythagoreans’ first theorem); and
every square number is the sum of all the previous odd numbers
(third theorem). The truly thrilling point about these relations,
however, was not that they existed, but that they could be proven.

Figure 2.3 Cosmological significance assigned to mathematical

regularities: in the Lambda on the left, the arrangement of the
squares of two on the left and the squares of three on the right
captures the musical consonances. In the Tetractys on the right
the set of ten points represent the dimensions – from none (point)
to three (pyramid), and the relations between them also conjure
the consonances, another testimony to the musical harmony of the
cosmos.
 The Concept of Proof
The proof is the greatest and most unique contribution of the
Pythagoreans to the concepts and practices of knowledge that would
come to make science as we know it. Not the particular proofs
(which are easy to convey by drawing – see Figure 2.5), but the very
concept of proof. We all learn proofs in high school and some of us
get quite good at constructing them, but rarely do we stop to think
what they are. A proof is a type of argument: a series of propositions,
some assumed and the others following some laws of inference.
What distinguishes a proof from all other forms of argument is that in
a proof the inference is such that if the assumptions are true then the
conclusion is always and everywhere true. So whether the dots in
Figure 2.5, for example, represent apples, people or galaxies – the
proof guarantees that the relations claimed in the theorem will hold
universally and eternally. Once we have proven that the sum of the
angles of any triangle equals two right angles, it matters not at all
that no triangle we may draw – indeed that no physical triangle ever
– will be accurate enough to embody this truth. It is our drawing
which is wrong, never the proven proposition.
Figure 2.4 Pythagorean classes of numbers. This classification
can continue indefinitely: hexagonal numbers; heptagonal;
octagonal; and so forth, and the classes have surprising relations
between them (see Figure 2.5).
 Figure 2.5 On the left – the proof of the first theorem: every
square number is the sum of two successive previous triangular
numbers. On the right – the proof of the third theorem: every
square number is the sum of all the previous odd numbers. The
power of the proofs is in their undeniable universality: the figures
can be drawn in any means or style, and can be extended
indefinitely, but will still convey the same relations.

Here again is this strange idea of perfect, certain, universal and

eternal knowledge, perhaps at its most extreme. What does ‘always
and everywhere’ even mean? Obviously we can never check if a
claim is ‘always’ true, so it seems spurious to worry about it. And it
seems spurious to care about triangles which we can never draw. If
we know, say, that the area of the square built on the hypotenuse of
a right triangle is equal to the combined areas of the squares built on
the other two sides (the famous theorem named after Pythagoras),
what else do we gain by knowing that it will always be so? We don’t
seem to add anything to our knowledge by ‘proving’ this relation –
this proof being the very achievement by which we remember
Pythagoras’ name. And what does it mean that Pythagoras’ theorem
is true even though no triangle in the world is really right-angled?
The ancient Egyptians, for example, knew this theorem very well –
we can see it embedded in their great engineering feats and it
appears on their papyri – but it never occurred to them to prove it.
From any practical point of view, proofs are redundant. During
Pythagoras and Plato’s time (the sixth to fourth centuries BCE) – and
well before and after – the Egyptians and the Babylonians could
boast achievements of both knowing-how and knowing-that
significantly more powerful than the Greeks’ in medicine, metallurgy
and what we might now call chemistry. Their engineering feats, from
irrigation projects to pyramids, alongside their surveying, astronomy
and astrology, are particularly interesting for us in the discussion of
proofs. This is because they demonstrate mathematical capacities
which were the envy and the model of the Greeks for centuries – all
without proofs. The Egyptian Rhind Papyrus (Figure 2.6), for
example, from the sixteenth century BCE (a millennium before
Pythagoras!), contains a slew of arithmetical and geometrical
problems and their solutions – but no proofs.
Figure 2.6 The Rhind Papyrus: an Egyptian mathematical
textbook dating from c. 1550 BCE. Rather than proofs, this
textbook comprises specific problems and general directions for
how to solve them. The first part contains arithmetical problems –
for example, how to divide a given number of loaves of bread
among 10 men – as well as tables converting complex fractions to
unit fractions, for example: 2/101 = 1/101+1/202+1/303+1/606.
The image here is from the second part, which contains problems
of geometry, like finding the volumes of cylinders and the slopes of
pyramids. The last part comprises a collection of various
exercises, such as multiplication of fractions. For Ahmose, the
scribe who signed the papyrus, mathematics was an earthly,
practical discipline.
 The uncompromising commitment to the absolute power of the
proof had difficult implications for the Pythagoreans. It turned out that
one can prove their fundamental assumption – that all quantities are
either whole numbers or the ratios between them – false. Here is
that proof, summarized in the textbox. The mathematically averse
can skip, but the effort is worthwhile – the magical way by which the
unexpected conclusion enforces itself can illuminate the allure that
proofs had on the Pythagoreans – and still have on us:Let’s assume
a square whose sides are 1. (1) Since it’s a square, ABC is a right
triangle, so the square of its hypotenuse AC – the diagonal of the
square – equals the sum of the squares of AB and BC. If
AC2=12+12, then AC2=2 and AC=√2. (2) Let’s assume that this
number – the square root of 2 – is a ratio between two numbers, call
them m and n: √2=m/n, and (3) reduce them until they have no
common factor: m≠an. (4) Square the ratio: 2=m2/n2, and you get
(5), that the square of the nominator is double the square of the
denominator: m2=2n2. This means that m2 is even – it has 2 as a
factor, hence (6) m is also even; the square root of an even is
necessarily even. This is because an odd number multiplied by itself
can’t create an even number, since no multiplication by 2 occurred. If
m is even, then it is double some other number – call it q (m=2q), so
(7) the square of m is four times the square of q (m2=4q2). But the
square of m is twice the square of n (m2=2n2), which means (8) that
twice the square of n equals four times the square of q (2n2=4q2).
Or, (9) the square of n equals twice the square of q (n2=2q2). This
means that the square of n is even, so (10) n is also even. But we’ve
shown that m has to be even, which means that if there is a ratio
between m and n, then there is a common factor between them: 2.
Or, to think of it slightly differently: if √2 is a rational number, then m
and n share q as a factor. But from both perspectives this goes
against what was assumed at the start: that m and n share no
common factor. So √2≠m/n; the square root of 2 cannot be a ratio
between two whole numbers, m/n. It is, literally, irrational – without
ratio.
This is a proof by way of negation: the assumptions (one
assumption was Pythagoras’ theorem and the other that √2 is
rational) turned out to contradict each other, and the conclusion is
that they cannot both be true. Because Pythagoras’ theorem had
been proven, then √2=m/n had to be false. Because it was a proof,
this conclusion was necessary: the assumption that all numbers are
rational had to be false. The Pythagoreans had to abide by it, and
they indeed abandoned the investigation of numbers to concentrate
on geometry. According to the third-century Neo-Platonist
Jamblichus, the Pythagoreans acted swiftly – by killing the person
who constructed the proof. Macabre humor aside, the fable delivers
a powerful insight: that the idea of knowledge which is limitless and
certain is not only both strange and compelling – it’s also costly. It
makes difficult, religious-like demands. The concept of Real
knowledge, episteme, which we inherited from Plato the
Pythagorean – abstract, eternal knowledge, detached from the
changing world – this concept only makes sense against the
background of a very peculiar understanding of the world and of us,
humans, within it. This understanding was rooted in the very
particular culture and politics which were home to Plato – those of
the Greek polis.
 Plato in Athens
Plato’s Athens, like the other Greek towns on the Greek peninsula
and the neighboring islands, as well as on the coasts of Asia Minor,
Sicily and North Africa, was an independent city-state. It called itself
a democracy, but its demos – ‘the people,’ the citizens – was very
limited; perhaps 5 to 10 percent of its population. It comprised the
heads of households: men, of property, old enough to have inherited
their fathers’, and wealthy enough to own slaves. Manual labor –
menial as well as skilled – was performed by these slaves. Their lot
was not that of the African slaves forced into the horrors of American
cotton fields and cocoa plantations – they were protected by law and
custom, could own property and were allowed into most facets of life.
Yet they were bound. They belonged to a household, and within it
they had to stay. They did possess knowledge – among them were
carpenters and shoemakers, foremen and even teachers and
physicians – but for their masters, this knowledge could never be
more than techne – organized, tradition-supported practical know-
how, carried and encoded in the body. It was knowledge that bound
a man to his place, his tools, his body. Women and children, even of
the higher classes, were also bound, if somewhat differently: to the
transformations of their bodies, which they could not control.
For this reason – so the Greek citizens explained to themselves
– politics, the public realm of the polis, was reserved for them: they,
and only they, were free. They were not bound by the immediate, the
bodily and the material. Their freedom allowed them to rule their
passions by their reason; to manage their household with prudence,
to weigh all things by good measure. Public matters were decided by
these free men through public arguments, because free men could
aspire to the type of knowledge required to run the polis: to consider
general principles; to infer the future on the basis of the past; to
reach decisions on the basis of abstract arguments. They could
transcend the here and now; they, and only they, could aspire to
episteme.
It was, quite probably, not the way all Greeks explained their
world to themselves; it is only what we have learned from those
Greeks who left written records, and those would have belonged to
the class of the free. As with the medieval masons, it is hard to tell
what Greek slaves and women thought (though not always
impossible – we have, for example, poetry written by educated
Greek women, such as the great Sappho of Lesbos); whether they
contemplated their human condition and whether, in doing so,
presented it to themselves differently than their masters did. For
these masters of the demos, however, this was the cultural-political
context in which proof carried such force: an abstract, pure
argument, whose power stems from its structure and is therefore
free of the bounds of the here and now. And this is the context in
which Plato’s idea of knowledge made sense; in which truth could be
envisioned as residing in a realm of its own, outside our world. A
reader who finds it hard to believe that such abstract considerations
as Plato’s philosophy can stem from such practical roots may
consider Plato’s biography.
 He was born circa 427 BCE to an aristocratic family in Athens.
His father hailed from the early kings of Athens and his mother was
related to Athens’ legendary lawmaker Solon, and when his father
died in his childhood, his mother married an associate of Athens’
leader Pericles. Plato was in military service from 409 to 404 BCE,

participating in the last rounds of the Peloponnesian War (431 to 404

BCE), which pitted Athens and its allies against Sparta and the other
Peloponnesian poleis. After the war he turned to the political career
expected of a man of his pedigree, joining the oligarchy of the Thirty
Tyrants that came to rule Athens; but deterred by their violence, he
left. In 403 BCE, Athens restored its democracy and Plato tried to
return to politics, but failed. This was followed by perhaps the most
significant encounter in the history of philosophy: Plato met Socrates
and became his disciple. He documents Socrates’ style of thought in
his earlier dialogues: an unrelenting questioning, which attempts to
take nothing for granted and leaves the interlocutor aware of the
weak and contradictory assumptions underlying his (always his)
deepest beliefs.
This relentless questioning of Athenian moral convictions cost
Socrates his life. He was condemned to death in 399 BCE on
charges of treason, and Plato, who was present at Socrates’
execution (by poisoning), left Athens temporarily and traveled to
Italy, Sicily and Egypt. When he returned, in 387 BCE, he founded a
school, the famous Academia, which we will discuss below together
with the other Greek philosophical schools. Twenty years later, at the
height of his fame, Plato left again, this time for Sicily, on an
invitation by Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse, to instruct him on how
to rule according to his (Plato’s) philosophical principles. The
political-philosophical experiment failed, with Plato barely escaping
alive, but he wasn’t deterred enough not to try the experiment twice
again, with the next two Sicilian tyrants – Dionysius II and Dion
(Dionysius' son and brother) – with the same results. He finally
retired to teach and write at the Academia, passing away at a ripe
old age in 348 or 347 BCE.
What Plato’s biography powerfully shows is that, even if his
philosophy urged abstract detachment from matter, it was by no
means itself detached from immediate material-political concerns.
Plato, like his mentor Socrates, his student-rival Aristotle (we’ll
discuss Aristotle’s times at the Academia below) and almost any
other influential thinker, was a member of a cultural-political elite,
who made sense of their world in ways that explained and justified
their status and privileges. But this is not to say that their philosophy,
or any philosophy, was insincere or ‘just politics.’ This was their
genuine understanding of that world, and what we have seen earlier
is how, through adoption of and adaptation for different uses in later
times, this understanding has been made fundamental to our
understanding of our world – even though it is so very different from
theirs. So to understand this philosophy, we do need to look at their
social and political culture from the outside, as it were, but also to
attempt to understand their worries and follow their solutions in their
terms. For the Greek culture from which we inherited our concept of
abstract, mathematical knowledge, the greatest mystery was the one
we already encountered with that late representative of this culture,
Plotinus: the mystery of being and becoming. How can order reside
in variety? How can unity allow diversity? How can one become
many?
Parmenides’ Problem and Its Import
 Parmenides’ Challenge
The mystery could be presented from different perspectives: there
are so many horses in the world; what makes them all one thing – a
horse? And if there is one thing – the horse – why are horses so very
different from one another? Similarly, all things move in very many
directions – is there one place to which they all belong? And if there
is such a place – why do they need to move at all? The answers
carried not only metaphysical and epistemological, but also ethical,
political and, as we saw with Plotinus, religious implications. The
problem of the one and the many, of unity and diversity, was so
fundamental to Greek thought that one could sort the different Greek
philosophical schools according to the way they tried to
accommodate these challenges.
The most influential formulation of this quandary was provided
by Parmenides, who lived in the Greek colony Elea in south-west
Italy about a century before Plato (Plato honored him by making him
the main interlocutor of one of his dialogs). Parmenides related it in a
philosophical poem of which only fragments are left, as is usually the
case with Greek thinkers before Plato. The poem is written as if
dictated by a goddess, who begins with this declamation:

Come and I shall tell you what paths of inquiry alone there are
for thinking: The one: that it is and it is impossible for it not to be.
This is the path of Conviction, for it leads to Truth. The other:
that it is not and it necessarily must not be. That … is a path
wholly unthinkable, for neither could you know what-is-not (for
that is impossible), nor could you point it out.
 Parmenides, Fragments, David Gallup (ed. and trans.)
(University of Toronto Press, 1984), p. 55 (emphasis added)

The words of Parmenides’ goddess seem odd only at first glimpse.

On a second look they convey a very solid philosophical insight: that
there cannot be any middle ground between existence and non-
existence. What is, what exists, simply exists; and what does not
exist is nothing at all. Indeed, even saying ‘what does not exist’ does
not refer to anything, and is therefore an empty string of words,
“wholly unthinkable”; we can only know, perceive, or discuss what
exists. Nothing can ‘almost exist’ or be ‘on the way to, or out of,
existence,’ so what is cannot have come into existence – it could not
have been nothing and then become something, because when it
was nothing, it simply wasn’t. So what is necessarily is and “it is
impossible for it not to be”; it has always been, and will never cease
to be. Furthermore, what is can never change, because change
always involves something that didn’t exist coming into existence
and vice versa and this, again, is “wholly unthinkable.” What exists is
one and the same with itself: if there is more than one existing thing
– two or more separate entities – what exists between them?
Emptiness? Non-existence? But non-existence “is not and it
necessarily must not be.” And for a similar reason, what is cannot
move: in order to move there has to be some empty space into
which it can move. But empty space is just nothingness and that,
again, necessarily “must not be.” If we follow the “path [that] leads to
Truth,” we realize that existence is one, eternal, unhanging – there is
no reality in variety, in birth and demise, in change.
 One may ask if it makes any sense at all to doubt the existence
of change or motion – aren’t these the most obvious, the most
general of all facts? Can we even think without change and motion?
Parmenides’ disciples agreed that we were all accustomed to think
this way, but still, they argued, these very fundamental assumptions
are but illusions. The most well-known of them, Zeno (also from
Elea), produced a series of arguments – the famous ‘Zeno’s
paradoxes’ – to demonstrate just that. Imagine, he suggested, a
mundane episode of motion: two things moving in the same direction
at different speeds. Let’s say it’s a race between Achilles and a
tortoise. Achilles runs ten times faster than the tortoise, and starts 10
meters behind it. You may think that Achilles would overtake the
tortoise in no time – he is so much faster. It will indeed take him only
a step or two to cover the 10 meters – but by the time he has
covered those initial 10 meters, the tortoise would have progressed a
meter. Achilles will of course quickly cover that meter, but by then the
tortoise will be 10 centimeters ahead – and so on. The distance
between the two will keep diminishing, but never disappear –
Achilles will never manage to catch up to the tortoise, so he will
never overtake him. Or, suggested Zeno, think of another common
experience of motion: an arrow shot from a bow towards a target. To
reach its target the arrow will have to cover half of the distance, and
then half of the second half, then half of that quarter, and so on – the
list of halves will continue to infinity, so the arrow will never have
enough time to cover the distance and make it to the target. In fact,
to get to that halfway mark the arrow will need to cover half of that
half, and before that half of that, and so on – the arrow, in fact, will
never leave the bow. Motion is an illusion.
 The Atomists
How should one understand Zeno’s paradoxes? After all, we do see
fast runners overtake slow ones and arrows hitting targets – what is
the meaning of this discrepancy between what we experience and
what reason tells us? The Parmenideans’ answer was that what we
are told by our senses, our experience of this world, is an illusion.
We should derive consolation from knowing that all our pains and
sufferings – as well as our hopes and passions – are such illusions,
and as far as knowledge is concerned, we should strictly follow
reason. Plato, we saw, concurred – we can understand his
philosophy as a sophisticated development of the Parmenidean
insight. In his version, this world, the world of variety, motion and
change, is but a cave, and our experiences are but shadows. For
him, the only things that truly exist are the pure forms, and they
follow Parmenides’ laws for what “it is and it is impossible for it not to
be”: the forms are eternal, unchanging and only known by reason.
But not all Greek thinkers were as impressed by Parmenides’
crystal-sharp reasoning. A different answer to his challenge came
from Leucippus (c. 480–460 BCE) and Democritus (c. 460–370
BCE), who lived about a generation before Plato, and Epicurus (c.
341–271 BCE), who was born a few years before Plato’s death. For
them, the founders of the Atomist school of thought, explaining the
world as we experience it was more crucial than following the edicts
of pure reason. They couldn’t deny or refute Parmenides’ insights
and Zeno’s arguments – these made an enormous impression on
Greek thinkers – but they compromised with them. Motion and
variety, in their thinking, were just undeniable truths about the world.
Hence, if motion requires empty space for moving things to move
into, then emptiness had to exist, even if reason did not approve.
Moreover, if we cannot understand how from the oneness of
existence comes the variety of existing things, we simply have to
assume that many things exist, separated by empty space. But what
the title ‘Atomists’ actually shows is that they desperately tried to
maintain as much as they could of Parmenides’ teachings. The many
things that existed, according to them, satisfied all the conditions that
the goddess in Parmenides’ poem set for what is: they were uniform,
eternal and unchangeable. Each one was an atom: a-tom.
indivisible, in-dividuum in Latin.
Some 400 years after the first Atomists and in a very different
context, Lucretius (99–55 BCE), writing in Latin in the waning days of
the Roman Republic (not much more is known about him), provided
a sophisticated elaboration of ancient Atomism in a philosophical
poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura). Here is an excerpt
from Book Two, translated by William Ellery Leonard:

Now come: I will untangle for thy steps

Now by what motions the begetting bodies
Of the world-stuff beget the varied world,
And then forever resolve it when begot,
And by what force they are constrained to this,
And what the speed appointed unto them
Wherewith to travel down the vast inane:
…
For, when, in their incessancy so oft
They meet and clash, it comes to pass amain
They leap asunder, face to face: not strange –
Being most hard, and solid in their weights,
And naught opposing motion, from behind.
And that more clearly thou perceive how all
These mites of matter are darted round about,
Recall to mind how nowhere in the sum
Of all exists a bottom, – nowhere is
A realm of rest for primal bodies; since
(As amply shown and proved by reason sure)
Space has no bound nor measure, and extends
Unmetered forth in all directions round.
…
And of this fact (as I record it here)
An image, a type goes on before our eyes
Present each moment; for behold whenever
The sun’s light and the rays, let in, pour down
Across dark halls of houses: thou wilt see
The many mites in many a manner mixed
Amid a void in the very light of the rays,
And battling on, as in eternal strife,
And in battalions contending without halt,
In meetings, partings, harried up and down.
From this thou mayest conjecture of what sort
The ceaseless tossing of primordial seeds
Amid the mightier void – at least so far
As small affair can for a vaster serve,
And by example put thee on the spoor
Of knowledge. For this reason too ’tis fit
Thou turn thy mind the more unto these bodies
Which here are witnessed tumbling in the light:
Namely, because such tumblings are a sign
That motions also of the primal stuff
Secret and viewless lurk beneath, behind.
For thou wilt mark here many a speck, impelled
By viewless blows, to change its little course,
And beaten backwards to return again,
Hither and thither in all directions round.
Lo, all their shifting movement is of old,
From the primeval atoms; for the same
Primordial seeds of things first move of self,
And then those bodies built of unions small
And nearest, as it were, unto the powers
Of the primeval atoms, are stirred up
By impulse of those atoms’ unseen blows,
And these thereafter goad the next in size;
Thus motion ascends from the primevals on,
And stage by stage emerges to our sense,
Until those objects also move which we
Can mark in sunbeams, though it not appears
What blows do urge them.
 http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html

Inane: emptiness, void

Amain: forcefully, violently
Asunder: apart, away
Spoor: track, trail

Lucretius may sound very ancient to some – ‘how strange it is to

argue scientific views in a poem!’ – and very modern to others – ‘isn’t
he talking about these particles the way we do?’ But if we remember
the lessons of the cathedral, we can instead look at what troubled
Lucretius himself, in his time and place, and how he attempted to
resolve his dilemmas; what he may have thought his audience would
find difficult and how he thought he could sway them.
Lucretius confronted Parmenides’ challenge by having order
emerge from chaos and by disengaging uniformity from singularity.
There is not only one, single is in his world, but very many particles –
the ‘begetting stuff.’ The particles are identical – this is where the
uniformity of existence lies – yet they move chaotically, and from
their accidental collisions, bit by bit, the varied but orderly world of
our experience comes to be.
Lucretius’ challenge was twofold. First, he needed to convince
his readers of this novel and strange story – the image of minute
particles in chaotic motion creating the world of large, orderly things
we know. Secondly, he needed to make them come to terms with the
difficult idea that what they are familiar with is an outcome of
something they can hardly understand. In particular, they needed to
accept that what they can see (and hear and feel and taste) is an
expression of things they cannot. To convince them that both ideas
are not mere fantasy, he offers an analogy from a common
experience: a ray of light enters into a darkened room, and little
particles of dust are seen bouncing around. The readers can now
visualize the motions Lucretius has concocted – the hardly visible
(motes of dust) represent the invisible (atoms). With the analogy
established, he offers a bolder move; the visible motion is not only a
representation, but an expression of the invisible one. The chaotic
motion of the minuscule dust particles becomes an argument for the
motion of the even more minute atoms: how can the former be
explained if not by the latter? Lucretius turns the dust motes into the
top step of a ladder leading down, across the threshold of visibility
and on to the tiny atoms, through their aggregates and aggregates-
of-aggregates; so small they are.1
 Greek Philosophies and Parmenides’ Challenge
The reason Parmenides’ challenge is so crucial to our story is that it
is still at the core of every scientific inquiry, whether it is about the
motion of sub-atomic particles, the creation of inorganic crystals, the
evolution of new species or the behavior of financial markets: how to
understand variety in terms of unity? How to understand change in
terms of stability and continuity? How to understand apparent
disorder in terms of fundamental order? Plato’s answer was to find
unity in ideal forms in a different realm, outside this world; and to
take variety and change as ‘failures,’ reflecting the deficiencies of the
material imitations of the abstract ideal. The Atomists’ answer was to
find unity in the uniformity of matter, and to claim that order emerges
spontaneously from chaos.
Lucretius’ beautiful intellectual maneuvers are so agreeable to
our ear that historians often take the Atomists’ answers to these
questions as more ‘modern,’ ‘empirical’ or ‘scientific’ than those of
their contemporaries. This is a mistake. The Atomists were no less
rooted in the culture of their times than any of the other philosophical
‘schools’ of antiquity (which we’ll discuss in Chapter 4). Their
philosophy did not aim at what we may think of as scientific
knowledge, but was intended to provide metaphysical foundations
for the good life worthy of a free man. What makes the Atomists’
answer to Parmenides’ challenge particularly interesting is rather the
thoughtful compromise by which they handled the mystery of order
and change. Compromises like that are particularly telling to the
historian of science: they reveal what appeared to the historical
agents as crucial; what they were willing to dismiss and what they
wanted to maintain at all costs. One can see in Lucretius’ poem that
the Atomists were impressed by Parmenides’ arguments. But they
also had a strong conviction that experience should be explained,
not denied, and therefore could accept neither the Parmenidean
conclusions from these arguments, nor the Platonists’. They
approached this discrepancy by adopting Parmenides’ insights
concerning existence, while simply ignoring the arguments against
variety and motion. They could not explain how empty space, a no-
thing, can still exist, how it can be a thing, but since motion requires
this existence, they just accepted it. They could not explain how the
many can arise from the one, so they just accepted that the many –
which they interpreted as the many elementary particles of matter –
exist. And they could not explain how existence changes, so they
just assumed the incessant motion of these particles. Otherwise,
they tried to maintain the uniformity, eternity and unchanging nature
of existence in their atoms.
Atomist philosophy became an important source for the so-
called Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, and
Platonism, in its many guises, had an important following through the
ages. But the most influential answer to the dilemmas introduced by
Parmenides was different from both and was provided by Plato’s
prize student, Aristotle, for whom all philosophical positions had to
pass the scrutiny of open-eyed observation and common-sense
logical analysis.
Aristotle and the Science of Common Sense
 Aristotle’s Life and Times
Aristotle’s philosophy in general and his philosophy of nature in
particular were in fact so influential that the useful and respectable
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ironically called ‘Plato’:
https://plato.stanford.edu) has, as of mid-2020, fifteen entries dealing
directly with aspects of it, and over 800 (!) in which it is featured. His
philosophy, as we shall see, has become the foundation of the
university curriculum from its very inception and remained so into the
eighteenth century. Muslim intellectuals and astronomers brought it
to India and China, where it was integrated into indigenous thought.
Most of what we know about Greek philosophy before Socrates is
through Aristotle’s summaries, and in some fields – such as rhetoric
and poetics – his writings are still the starting point of any curriculum.
In other areas, such as logic, it is an essential ingredient. There is no
other thinker, apart from perhaps the founders of the great religions,
whose concepts and modes of thinking and argumentation have held
sway over such expanses of time and space, but just as we stressed
and shall continue to stress, this does not mean his thought was not
deeply rooted in the very specific culture in which it was conceived.
Like his mentor Plato, Aristotle’s life was shaped by the
tumultuous politics of the Aegean Peninsula of the fourth century
BCE. He was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, northern Greece, to a
physician father, and was almost certainly also educated as a
physician. The tradition was that medical skills were kept secret and
handed down from father to son, and biological and practical
interests are very clear in his writings. When both his parents died,
he was brought up by an uncle at the Court of Macedonia, and the
medical education was replaced by a more liberal teaching, worthy
of a nobleman: Greek, rhetoric and poetry. In 367 BCE, aged 17, he
became a student at Plato’s Academia – which by then had been
operating in Athens for some twenty years – during Plato’s first
political visit to Syracuse. One has to assume they met upon Plato’s
return and many times in the decades to follow, but there is no
record of these meetings.
The politics of the Academia, Athens and the Hellenic Realm
would play a major role in Aristotle’s life. He soon became a teacher
at the Academia and was to remain there for twenty years, towards
the end of which his political standing became tenuous. His
Macedonian patron, King Philip, was moving to conquer Greece, and
when his hometown of Stagira fell in 347 BCE at about the same
time as Plato’s death, Aristotle had to forsake his ambition of
becoming Plato’s successor as the head of Academia and leave
Athens. He spent the next twenty years as a court philosopher, first
in Assos (today Behram in Turkey) and then back in Macedonia,
where he became the center of a group of philosophers with serious
empirical interests in anatomy, zoology and biology. According to the
great first-century chronicler Plutarch, Philip hired him as a tutor to
his son, young Alexander, soon to be known as ‘the Great.’ It’s at
least as likely that Philip’s interest was the political influence he
could exert through Aristotle on the Academia, because in 340 BCE,
when Philip began preparing to take Athens by force, Aristotle was
forced to move again, returning to his home in Stagira, taking with
him his intellectual circle. When Alexander finally subdued Athens in
336 BCE, the Academia was allowed to carry on with its work, but a
year later Aristotle was sent to Athens to found a rival school – the
Lyceum – much broader in its interests and more empirically oriented
than the Academia. It is assumed that most of what we know as
Aristotle’s works are his students’ notes from his teachings there,
which were conducted while walking around – hence the nickname
peripatetics for the Aristotelians throughout history (from the Greek
περπατάειν peripatein – to walk up and down). After Alexander’s
death in 323 BCE, Aristotle had to leave yet again, retiring to a family
estate in Chalcis, where he died the following year at the age of 62.
 Aristotle vs. his Predecessors
Aristotle’s philosophy is as earthly and involved as his life was, and
so was his approach to Parmenides’ challenge. Like the Atomists, he
was not impressed by any denial of common experience: the
philosopher’s challenge is to clarify reality, not reject it; to explain
how it works, not argue that it’s just an illusion. But neither was
Aristotle persuaded by the Atomists’ account of the underlying
reality, and especially by their obsession with motion in empty space.
For the various Greek philosophical schools, ‘motion’ was
synonymous with change of all kinds – water on the stove, for
example, moved from cold to hot. But locomotion – motion from one
place to another – Aristotle argued, is much too limited a concept of
change with which to account for all the complexity of nature. Even
more generally, he could not accept that order could emerge from
disorder, or unity out of variety: it is absurd, he argued, to think that
plants and animals, houses and cities, could somehow come about
from the chaotic motion of uniform particles, as the Atomists would
have us believe.
Nor was Aristotle impressed with the solutions provided by his
great master, Plato. The concept of pure forms introduced, in his
view, more mysteries than it solved. It was completely unclear how
the ideal form relates to all its material embodiments – how The
Horse, allegedly existing eternally and unchanging in another realm,
relates to all the horses in the world. Furthermore, argued Aristotle,
Plato cannot explain how the forms relate to one another: is there an
ideal form of four-legged animals, a kind of super-form existing
independently of the forms of horses and sheep? And then a super-
super-form of an animal relating these forms to the forms of fishes
and fowl? There seemed to be no end to it – Plato was taking
similarities between real, worldly objects and treating them as if they
were objects themselves.2
Aristotle’s fundamental approach to the gap between reason
and experience that Parmenides’ and Zeno’s arguments introduced
was to submit philosophical argumentation to common sense. Truth
had to be found in the real objects or our world, rather than in some
ideal realm, and knowledge had to stand up to the scrutiny of
empirical evidence and the views of all people, or at least most, or at
least the wise. So Aristotle had no patience for Plato’s enthusiasm
for mathematics, in which he found an unhealthy and unhelpful
fascination with abstract idealization. For him, logic was the means
to knowledge, because it captured real relations between real
objects (the main logical tool was the syllogism, an example of which
is in Chapter 8). And in real objects, form and matter can be
distinguished, but not separated: we can consider the form of a
horse – being a horse rather than a mouse for example –
independently of its flesh and blood. But this doesn’t mean that this
‘horsiness’ exists someplace separate from the horse.
Plato and Aristotle represent fundamentally competing
conceptions of knowledge, and the difference between them is
reflected, in a nutshell, in what they have to say about truth. For
Plato, truth is a relation to the eternal and transcendental: “the soul is
like the eye,” he says in his Republic, “when resting upon that on
which truth and being shine, the soul perceives and understands and
is radiant with intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of
becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes
blinking about, and is first of one opinion and then of another, and
seems to have no intelligence”
(http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.7.vi.html). Aristotle has little
respect for such reveries: “To say that what is is not, or that what is
not is, is false,” he puts it in stubborn simplicity in his Metaphysics,
“but to say that what is is, and what is not is not, is true”
(www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?
doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0052%3Abook%3D4%3Asection
%3D1011b).
 Aristotle’s Alternative
Aristotle’s own answer to Parmenides’ challenge is shaped by this
unrelenting demand to steer away from over-speculation; “to say that
what is – is.” Nature is change, is the coming to be and passing
away of things around us. So for us to understand nature as we
know it, the is and the none, what exists and what does not exist,
cannot be kept so dramatically apart. There must be something
between them – and that is Aristotle’s great innovation: what almost-
exists, or potentially-exists. The oak (his favorite example) does not
fully exist until the acorn had sprouted, and the trunk grew, and the
branches are covered with leaves. But the oak also, in a sense,
already exists in the acorn – it exists in potentia. Given the
appropriate conditions, the acorn will develop into an oak. It is not
necessary that the acorn actually fully grows into an oak – a cow
might eat it or a fire might destroy it. But it is necessary that it will
never become a monkey or a maple tree. By its own powers (and
given the appropriate conditions) the acorn will become an oak and
nothing but an oak – this is what it means for the actual acorn to be a
potential oak.
For Aristotle, there is no dichotomy between order and change.
Potential can only be realized through change, and the realization of
potential – the acorn’s turning into an oak – is the paradigm of how
nature changes in an orderly way. Nature is orderly change, and the
task of the natural philosopher is to decipher this order.
 How then are order and change balanced? What changes and
what maintains orderliness and uniformity? Matter changes.
Obviously, the matter of the oak is not that of the acorn – there is
much more of it, and it’s different in hardness, color and so on. What
guarantees the orderliness of this change? Form does. It is the form
of the acorn in which the potentiality of the oak lies. Matter is
passive, uniform and changeable. It carries all the potentialities, but
has no distinguishing properties of its own. Form is active and
orderly: it bears the properties of the individual substance and guides
its change.
If this sounds like antique and arcane jargon, consider that we
still think of ourselves in a very similar way: most of the cells of our
bodies have a life span much shorter than ours (between a few days
and a few years – neurons and cardiomyocyte heart cells are the
long-living exception), so it’s fair to say that every seven to ten years
almost all the matter of our body has changed. But we don’t think of
ourselves as being someone else or something other than who and
what we were a few years ago. We think: ‘I am changing.’ It is the
order of this change, the development, the continuity that is ‘I.’
We may think of this underlying unity as our self, or our soul. For
Plato, we saw, this strict distinction between our changing body and
our unified, consistent soul meant that the soul was independent of
the body – it just resided in it, joined when it was born and departed
when it perished. Christianity was happy to adopt this idea that the
soul is immortal because it allowed it to solve the mystery of the
injustice of life on Earth: souls are getting properly rewarded or
punished after the death of their body, according to the way they
navigated it during its life. For Aristotle, this was a fundamental
mistake: that we can distinguish between matter and form – or body
and soul – does not mean that they can be separated. Were the
acorn to be eaten or burnt, both its matter and its form would be
extinguished, even if we can understand very well the difference
between them. When we die, both body and soul cease to exist.
There is no realm in which forms dwell independently of matter, and
matter has no existence if not shaped and determined by form.

Figure 2.7 Aristotle’s elements and the properties and oppositions

comprising them. Note that although the origins of this analysis
may have been common wisdom, the conclusions are not. For
example: perhaps because he reasons that heating water
produces air, Aristotle sets air to be wet and hot (like vapors),
which isn’t the way we usually experience wind and its effects.
 Aristotle’s World
Unlike Plato, then, Aristotle allows for only one world – the one we
dwell in. And unlike the Atomists’ world – which we to a large degree
adopted – Aristotle’s does not comprise moving bits of uniform
matter. Its fundamental components are substances: definite
individuals, like a person, a horse or an acorn. These individuals are
inseparable compounds of matter and form, but their essence – what
it is that they are: person, horse or acorn – is determined by their
form. There are no substances without matter, but without form –
amorphous – matter is not any particular thing; it’s not a substance.
Natural substances, like a person, horse, acorn or stone, have their
own essential nature. There are also other objects in the world, like
cups or desks, which are not natural but artificial – produced by art,
their form is a reflection of the artisan’s soul.
The nature of a substance is the sum of its properties and is
determined primarily by its form and secondarily by the matter
comprising it. This essential nature disposes every object to certain
kinds of behavior – its ‘natural’ behavior. Thus fire naturally
communicates warmth, rocks naturally fall, acorns naturally develop
into oak trees and babies naturally grow into persons. If in our
(‘modern’) world objects are ruled externally, by laws that pertain to
all objects everywhere, in Aristotle’s they are ruled from within, by
their own natures. To know this world, therefore, is not only to know
its overall regularities – which are studied mostly by abstract logic. It
is also, and even more so, to know the particularities of substances,
their essential natures and the behavior that follows from these
natures, and how it differs from that of other substances.
Aristotle’s world, then, is populated by substances, not ‘things.’
Its most fundamental elements are not simply material, but a
combination of fundamental qualities (Figure 2.7). These
fundamental qualities are ordered according to basic oppositions:
warm vs. cold; wet vs. dry. Warmth and coldness are active: heat
diffuses and separates; coldness draws things together. Wetness
and dryness are passive: the wet receives impressions; the dry
preserves them. The material elements of the world (of which all
material things are composed) are combinations of these qualities:
cold and dry is earth; cold and wet – water; warm and wet – air; and
warm and dry – fire. Change the qualities, and the elements
transform from one to another: heat up water, and it becomes air
(such is vapor); cool water down and it becomes earth (ice); heat
earth up and it becomes fire. Aristotle seems to have simply picked
the elements from common Greek lore (in Chapter 6 you’ll find a
poetic version of their transformations from the Platonic tradition),
but one can see how they stand for the fundamental aspects of our
daily experience: solidity and fluidity; heat and mobility. Experience
also tells us that left to their own powers – following their own nature
– earth and water will move downwards, and air and fire upwards.
Earth will sink in water and fire will ascend through air, so we can
infer what their natural places are: earth – at the center of the world;
water – surrounding it; next – air; and at the periphery, furthest from
the center, fire.
 The Cosmos
The elements, it must be stressed, are not barren, uniform matter,
like the atoms of Epicurus and Lucretius. They are expressions of
primary principles and have distinguishing properties and active
forms. So Aristotle’s world is also not a uniform, empty space full of
uniform, moving matter. It is an ordered whole, where every
substance has its own proper place: a cosmos (Figure 1.12).
Since it has a clear center and a clear periphery, Aristotle’s
cosmos is necessarily limited in size – there are no places in infinite
space. In fact, it was expected to be rather compact (more on that
later). But it is not limited in time: it has neither beginning nor end. To
the cosmos as a whole Aristotle applies Parmenides’ insight about
existence: nothing can come into existence out of non-existence, nor
vice versa. There is no sense in asking ‘what was before (or will be
after) the cosmos,’ nor ‘what is outside it.’ The cosmos is all there is.
And within Aristotle’s cosmos things do change – they move.
Motion is not simply what happens – it defines happening: time just
is the measure of motion, and space comprises the places to and
from which things are moving. Still, motion is change, so it requires a
cause. This is a fundamental metaphysical principle for Aristotle and
throughout history: every change requires a cause. This cause can
be of two different sorts: substances can change according to their
essential nature – a change directed by their own form – or they can
change because of some external cause. In the case of motion,
when a substance moves towards its proper place, the cause of its
motion is its own nature, so the motion is natural. A stone, for
example, is a piece of earth, so its proper place is at the center of
the cosmos, and falling downwards is therefore its natural motion (it
is clear to Aristotle that on the other side of Earth stones fall towards
the same center). When something forces a substance away from its
proper place – like a hand throwing the stone up – this is forced or
violent motion.
Further, the intensity of change depends on the power of its
cause. In the case of motion this means that the speed of a moving
body is proportional to the force moving it, whether this force is
natural – like the weight driving the stone down – or violent, like the
force delivered by the hand. The heavier the body, the faster the fall;
the stronger the arm, the faster the flight. A change is also affected
by contrary causes, so the speed of the moving body is inversely
proportional to the resistance that the medium offers to its motion:
we have all witnessed a falling stone slowing down as it passes from
the rare air to the denser water.
This combination of common-sense metaphysics and basic
empirical knowledge – a fundamental trust in human reason and the
human senses – is the hallmark of Aristotle’s natural philosophy and
what made Aristotelianism such an attractive intellectual framework
for so many thinkers for so long. But this down-to-earth approach
does not limit Aristotle to trivial conclusions – quite the opposite. His
considerations of resistance, for example, allow him to argue that the
Atomists’ assumption – namely, that all motion requires empty space
– is fundamentally wrong. In empty space, explains Aristotle, there is
no resistance, and since speed is inversely proportional to resistance
(in modern notation we can write it like this: V ∝ F/R), zero
resistance means infinite speed (V ∝ F/0 ∝ ∞). But infinite speed is
impossible: a body moving infinitely fast is in more than one place at
the same time, which is absurd. This means not only that motion
does not require empty space – as the Atomists thought – it actually
necessitates a medium: bodies have to move through something, not
nothing.
Behind this nifty argument hides a very fundamental assumption
about motion, an assumption that had a crucial effect on the
philosophy of nature for two millennia. The assumption is that motion
cannot be understood on its own; it is what happens to a body when
it changes its place. So motion makes no sense without a place from
which and a place to which the body moves. But in empty space
there are no places, so motion in empty space makes no sense. The
cosmos is full.
The part of the cosmos we dwell in is full of the four elements,
whose proper places, we saw, are ordered in enveloping spheres:
earth at the center, water around it, above it air and then fire. This is
what it means for earth and water to be heavy and air and fire to be
light, not just in comparison and in relation to one another, but in and
of themselves. Earth and water belong in the center and their natural
motion is down; air and fire belong in the periphery and their natural
motion is up. But rarely do we come across the elements in their
proper places; the incessant circular motion of the heavens mixes
them up. Thus a piece of coal is heavy, so we can infer that it’s made
mostly of earth; but it will catch flame when heated, so it comprises
also some fire; and fire being light, this flame will rise. The realm of
the elements reaches up to the Moon, but above it is a completely
different realm – the heavens – operating according to fundamentally
different laws.
Even though we cannot observe the heavens from close range,
Aristotle’s considerations remain based on this combination of
empirical and philosophical common sense. It is befitting of the noble
bodies of the upper realm to be at rest, to not change, but we know
that they do move. We don’t see them move (their motions are too
slow to observe), but we do see the heavenly bodies at different
places at different times. Yet we also know that they always follow
the same path and return to the same place, and as far as human
recollection and records go, these have always been the same paths
and same places. Metaphysical and empirical considerations lead to
the same conclusion: that the motion of the celestial bodies is as
close to rest as any motion can be – a motion within place, rather
than from one place to another. A body can only move without
changing its place if it moves in a circle, and the circle – equal in all
dimensions, hence the most perfect of shapes – is indeed proper of
the celestial motions. This circular motion has to have the Earth as
its center, or it would approach and retreat from us, and no longer be
within its place. It also must be of uniform (circular) velocity, because
if it slowed down it would finally come to a halt, and if it accelerated,
it would end up moving at infinite speed. Time, you remember, is
unbound.
The natural motions of the celestial bodies are circular, different
from the linear motions of the terrestrial substances, and their proper
places are different. They must, therefore, be made of a something
different from the four terrestrial elements – the fifth essence, the
quintessence, as it would be called in the Middle Ages, or the aether,
to adopt Plato’s term (which Aristotle didn’t actually use). The aether,
unlike the terrestrial elements, isn’t composed of oppositions, so it
doesn’t possess their penchant for transformation: it is unchanging,
and is so subtle that it offers no resistance that could slow down the
celestial motions. Here is one of the places where the power mill of
Aristotelian thought seems to grind to somewhat of a halt: it is not
completely clear how to reconcile the insights about motion and
medium with the supposed eternity of the celestial motions. Thinkers
in Europe and the Middle East would spend much of their intellectual
energy for many centuries throughout the Middle Ages and into early
modern times on problems like this.
 Natural Philosophy and the Causes of Change
The celestial realm in the Aristotelian cosmos is thus as different as
can be from the terrestrial one. Whereas under the boundary marked
by the Moon’s orbit all bodies are made of the four elements, above
it they are made of a fifth; whereas on Earth bodies move in straight
lines, in the heavens they move in circles; and in general, whereas in
the realm of the elements everything is coming to being and passing
away, in the heavenly realm all is eternal and unchanging. This
sounds like Plato’s distinction between the world of matter and the
world of pure forms, and the Christian thinkers of the age of the
cathedral indeed dedicated much effort to assimilating these two
pagan philosophies together with their own monotheism, reading the
Christian relations between the Creator and His creation into these
distinctions between the eternal and the changing. But for our
interests in the origins of science, it is important to pay attention to
the deep difference between Aristotle and his great master. For
Aristotle, even though the rules operating above and below the Moon
are so different, both realms are parts of the same cosmos, and
need to be studied by the same methods. Aristotle’s cosmos, with its
upper and lower realms, comprises substances and essences,
connected to one another in causal relations, which the philosopher
should decipher: ‘to say of what is that it is.’
The Aristotelian natural philosopher, from Antiquity through the
Middle Ages, is therefore particularly interested in causes, because
nature is change, and change, as we said, requires cause. The
philosopher’s task is to find the order in this change; to find the
regular causes of motion: why it is that the Sun moves around the
Earth, that the tiger moves towards its prey or that the acorn moves
to become an oak? It is also part of his task to reveal the causes of
strange phenomena, which seemingly break these regularities: why,
for example, does wood, made mostly of earth, float on water?
When we think about a cause of one event, we think about the
immediate event which preceded it: the window broke because it
was hit by the stone; we know this because when the stone hit the
window, the window changed from a flat surface to a pile of shards.
Aristotle would call the stone the efficient cause of the breaking –
“the primary source of the change or rest” – but his concept of cause
is much richer than that. To fully understand why the window was
broken, we of course need to understand that it is made of glass. For
him, this is part of the cause – the material cause – “that out of which
a thing comes to be” (all quotes here and below from Aristotle,
Physics, in Jonathan Barnes (ed.), Complete Works (Aristotle)
(Princeton University Press, 1991)).
Matter in Aristotle’s philosophy, we said, is what is subject to
change, and the order, direction and end of the change is
determined by the form. So to know why the encounter between the
stone and the window ended up in a pile of shards, it is not enough
to know that it’s made of glass. We also need to know the form, or
the essence of the window. This is the formal cause, “what it is to
be.” It makes sense: if the glass was in a different form – say of
fibers – it wouldn’t have been broken. Finally, Aristotle requires that
we understand the reason for the change – “that for the sake of
which” what happened, happened. Why did the stone hit the window
pane? For what purpose? This is the final cause, which represents a
very fundamental assumption in Aristotle’s natural philosophy: things
in the world happen for a reason. They don’t only happen because
something else happened before, but also in order for something to
happen later. The final cause, then, is the most revealing of the four.
Aristotle knew of neither glass windows nor fiberglass, but the
fact that his reasoning can so smoothly be applied to them may
elucidate the enchantment it held on scholars for so long. This is
especially true regarding the four causes, or four aspects of
causality. From Aristotle’s point of view, his predecessors were
wrong in limiting their attention to only one of the causes: the
Atomists to the material; Plato to the formal. We moderns, he’d have
said, are too hung up on efficient causes.
In fact, our window example would have probably sounded to
Aristotle rather uninteresting exactly for that reason. We, perhaps
like the Atomists, think that in order to understand nature we need to
concentrate on its simplest events. Aristotle, on the other hand,
insisted that the cosmos needs to be understood in all its rich
complexity. This is why he mostly disapproved of mathematics within
natural philosophy: mathematics requires and provides abstractions
and idealizations. Aristotle was interested in causal explanations, not
mere calculations, so his natural philosophy is qualitative. He would
also not pick up simple collisions as examples for these four layers
of a complete account of a natural phenomenon. He may invite us to
look at the acorn changing into an oak: the material cause of the
change is the matter of the acorn, of course; the efficient cause
perhaps the water and the warmth of the soil. The formal cause is
the form of the oak which the acorn embeds, and the final cause –
the oak. The acorn changes in order for the oak to come into being.
The oak is the telos of the acorn – its end and goal – just as the
center of the Earth is the telos of the stone’s natural motion:
Aristotelian natural philosophy is teleological.
This causal, qualitative, teleological analysis is a powerful tool.
Consider, as another example, the generation of a man: the matter is
the mother’s womb and the efficient cause is the copulation. The
formal and final cause seem to be merging here: it is the adult man
who is both the origin of the process and its end. Aristotle even
applies this mode of analysis to artifacts – things brought into being
by the human hand. The material cause of the statue, his favorite
example, is bronze; the efficient cause is the art in the artisan’s
hands and tools; the formal cause is the shape of Artemis or Apollo;
and the final – the completed statue. Again, one might say that the
final cause is the most explanatory of them all: one cannot
understand any of the other three without considering their telos: the
statue to be.
 Conclusion
In the seventeenth century, when the New Science was defining
itself in opposition to the Aristotelianism of the medieval universities,
the idea of a final cause became a focus of ridicule. We have
inherited this attitude, and probably think it’s strange to claim, like
Aristotle, that “nature belongs to the class of causes which act for the
sake of something.” But how else do we answer Aristotle’s question
on why it is that “our front teeth [are] sharp, fitted for tearing, the
molars broad and useful for grinding,” if not by saying ‘in order that
we can properly digest our food?’ Some readers may suggest that
we do know how to explain the usefulness of teeth without
supposing they are made for purpose: they developed by a series of
accidents, at each stage those whose teeth were better survived
longer and produced more offspring. But Aristotle, who’s aware that
the assumption of final causes is problematic, is also familiar with
this line of thought. He’s simply not convinced by it:

A difficulty presents itself: why should not nature work, not for
the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as
the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of
necessity? … Why then should it not be the same with the parts
in nature, e.g. that our teeth should come up of necessity-the
front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful
for grinding down the food-since they did not arise for this end,
but it was merely a coincident result; and so with all other parts
 in which we suppose that there is purpose? … [and then] such
things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way;
whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to
perish, as Empedocles says his ‘man-faced ox-progeny’ did.
Aristotle, Physics, Book II, ch. 8

Empedocles lived a century earlier in Sicily and his work was an

important resource for Aristotle. He credits him with the doctrine of
the four elements, and one may find clear roots of Aristotle’s
approach to natural philosophy in the fragments we have from
Empedocles’ poem On Nature. So Aristotle gives careful attention to
the argument Empedocles suggested: that legendary creatures, like
the half-ox-half-man and other marvels and monstrosities of Greek
mythology, do not exist because they can’t survive. Empedocles was
offering a way to understand how things in the world fit their use
without assuming final causes. The reason all creatures are orderly
is because only orderly creatures survived – only those whose teeth
allow handling food properly; there’s no need to assume that the
cause of the way teeth are is the way they should be. We think this
an excellent argument – it is the basis of the theory of evolution.
Aristotle doesn’t. He agrees that “Such … arguments (and others of
the kind) … may cause difficulty on this point,” but insists that “yet it
is impossible that this should be the true view.” He doesn’t seem to
have a good argument why. At the end of the day, as we said
concerning his view of the Atomists, Aristotle simply can’t accept that
order can arise from chaos, just by chance: “For teeth and all other
natural things … normally come about in a given way; but of not one
of the results of chance or spontaneity is this true.” Things that come
up the same way again and again don’t do so by coincidence,
Aristotle insists. Even if the survival argument can explain why
disorderly things perish, it cannot explain why orderly things keep
reproducing themselves regularly:3

We do not ascribe to chance or mere coincidence the frequency

of rain in winter, but frequent rain in summer we do; nor heat in
the dog-days, but only if we have it in winter. If then, it is agreed
that things are either the result of coincidence or for an end, and
these cannot be the result of coincidence or spontaneity, it
follows that they must be for an end.
Aristotle, Physics, Book II, ch. 8

It was important for us to look a little more closely at Aristotle’s

writing, to get a glimpse of the tantalizing breadth, thoroughness and
explanatory power that made him so influential for so long. The force
of his arguments often seems to come across even – or perhaps
especially – when the positions they support are no longer what we
are taught by our science. We mentioned that the New Science of
the seventeenth century defined itself in opposition to Aristotelian
natural philosophy. But as we will see in Chapter 10, even its
greatest hero – Isaac Newton – could not to shake off the stubborn
common-sense and direct empiricism that gave this philosophy its
power and also marked its boundaries.
 Discussion Questions
1. Which ancient Greek assumptions can we still find within our
ideas about knowledge? Where do we clearly differ? What’s the
significance of these ‘archeological remains’ of one culture in
another?

2. Does the idea of the mathematical structure of the universe make

sense? If so – what does it say about the material world around us?
If not – how can one explain the inevitability and great success of
mathematics in our knowledge of this world?

3. Do Parmenides’ dilemma and Zeno’s paradoxes seem daunting?

If not, what has changed in our thought to take their edge away?

4. Can you conceive of mathematics without proofs? What would be

lost? Can anything be gained?

5. Do the biographies of Plato and Aristotle make a difference in

understanding their respective philosophies?
Suggested Readings
 Primary Texts

Plato, Meno, 81–86, in: Plato, Complete Works, John M. Cooper and
D. S. Hutchinson (eds.) (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1997), pp. 880–887
(also: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html).

Plato, Timaeus, 27–40, in: Plato, Complete Works, John M. Cooper

and D. S. Hutchinson (eds.) (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1997), pp. 1234–
1244 (also: http://classics.mit.edu//Plato/timaeus.html).

Aristotle, On the Heavens, Book I. 8, in: Aristotle, On the Heavens,

W. K. C. Guthrie (trans.) (Harvard University Press, 1939), pp. 68–81
(also: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.1.i.html).

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book II, On Atomic Motions

(http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.2.ii.html).
 Secondary Sources

On classical Greek science:

Lloyd, G. E. R., Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle (London:

Chatto & Windus, 1970).

On Greek culture and its epistemology:

Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd edn. (University of

Chicago Press, 1958).

On Parmenides and his import in Greek philosophy:

Palmer, John, Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy (Oxford

University Press, 2009).

On Plato’s life and work:

Friedlander, Paul, Plato: An Introduction, Hans Meyerhoff (trans.)

(Princeton University Press, 2015 [1970]).

On Plato’s metaphysics and cosmology in the Timaeus:

Broadie, Sarah, Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge

University Press, 2011).

On Aristotle’s thought in biographical context:

Natali, Carlo, Aristotle: His Life and School. D. S. Hutchinson (ed.)

(Princeton University Press, 2013).
 On Aristotle’s epistemology, philosophy of nature and their
relations:

Falcon, Andrea, Aristotle and the Science of Nature: Unity without

Uniformity (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

1 I owe the first part of this analysis to my late, venerable teacher

Amos Funkenstein, may he rest in peace, and the last part to my
former tutor and PhD student Kiran Krishna.

2 ‘Reifying’ is the philosophical term.

3 It’s worth noting that Charles Darwin, from whom we learned the
idea of the survival of the fittest, also couldn’t explain how it is that
the same set of teeth keeps appearing in the same species
generation after generation.
 3
The Birth of Astronomy
◈
 Looking Up
Disregard, for a moment, all you have been taught and consider the
following question, relying only on what you have actually observed:
when you look up at the sky, what do you see? The answer is not as
straightforward as one might expect.
You may start by answering: ‘it depends.’ During the day, we
see the Sun. During the night, we see the stars. Most of us live in
cities, so we don’t see many of them, but it only takes a short ride
out of town and a bright, moonless night to observe the sky as the
ancients did: full of literally countless stars. The Moon is a bit of a
mystery: although it usually appears during the night, we have all, on
occasion, seen it by day. We probably wouldn’t be assuming too
much if we said that both the day and the night skies are perched
above us like a dome (Figure 3.1 shows what this dome looked like
above Jerusalem the day Titus burnt the Temple). It really looks this
way, meeting the horizon at what seems like a segment of a great
circle.
 Figure 3.1 The sky dome, as it would have looked above
Jerusalem on August 3, 70 C E , the day the Jewish Temple was set
on fire by the Roman legions, quashing the Jewish rebellion. You
will find other dates in the literature: the Jewish tradition
commemorates the day as Nine of Av – the ninth month of the
lunar calendar. For reasons to be clarified in this chapter and
Chapter 7, synchronizing these calendars isn’t trivial.

What else can we say? Most of us – not much. Some of us –

sailors or navigators by hobby or by trade – can recognize the stars
and the constellations (Figure 3.9). And what do the bodies in the
sky – the Sun, Moon and stars – do? We all know that the Sun
moves: it rises in the east and moves to the west, where it sets – that
is, disappears under the horizon – and if we are in the Northern
Hemisphere (where the heroes of the following story resided), this
journey goes through the south.1 The Moon obviously moves as
well; though none but the true expert can tell where it will show up.
With a little observation over a night one may notice that the stars
also move, in the same direction as the Sun, and some of them also
rise and set. But it is crucial to stress that we don’t really see any of
these heavenly bodies in motion – we infer that they move because
we see them in different positions at different times.
It seems obvious (though we’ll see that it isn’t) that the rising
and setting of the Sun is what determines day and night. Considering
it a little further, we may recall that the Sun’s daily motion is not
completely regular. It always travels in the same direction, but it
doesn’t always take the same time. The days get longer and shorter
with the seasons, and the Sun’s trajectory also changes. In the
summer it’s higher in the sky, and the days are longer; in the winter,
the other way around. The keener observers among us may notice
that both kinds of change are caused by the changing position of the
rising and setting Sun. In the Northern Hemisphere, the farther up
north it is on the horizon at dawn, the longer its trajectory, the higher
its ascent in the sky, and the longer the day (Figure 3.2). This is
inverted in the Southern Hemisphere – the farther south the Sun is
on the horizon at dawn, the higher its ascent and the longer the day.
 Figure 3.2 The Appearances (Northern Hemisphere). The Sun
rises in the east, travels through the south and sets in the west. In
the winter, it rises at a more southern point on the horizon,
reaches a lower point and spends fewer hours above it; in the
summer – vice versa. The stars always rise and fall in the same
place. Some of them – the circumpolar stars – rotate around the
North Star and never fall under the horizon.

There are a couple of lessons to be learnt from this short

exercise. The first is how little every one of us knows personally.
Modern science, as a whole, produces knowledge whose depth and
quantity would have been hardly imaginable to our ancestors. But
this doesn’t mean that each one of us knows more than an ancient
sailor or a medieval peasant did. The opposite is more likely to be
true. Knowing how to tell times and directions by looking at the sky
was, for them, a matter of personal survival, so they had to make a
point of learning it. It is exactly thanks to the great success of
science that we have been relieved of this need, but at this very
price: that we, personally, do not know. We have delegated much of
our knowledge to other people – and to objects.
Another lesson is how surprisingly unyielding all these details
are. Although we are submerged in these motions, they only present
a very rudimentary order to our immediate experience. Nature does
not speak to us. Not only do the mechanisms behind the phenomena
remain hidden, the phenomena themselves are hidden behind our
experiences, and the experiences are confusing and do not seem in
and of themselves interesting or significant. It takes concentrated,
organized observation to find enough order in these experiences to
turn them into phenomena that we can attempt to systematize and
understand. And it takes some basic assumptions – an image, a
storyline, a hypothesis about how these endless details relate to one
another – for us to recognize any pattern about which questions can
be asked.
Making the Phenomena
 The Two Spheres Model
Astronomy begins, then, not with innocent star gazing, but with the
introduction of a basic model to guide observation. For the
astronomers of ancient Mesopotamia and the Aegean region, that
model was of two spheres: the image of our Earth, a sphere, nestled
inside the bigger sphere of the heavens. The heavens and Earth
share the same center, and the heavens – the celestial sphere –
rotate around this center from east to west, carrying the Sun and the
stars (Figure 3.3). When this rotation takes the Sun above the
horizon, it’s daytime; when below – it’s night time (Figure 3.4).
Figure 3.3 The Two Spheres model. The big sphere rotates as a
whole around the smaller sphere which is Earth. The big sphere
carries the Sun, the other planets and the stars in their
constellations. It rotates from east to west, around an axis that
extends north to south, and whose northern pole always points at
one star – the North Star, or Polaris.
Figure 3.4 The celestial motions according to the two spheres
model. The celestial – outer – sphere rotates around the axis from
east to west, represented by the clockwise arrows at the top and
bottom. One such rotation is a day. For the observer on Earth –
the inner sphere – it’s daytime when the Sun, carried by the
celestial sphere, appears above their horizon, represented by the
thin bright line. The other stars also rotate with the celestial
sphere, although their appearance above the horizon is not as
dramatic and conspicuous as the Sun’s. The Sun also travels on
the ecliptic, represented by the bright band on the celestial sphere,
from west to east, represented by the anti-clockwise arrows. It
completes a full trip from one point on the ecliptic to the same
point in a little more than 365 rotations of the celestial sphere
around Earth. One such trip is a year. The length of daytime
depends on the place of the observer, which determines their
horizon, and the place of the Sun on the ecliptic. For example,
when the Sun is in the summer solstice, it travels during one full
 day along the top dotted line, and spends more time above the
horizon than below it. When in the winter solstice, it travels along
the bottom dotted line and spends more time under the horizon.
When the Sun is at one of the equinoxes, it travels with the
celestial equator, which is a projection of the terrestrial equator on
the celestial sphere, so it spends as much time above the horizon
as under it. The other planets, not represented in this diagram,
also travel on the ecliptic, though at slightly different angles, which
is why the ecliptic is a band rather than a line. Each planet has its
own pace and its own year.

This is not an obvious idea. The sky may look like a dome and
the horizon does look circular, but otherwise nature does not declare
its shape anymore than its motions. Egyptian cosmology describes a
world that is by no means spherical and the author of Genesis
doesn’t seem committed to any particular shape for the firmament
that God placed between the waters above and below. In Homer’s
epics and Hesiod’s mythology of the eighth to seventh centuries
BCE, the heaven is apparently a sphere – it’s not completely clear,
but Hades, the realm of the dead, is below and supposedly as deep
as the Heavens above are high – yet Earth is a circular disc. Similar
considerations of symmetry led some of the philosophers of the next
three centuries (the so-called ‘pre-Socratics’) to argue for a spherical
heaven, but many kept the Earth flat. Aristotle actually explains why
the combination of a spherical (or hemispherical) heaven and a flat
Earth is appealing yet wrong: the celestial horizon appears to be just
a continuation of the terrestrial one, and because the celestial
horizon is so far away, the curvature of the Earth becomes
negligible. So it seems like we’re on a flat surface, with a perfect
hemisphere above us, he continues, but in fact the terrestrial horizon
is very different from the celestial one. It’s determined by the Earth’s
curvature and how high we are, and is rather close by (in modern
terms: about 5 kilometers standing at sea level, and about 20
kilometers on a hill 100 meters high). Even those who considered
Earth spherical didn’t necessarily think of the Sun as completing a
circular orbit around it. The idea that it might be spending the night
under the Earth didn’t occur to them all, and when it did, it seemed to
go against common experience. Springs, for example, come from
below ground, but they are colder early in the morning, so they
couldn’t have been warmed from below by the Sun during the night.
The Pythagorean fascination with the power of geometry and
the Parmenidean arguments about the necessary oneness and
perfection of being seem to have gradually outweighed these
empirical considerations. Through the fifth century BCE, the two-
sphere model became the favorite of Greek philosophers of nature,
and both Plato and Aristotle provided elaborated versions of it. Plato,
as one might expect, supports the notion that the Earth is spherical
with abstract metaphysical arguments. Aristotle, as is his wont, adds
to his cosmological analysis two arguments from observation as to
why it should be spherical.The first is that “the horizon always
changes with a change in our position, which proves that the Earth is
convex and spherical” (Aristotle, Meteorology, II.7,
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/meteorology.2.ii.html). Observed from
different places, the same stars set (and rise) at different times and
rise to different heights in the sky. This is most evident with the Sun:
the same day is longer or shorter the farther north or south one
travels. Were we residing on a flat surface, we would all have one
horizon; the stars would rise and set at the same time and climb to
the same angle above the horizon. This means that we have a dome
not only above our heads, but also under our feet. Aristotle’s other
argument is that “in eclipses, the outline [of the shadow on the Moon]
is always curved: and, since it is the interposition of the earth that
makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of
the earth’s surface, which is therefore spherical” (Aristotle, On the
Heavens, II.14, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html).
Aristotle unmistakably has the two-sphere image clearly ingrained in
his mind: the world is a sphere; the Sun is the source of light and is
also lighting the Moon; an eclipse is the shadow of the Earth on the
Moon – so since its shadow is circular, Earth is a sphere.
Aristotle’s considerations demonstrate that even in this
rudimentary form the two-sphere model already assumes at least
two crucial insights about the cosmos, neither of them trivial: that the
Sun and the stars move together as one rotating spherical whole;
and that the Sun produces daytime, the light of day being nothing but
sunlight. These insights are far from obvious. Consider, by way of
comparison, the monotheistic tradition: according to Genesis, you
may recall, God created light, and designated it ‘day,’ on the first day
of creation. He only created the sky2 on the third day, and only on
the fourth day did he create the heavenly bodies, anointing the Sun
to rule the day and the Moon and stars – the night. All heavenly
bodies were created “to give light upon the Earth,” and the Sun’s
light isn’t unique – it isn’t the cause of the day. For the writer of
Genesis, day and night are different entities, different creations – not
astronomical phenomena.
It is with the two-sphere model that the confusingly changing
positions of the bodies we see in the sky become the heavenly
motions that concern the astronomer. The model itself tells us
nothing about the causes of these motions. The Babylonians, for
example, left no visual or verbal account of this model. They gave no
evidence that they were interested in heavenly causes or expected
their astronomy – their mathematical theory of heavenly motions – to
fit their cosmology – their general understanding of the making of the
cosmos. Their tables of planetary positions (about the planets
momentarily), an exemplary achievement of observational
astronomy to be discussed later, are patently free of theory. But even
in these strictly empirical tables the two-sphere model is embedded.
One can hardly understand them without the categories introduced
by the model (and which we will discuss below): ecliptic, equinoxes,
solstices, oppositions, and so on.
 How It Works
With the two-sphere model, the appearances become astronomical
phenomena. Let’s reiterate and expand (Figure 3.4).
The celestial sphere – the heavens – rolls from east to west at a
regular pace. The axis of this rotation goes through the Earth (the
yellow dotted line), from the North Pole to the South Pole, and the
largest plane perpendicular to this axis cuts Earth at its equator and
the celestial sphere at the celestial equator (the red circles). The axis
points always in the same direction.3 In the Northern Hemisphere it
points at a particular star: the North Star or Polaris, which is not a
very bright star, but usually visible, so very useful for navigation. In
the Southern Hemisphere, it points (almost) at Sigma Octantis,
which is not nearly as visible, and hence not as useful. One full
rotation of the heavens around Earth we call a day. 4
The Sun and the stars rotate around Earth with the celestial
sphere. Because the axis of this circular rotation is not above our
heads (unless we’re stationed at one of the poles), the Sun spends
some of its orbit under the horizon – night – and some over it – day
(the yellow circles). The length of the day depends on the angle
between our horizon and the axis of rotation; that is, it depends on
our latitude – our position on the Earth relative to the equator and the
poles. The same is true for the stars: carried by the celestial sphere,
they rise above the horizon in the east, travel in the same direction
as the Sun (through the south in the Northern Hemisphere and
through the north in the Southern Hemisphere) and disappear under
the horizon towards the west. Stars which are close to the North Star
(or to Sigma Octantis in the Southern Hemisphere) – whose angular
distance from the celestial pole is smaller than the pole’s angular
distance from the equator – rotate in the same direction, but always
remain above the horizon. These are the Circumpolar stars (on the
right in Figure 3.2). Conversely, we can assume that there are stars
we never see, because they always remain under the horizon.
This is what happens daily – the diurnal motion. What about the
seasons? And the shorter and longer days? Here the two-sphere
model allows an even more interesting understanding.
The length of the day changes because the Sun changes where
it rises and sets. We can think of this change as the Sun shuffling
back and forth within a small segment of the horizon – moving north
in the Northern Hemisphere as the summer comes and south with
the winter (and the inverse in the Southern Hemisphere) – making its
path get longer and shorter accordingly, as in Figure 3.2. But if we
think of the whole celestial sphere as rotating around us from east to
west with the Sun on it, we can think of the Sun, instead of
oscillating, as moving regularly, in a constant direction, on the
rotating heavens. In other words: the Sun, according to the two-
sphere model, has two motions: one with the celestial sphere (east
to west), and one on it (west to east).
In a little more detail: the two-sphere model explains the
changes in the length of the day by having the Sun travel east along
a big circle that is at an angle (which turns out to be 23½°) to the
celestial equator (Figure 3.4). The Sun’s journey through the
heavens is much slower than the Sun’s journey with the heavens.
This means that every time the daily rotation of the celestial sphere
carries the Sun above the horizon, the Sun is at a different position
on the sphere. So every day the Sun rises at a slightly different point
on the horizon and travels at a slightly different trajectory. It takes the
Sun a little more than 365 astronomical days – 365 revolutions of the
heavens around Earth – to complete one circling of the heavens.
This is what we call ‘a year,’ or in more pedantic astronomical terms
– ‘a solar year.’
The Sun’s annual path in the heavens – the circle it draws on
the celestial sphere – is the ecliptic. When the Sun is at one of the
two points where the ecliptic crosses the celestial equator, it spends
as much time above the horizon as under it, making the day and
night of equal length; Figure 3.4 shows why. This is the vernal
(spring) or autumnal equinox. When the Sun is at the northernmost
point of this path – the furthest from the equinoxes to the north –
then in the Northern Hemisphere it spends the longest time above
the horizon and the day is the longest. This is the summer solstice.
The southernmost point is the winter solstice with the shortest day.
When the Sun is under the horizon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s
above the horizon in the Southern Hemisphere, so the solstices are
exactly reversed. Our horizon, we have noted, changes according to
our latitude – how far north or south we are from the equator – and
the two-sphere model now explains why. So how far on the horizon
the Sun will get from solstice to solstice, how high in the sky it will
get on each day, and how long the day will be all depend on our
latitude. On the equator, the angle between the point on the horizon
in which the Sun will rise on the solstice and the point it will rise on
the equinox is the angle between the celestial equator and the
ecliptic – those 23½°. On the equator the Sun’s daily path is always
perpendicular to the horizon. The two-sphere model explains that
this is because the equator is perpendicular to the axis on which the
celestial sphere rotates, so the day is always the same length as the
night. On the poles, the Sun rises once a year, on the vernal
equinox. It spirals up to 23½° above the horizon then spirals back
down, disappearing under the horizon on the autumnal equinox, not
to reappear until the next vernal equinox.
As fundamental and pre-theoretical as the model is, it already
allows crucial insights and discoveries. Here is a particularly
important one: almost all the stars are fixed – they remain in the
same place in the heavens relative to one another, rising and falling
at the same spot on the horizon. But it turns out that the Sun is not
alone in its journey through the great celestial sphere. With it are a
few other heavenly bodies, which also change their position among
the fixed stars, rising and setting at different points along the horizon.
These have come to be called planets; ‘wanderers,’ πλανήτης, in
Greek. Unlike the fixed stars, these wanderers don’t twinkle, which,
according to Aristotle, is a sign that they are closer. More importantly,
although each planet travels at its own pace (each takes a different
period to complete a whole revolution, meaning that each has its
own year), all planets share a path and direction with the Sun,
travelling along a narrow band within a few degrees of the ecliptic.
When divided into parts which are given astrological significance,
this band becomes the Zodiac (Figure 3.5), which we’ll discuss in
some detail in the chapter on magic (Chapter 6).
Figure 3.5 The Zodiac. A segment of a mosaic tiling the prayer
hall of a sixth-century (Byzantine period) synagogue near Beit
Alpha, Israel, with Hebrew names for the signs. In a way that
nicely illustrates the different facets of knowledge discussed in
previous chapters, the mosaic is inscribed with two dedications
near the entrance. One, in Aramaic, attends to the political,
cultural and financial side: it dates the mosaic to the reign of
Emperor Justin, and states that it was paid for by donations from
members of the community. The other, in Greek, attends to the
know-how. It reads: “May the craftsmen who carried out this work,
Marianos and his son Hanina, be held in remembrance.”
Making Time
 The Astronomer’s Role
As we realized earlier with our stargazing exercise, these concepts
are not easy to come by. Even in this very rudimentary form,
knowledge of the heavenly motions already demands acute and
concentrated observation; a model that requires mastering; and
considerable leisure. Why should anyone invest this labor and
expertise? What can be gained from studying the sky? What’s the
use of astronomy?
Astronomers, one might say, handle time. They provide
calendars. From the point of view of astronomy, calendars are
predictions of regularly occurring events – times and places where
the main heavenly bodies should be expected. The rise and fall of
the Sun is the most prominent of these events, but every other
planetary motion can also serve as a calendar. And each presents
challenges to this demand for regularity, especially the Moon, whose
behavior may seem completely erratic. From a wider cultural point of
view, calendars determine days of significance – Holy Days – and
related considerations, such as the direction of prayers or times of
rituals. Some occurrences, although they happen fairly regularly, are
rarer and thus carry special significance: the occasions when the
Sun spends the most or least time above the horizon (summer or
winter solstice), or the occasions when the day and night are equal
(equinoxes, as we’ve learned). Some occasions are so rare that they
seem extraordinary: the appearance in the heavens of an unknown
object (comet) or the occlusion of the Sun or the Moon (eclipses).
Aristotle even speaks, or tells us of observing the eclipse of Mars by
the Moon – the rarer the occasion, the more competence the
astronomer predicting it can boast. The more spectacular the rare
event is, the more significant it is. What the exact significance is;
what counts as beneficent or maleficent; what kind of influence the
different heavenly arrangements carry for the individual or the
community – this of course changes from place to place; from culture
to culture. The Greeks titled the discipline that assigns and deciphers
this significance astrologia, and in this sense it is not unreasonable
to say that astronomy is the handmaiden of astrology.
It turns out that the answer to ‘who needs astronomy’ is also not
trivial. One might think that everyone would find timekeeping useful:
the time of day to milk the cows or feed the horses and the time of
year to plant or harvest. But this practical time is not what the
astronomer provides. The peasant can’t rely on clocks and
calendars; she listens to her cows and checks the readiness of the
soil or the ripeness of the fruits. Hers is natural time: local,
contingent, changing from year to year. The motions of the heavenly
bodies, which make the abstract and idealized astronomical time,
are of no use to her.5
There are many reasons to think of astronomy as the
paradigmatic science, and this is one of them: that astronomy, and
science in general, is impractical. It requires significant resources. As
we saw, astronomy does not develop naturally from curiously gazing
at the sky. It requires expertise, and expertise is expensive: the
expense of supporting the livelihood of people who devote their time
to developing it instead of producing food and shelter for themselves
and their families. A society where every person has to provide for
their own subsistence cannot afford astronomers. And such a society
also has no use for astronomy. Astronomy is of use only to a culture
organized enough to apply the knowledge astronomers produce: a
culture with priests who consult calendars concerning rituals and
kings who consult astrologers concerning war. So here is the point in
a nutshell: astronomy, and by extension science, is only of use to a
culture organized enough to make use of astrology.
Useful or not, the Time provided by astronomers and recorded
in their calendars is the record of regular, orderly motion of the
heavenly bodies.6 Yet these bodies don’t seem to move all that
regularly. The heavenly sphere as a whole is orderly enough in its
rotation: the length of the astronomical day – from sunrise to sunrise
(or from sunset to sunset, as in the Jewish tradition) – appears to be
always the same. But the length of the day and the night – the time
the Sun spends above versus under the horizon – changes from day
to day, as discussed above. What we haven’t considered yet is that
the pace of the change is not regular. This is a fact we can easily
recognize: the days shorten very quickly, then stabilize so to speak,
then lengthen quickly and so forth. From an astronomical standpoint,
this means that the motion of the Sun on the ecliptic is sometimes
faster and sometimes slower. The motion of the other planets along
the ecliptic is even less orderly; not only do they change their
velocity: they sometimes seem to change their direction. This
phenomenon, called ‘retrograde motion’ (Figure 3.6), has a very
important role in the history of astronomy, and we will return to it
below.
Figure 3.6 Retrograde motion. This is a sequence of photos from
31 January 2015 to 11 September 2016, showing Mars moving in
an S-shape trajectory from upper right to lower left, and Saturn in
a flattened compact loop behind it, against the background of Libra
and Scorpio. The Milky Way is on the left and Antares is the bright
star just under Mars in its fourth last position. This image is
composed of numerous exposures spanning nearly a year, taken
with a modern camera and lens. Such technology was obviously
not available to the naked-eye-observing astronomers of yore. For
them, distinguishing the planets from the backdrop of fixed stars
and plotting the nightly changes of position as a motion over a
long period demanded keen dedication and a powerful set of skills.
 Positions and Regularities
Astronomers produce orderly time from their observations of the
motions of the planets, so it is important to explain here what
‘observations’ and ‘motions’ are for the ancient and pre-modern
astronomer. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, we cannot
see the heavenly bodies move. Even the daily motion of the whole
heavenly sphere is too slow to really see as it’s happening, although
the changes of the place of the Sun or the stars during the day are
obvious enough that we can think of them as having just moved from
the place we saw them a little while ago to the place they are now.
The motion of any of the planets on the ecliptic – even that of
mercury, the swiftest of the lot – is much slower still. All we can
directly observe is the planet’s position against the backdrop of the
fixed stars. The change in that position from day to day is what we
call ‘motion’, and what the traditional astronomers termed ‘anomaly.’
This term illustrates an important point: that the very idea that
the heavenly bodies move is already a bold theoretical assumption.
Moreover: the idea that they are bodies is just as bold. Until the
advent of telescopes in the seventeenth century, only the Sun and
the Moon looked somewhat like bodies – to the naked eye, the rest
of the planets and obviously all the stars are just points of light; as
we learned in the exercise we started with.
Figure 3.7 Naked-eye astronomical observation instruments.
These instruments are used for measuring angles: between two
stars; between a planet and a star; between a planet or a star and
the horizon. The woodcuts are from John Seller’s Practical
Navigation, originally published in 1669 and in many editions since
(including modern ones). The gentleman on the left is holding an
advanced version of a very basic angle-measuring instrument:
Cross Staff, also known as Jacob’s Staff. The observer puts the
end of the staff to their eye and moves one of the perpendicular
rods so its ends ‘touch’ two celestial objects – for example, a
 known fixed star and a planet. The angle between one end of the
rod, the eye-end of the staff and the other end of the rod is the
empirical datum recorded. The gentleman on the right holds the
most sophisticated instrument of that lineage – the sextant. The
sextant is in a sense no longer a pure naked-eye instrument,
because it comprises a lens and a mirror, but it is still used in a
comparable way to capture an angle.

This is the subject matter of pre-modern astronomy: the relative

positions of these points of light. These relative positions are angles:
between two stars; between a planet and a known fixed star;
between a star and the celestial equator (declination); between a
star or a planet and the already calculated equinox (right ascension);
and so forth. All observational instruments measure these angles,
and as you can see in Figure 3.7, which is taken from a seventeenth-
century manual, these instruments didn’t change much – in a sense,
until today. All ‘motions’ and ‘velocities’ are angular motions and
velocities, or an angle covered in a given time: the astronomer’s task
is to find regularities in all these ever-changing velocities and
directions.
How can this be done? The Babylonians, the keenest
astronomical observers of antiquity, approached the challenge as a
practical one: they tabulated their observations numerically (Figure
3.8) and developed algorithms that allowed them to predict the future
positions of the planets as if they were moving regularly. We know of
two such algorithms, known (among historians; otherwise the names
mean sadly little) as ‘system A’ and ‘system B.’ Each, in a slightly
different way, breaks the motion of the planet into a series of units,
which approximate the motion as if its angular velocity changes in a
uniform way. For a simplified example: system A is a kind of a ‘step
function,’ according to which the Sun moves at a velocity of 30° in
one mean lunar month and at a velocity of 27°7’30” in the next and
so forth. In System B (a ‘zig-zag function’) the changes in the
velocities are approximated as continuous. This provides good
predictions of both the relations between the Sun’s and the Moon’s
positions on the ecliptic and of the length of the solar year. What it
does not give, or presume to give, is any explanation of why this is
so. In a sense, it can be almost read without any physical image
attached to it at all, let alone any theory: no motion or time, just
changing relative positions.
Figure 3.8 A seventh-century BCE Babylonian table of lunar
longitudes, on a clay tablet from the library of Ashurbanipal in
Nineveh (now near Mosul in Northern Iraq). The table records the
daily change in the duration of the Moon’s visibility during the
month of the winter solstice.

For the Greeks, this type of approximation was not enough.

 Saving the Phenomena
The Greeks were keenly aware of the quality of the Babylonian
observations and calculations. Aristotle talks about “the Egyptians
and Babylonians, whose observations have been kept for very many
years past, and from whom much of our evidence about particular
stars is derived” (Aristotle, On the Heavens, II.12,
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html). More than 400
years later the great Ptolemy (whom we’ll discuss at length below)
was still making use of what was by then 800-year-old Babylonian
data, apparently still unsurpassable in accuracy and detail. But as
we saw in Chapter 2, Greek classical philosophy and the culture of
the ruling elite that it represented were hardly impressed by
technical, practical solutions. Real knowledge, knowledge worthy of
a free man – episteme – was, for the Greeks, knowledge of the
general and the abstract, the simple and ideal, that lies behind the
mundane and changing. The Greek astronomer could not fulfill his
duties simply using efficient arithmetical methods predicting the
positions of the Sun, the Moon and the planets. He was expected to
provide a theoria: a geometrical model that would present these
positions as the result of both real and orderly motions. He was
required to make them intelligible. This was the meaning of the
famous edict ascribed to Plato (in the sixth century, by Simplicius,
one of the last great pagan philosophers and chroniclers): “save the
phenomena.”
 Here is another very particular Hellenistic concept, which
tellingly is still part of common philosophical parlance. The
astronomical phenomena needed ‘saving,’ because they seemed
irregular, yet couldn’t be so. Nothing real was disorderly. The real
had to be orderly, especially when it came to the heavenly bodies,
the most noble inhabitants of the cosmos. The Babylonian tables
were orderly, but they didn’t show – or didn’t presume to show – that
their order was the real order. For the Greeks, imposed human order
was mere techne, and of no interest to the philosopher. The task the
philosopher set to the astronomer was to demonstrate that the
apparent irregularity of the heavenly bodies is only apparent – that
the heavenly bodies actually move in an ordered way, and it is only
to us – as phenomena – that they appear irregular. The Babylonian
tables didn’t discharge this task. Only a geometrical theoria could
save the phenomena, because only geometry represented an order
noble enough to capture the real orderliness of the heavenly
motions. Even Aristotle, for all his usual suspicion of mathematics,
admitted that geometry was the only proper instrument for
astronomy. Some things in the cosmos, like light and musical
consonants, were mathematical in their very nature and therefore
needed to be studied mathematically. The heavenly bodies were of
this sort.
 Figure 3.9 The constellations as they could have been observed
at the same time and place as Figure 3.1. Similarly to Figure 3.1
and Figure 3.6, the patterns captured here by modern technology
required superb skills and imagination from the ancient
astronomer.

If ‘save the phenomena’ survived as a philosophical concept,

‘theoria’ is still embedded in our concept of ‘theory,’ so it’s interesting
to briefly consider its meaning and to see what light it sheds on its
modern namesake. What makes theoria a proper tool to save the
phenomena? It’s mathematical, which guarantees that it captures the
order behind the phenomena. But this is not enough, because the
Babylonian tables were also mathematical (though arithmetical
rather than geometrical) and they did not satisfy the Greeks. The
difference is that, unlike the tables, theoria is not a mere practical
tool of prediction. It tells a story – it provides an account of the
phenomena that explains why the phenomena are the way they are.
In the astronomical case, the explanation is not necessarily causal,
as Aristotle would have preferred, but it’s still a ‘story’: it allows
following bodies in motion; it tells of real changes in the world; it
shows that things are the way they should be by following where
they were and where they’re going to.
Stories that explain why things are as they are belong, in most
cultures, to the realm of myth, so it may be tempting to think of
theory as a kind of myth: a narrative that makes sense of the
mysterious and often frightening natural phenomena. But there is a
fundamental difference between theoria and myth. Myths explain
phenomena by domesticating them; by narrating the strange in terms
of the familiar. Great natural events become, in the myth, effects of
human-like reason and emotions of human-like gods and heroes.
The painful and the frightening – thunder and lightning; storm or
earthquake – are a sign of gods' anger and vengeance; the bountiful
– sunlight and fertile rain – are a sign of their love and care. A
theoria – theoretical – way of explaining is diametrically opposed to
that. If the myth alleviates the mysterious by relating it to the familiar,
the theory takes the familiar and explains it by the mysterious: the
daily and common natural happenings become expressions of
esoteric forces and motions – forms; essential nature; miniscule
particles – and in Greek astronomy: perfect spheres.
 Spheres
The import of spheres in astronomy is one crucial point at which
Plato and Aristotle’s philosophies converge. Plato’s call to submit the
heavenly motions to a strict spherical model is a general application
of the Parmenidean and Pythagorean fascination with geometrical
perfection. The detailed requirements for such a model are provided
by Aristotle. The real heavenly motions, he dictates, must be circular,
concentric and in uniform velocity, and the theoria should explain all
apparent motions as configurations of these real motions. These
requirements are embedded in Aristotle’s cosmology (Figure 3.10):
all heavy matter moves towards the center of the Earth and all light
matter away from it. This means that this center is also the center of
the cosmos and that the Earth is spherical. The planets travel around
this common center of the Earth and the cosmos. Their trajectories
are circular, and these circular motions are always at the same
(angular) velocity.
Figure 3.10 Aristotle’s Cosmology as the basis for astronomy. The
Earth at the center as the realm of elements and the planets
surrounding it in order – the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn. Around them is the sphere of the fixed stars, which
in this Christian text is identified with the Biblical Firmament (see
Figure 1.12); around it the Ninth Heaven – “the Crystalline
Sphere”; then the Tenth Heaven – the Primum Mobile; and around
it the rest of the Christian context as in Figure 1.12. This woodcut
is from Peter Apian’s Cosmographia (Antwerp: Arnold Berckmann,
1539 [1524]) – an introductory book on astronomy, geography,
cartography, navigation and instrument-making, which went
through no fewer than thirty editions in fourteen languages during
the sixteenth century.
 To better understand the intellectual motivations behind these
cosmological assumptions, we need to think again about Aristotle’s
(and the ancients’) concept of motion. For them, as we discussed in
Chapter 2, motion is change – in fact the paradigm of change –
hence it requires a cause, a beginning and an end, and a medium.
The heavenly bodies rotate around us, but it doesn’t seem right to
think of them as truly changing. Like many of Aristotle’s insights, this
one is both a metaphysical and an empirical one. First, it is not
appropriate for these noble, ethereal bodies to change. If they
change, it also means that they come to be and pass away, like the
mundane objects around us. We also know from our forefathers,
Aristotle points out, that in general, the motions of the heavenly
bodies do not change. The Sun has always risen in the east and set
in the west; the constellations have always been the ones we know
(Figure 3.9); no heavenly body has appeared or disappeared (the
irregular appearance and disappearance of comets, meteors and
their like attests that they belong under the Moon, within the earthly
realm).
By all these considerations, the heavenly bodies should not
change, and since motion is change, they should not be moving;
they should be at rest. So how can one explain that the heavenly
bodies do change their places in the heavens? Aristotle’s rules for
astronomy aim to resolve this tension; the sphere, in these rules, is
not just an abstract symbol of perfection, but a working concept. It
allows Aristotle to develop an idea of motion which is as close to rest
as it can be.
 The motion of the celestial bodies according to Aristotle’s
cosmology – circular, concentric motion of uniform velocity – is
almost rest; it evades all the limitations that make terrestrial motion a
paradigm of change. Moving in circles, the stars and planets move
within a place, rather than from one place to the other. Moving in
uniform velocity, their motion is eternal: never slowing, which may
bring them to a stop; never accelerating, which may eventually make
them reach infinite velocity. Moving in concentric orbits, the heavenly
bodies move without ever approaching the center of the cosmos,
from whence they could no longer move; nor recede to the periphery,
beyond which there is nothing.
This is why the task of the Greek astronomer was to assign to
the heavenly bodies these orderly motions – circular, concentric,
uniform – and explain how the seemingly chaotic phenomena – the
seemingly irregular motions of the planets – arise from them. This is
what to save the phenomena meant, and it would remain so until
Johannes Kepler changed astronomy’s challenge in the seventeenth
century.
 Eudoxus’ Nested Spheres
It is not entirely clear whether Aristotle invented these cosmological
rules or whether he was giving philosophical formulations to ideas
which were already evolving among the astronomers of his time. The
first complete attempt that we are aware of to save the phenomena
in this way is of Aristotle’s contemporary Eudoxus, who lived in
Cnidus in Asia Minor from c. 390 to c. 340 BCE, and we know about
it indirectly, from Aristotle’s own testimony and a later commentary.
In Eudoxus’ astronomy the heavenly bodies are set in concentric
spheres, exactly as decreed by Aristotelian cosmology (Figure 3.11,
left). At the center of all the spheres is the Earth, and at the
periphery is the sphere of the fixed stars, which rotates from east to
west in the regular daily motion we are familiar with. In between,
Eudoxus placed (according to Aristotle’s account) no fewer than fifty-
five additional spheres. Each sphere moved regularly, but each in its
own direction and its own angular velocity, and every planet was
carried by three or four spheres, producing its own motion while
canceling the motions of the others. With this combination of
separate motions Eudoxus could apparently reconstruct not only the
observed changes of angular velocity in the annual path of every
planet, but even their strange retrograde motions (Figure 3.11, right).
This account of retrograde motion was particularly impressive;
according to Eudoxus’ model, it was a ‘hippopede’ – a figure-of-eight
trajectory created by two spheres whose axes of motion were at an
angle to each other (the name comes from ἵππος – horse – because
the eight-shape was similar to the knot for hobbling horses’ legs).
Eudoxus turned the two-sphere model into a multiple-sphere one,
but succeeded in saving the phenomena: the planets’ seemingly
irregular annual motions became an expression of circular, uniform,
concentric motions.

Figure 3.11 Eudoxus’ system (on the left) and the way it explains
retrograde motion (on the right). Each planet is carried by a
number of rotating spheres. All the spheres are concentric and
each one rotates in a uniform angular velocity, but each rotation is
around a different axis and at a different velocity. The planets’
apparent changes of velocity and direction, of which the
retrograde, ‘hippopede’ shape is the most pronounced, are
produced by the combination of these different motions.

Was Eudoxus’ model real or just an idea? Could it really

produce the heavenly motions or did it just suggest how this might
be done? One cannot calculate the motions of fifty-some spheres
moving simultaneously in different directions and velocities using
only pen and paper. But a modern computer can – so it can also be
done by a mechanical calculating machine doing what we’ve learned
to do electronically, namely: to turn the continuous motions into
discrete computations. This is actually less mysterious than it
sounds: perhaps Eudoxus built an armillary sphere, with rings that
could be moved point by point to scratch a trajectory on the surface
of some soft sphere – a fruit, perhaps – placed at its center?7 This
was not beyond the ancient Greeks’ technological capacities, as the
famous ‘Antikythera mechanism’ testifies (Figure 3.12). Named after
the island near whose shore it was salvaged from a Roman
shipwreck in 1901, this is second- or first-century BCE clockwork of
at least thirty gears, perhaps even thirty-seven – not that many fewer
than what Eudoxus would have needed.
Figure 3.12 The Antikythera Mechanism: a second- to first-century
BCE mechanical device for calculating relative positions of the
planets and, in particular, past and future eclipses, both solar and
lunar. It was discovered by sponge divers in 1901 in a 70–60 BCE
wreckage of a Roman ship, apparently on its way from Rhodes to
Rome, but the device’s full complexity was only revealed in this
century by X-ray tomography and computer-imaging technologies.
It is made of bronze, about 20 cm in height, with dials on both
sides. The front dial represents the ecliptic, with an outer ring
divided into 365 days and an inner ring divided into 360 degrees
and the signs of the Zodiac. The rear face had five dials, the most
important following the Metonic cycle – the nineteen-year cycle in
which the solar and lunar calendars synchronize. The dials were
moved by a handle, through thirty-seven interlocked geared
wheels of different sizes, whose accumulated ratios create the
proportions between the dials’ motions, mimicking the different
cycles of planetary motions. If recent reconstructions (many
available on the web) are indeed good approximations, the device
represents mechanical and precision technology which was only
 redeveloped in Europe in the late Middle Ages. The mechanism
was part of a trove comprising marble and bronze statues, jewelry,
glasswork and coins, which recapitulate our discussion of the
cultural import of such artifacts and the theories they embody:
objects of wonder, whose superb precision fulfills aesthetic rather
than practical values.

But this is already more speculation than befits the serious

historian. What is important to note – what is really telling as a
crucial early moment in the history of science – is the task Eudoxus
set himself and the way he approached it. He had a set of
phenomena which appear irregular, and he believed that they cannot
really be irregular. There had to be an order they obeyed, and their
irregularities had to be only apparent – only to us. Perfect order
meant rest, but the phenomena were motions, and he could not
explain motions through rest, so he had to compromise. He
constructed a model out of motions which were as close to rest as
possible: concentric, circular, of uniform (angular) velocity. The
model could not provide a cause for these motions: he had to
assume that circular motion was simply in the very nature of the
heavenly bodies. But it did make physical sense: it put the Earth
where it should be and arranged the stars and planets around it.
Eudoxus’ model saved the phenomena: it presented apparent
disorder as the consequence of real order.
 The Empirical Side of Theoria
Astronomers, as we saw, produce calendars – predictions of the
future positions of the heavenly bodies – and in this empirical task
the Babylonians were particularly successful in their arithmetical,
approximating approach. The unique property of Greek astronomy,
which makes it a founding moment in the history of what we now call
science, is the addition of theoretical requirements to these
predictions. Yet it would be wrong to think that Greek astronomy had
no place for the empirical. Looking at the heavenly bodies with an
overall image of their positions in mind and a conviction about the
fundamental properties of their motions allowed the Greeks to make
bold empirical claims – claims about sizes, distances and other
properties of the heavenly bodies and the Earth. One of the most
interesting features of these calculations is that they are completely
irrelevant to that main task of the astronomer – to produce
calendars. They serve curiosity alone.
Aristarchus of Samos (310–230 BCE), in his only extant work –
On the Sizes and Distances – provides a very early example (Figure
3.13). Equipped with the image of spheres within spheres and the
assumption that the Earth and the Moon are lit by the Sun (so, pace8
Genesis, the Moon does not have its own light), he measured the
relative sizes of the Earth and the Moon. What Aristarchus knew
from observations is that eclipses happen only when the Moon is full.
This correlation should have made perfect sense to Aristarchus: if
the Moon’s light comes from the Sun, it can only appear to us fully lit
when the two are lined up – namely, when the Moon and the Sun are
on opposite sides of us, on the Earth. And it is in the same relative
position that Earth can enter directly between the two and cast its
shadow on the Moon. Eclipses differ in duration, so it also makes
sense that the longest ones occur when the Moon passes through
the whole radius of Earth’s shadow. The angle between the Moon’s
position when the eclipse starts and its position when it ends – when
the Moon enters and when it exits the shadow of the Earth – is the
angular size of the Earth as perceived from the Moon. The angular
size of the Moon is easily measured, and obviously, the distance
from the Moon to the Earth is the same as the distance from the
Earth to the Moon. So the ratio between the two angular sizes – 3.7,
as it turns out – is the ratio between the diameters of the Earth and
the Moon. All their other relative sizes (surface area, volume) can be
easily calculated from this. Using the complementary insight that at
half-Moon there is a right angle between the Earth, the Moon and the
Sun, Aristarchus could also calculate the relative distances between
the three bodies on the basis of the observed angle to the Sun (87°):
another spectacular empirical achievement whose only purpose was
to satisfy curiosity.
 Figure 3.13 Aristarchus’ calculations of the relative sizes of the
Moon and the Earth from a tenth-century Greek copy of his On the
Sizes and Distances, now in the Vatican Library. The Moon (the
smallest circle on the right) comes in and out of the shadow of the
Earth (in the middle). The angle between the Moon’s position at
the beginning of the eclipse and its position at the end is the
Earth’s angular size as observed from the Moon. The ratio
between this angle to the angular size of the Moon as observed
from the Earth is the ratio between their real sizes.

Aristarchus’ younger contemporary, Eratosthenes of Alexandria

(276–194 BCE) , may have one-upped him by using even simpler
observations and calculations to establish an even more exciting and
impractical piece of empirical knowledge. With the aid of a gnomon –
a simple sundial – he measured the Sun’s angle at its zenith (its
highest point in the sky). The length of the gnomon’s shadow
provides the angle, and it’s easy to determine when the Sun is at the
zenith; this is when the gnomon's shadow is shortest. It was
important that the measure be taken at that particular point – it
allowed him to compare angles taken at the same time in Alexandria
and at Syene (today’s Aswan). He found that the difference between
the angles measured was 7°, which meant that the circumference of
the Earth was 360/7ths of the distance between Alexandria and
Syene, or 250,000 stadia. There are several guesses as to what a
stadion is, and one of them – 185 meters, based on the dimensions
of the stadium in Eratosthenes’ Athens – gives 46,000 kilometers,
astonishingly close to the modern number, which is about 40,000
kilometers (although we no longer think of Earth as perfectly
spherical). But to do this would be to miss a crucial point. Stadion
stands for a horse’s pace. It is not a standardized unit. Eratosthenes’
measure of the distance between the two cities was a crude
estimation – approximately 5,000 paces of a horse – and he didn’t
pretend it was anything else. The measurement of the size of Earth,
like that of the size and distance of the Moon, was an exercise in
extravagant curiosity, and accuracy had an aesthetic, playful value,
with no practical significance (compare the captions to Figures 1.10
and 3.12). Similar points can be made about the breathtaking
accuracy of modern science.
Similar insights can be offered concerning the work of the man
who Ptolemy himself considered the greatest of all Greek
astronomical observers: Hipparchus of Rhodes (c. 190– 120 BCE).
Hipparchus’ successors attributed to him a catalog of some 850
stars; great advancements in geometry (including an invention of a
theory of chords – a basic version of trigonometry – necessary for
his calculations); the invention of new observational instruments
such as the equatorial ring; great improvement of the calculation of
the lunar and solar months, and more. But he was (and still is) most
revered for establishing the precession of the equinoxes.
Comparing his own meticulous observations to those of the
Babylonians from centuries earlier, Hipparchus noted that the
equinox is shifting; the place where the ecliptic crosses the celestial
equator, measured against the backdrop of the fixed stars, moves to
the west at a rate of about 1° a century. Loyal to the Greek way,
Hipparchus accounted for the precession by assigning the celestial
axis a small circle on which it rotated very slowly, completing a full
cycle – a period – in some 26,000 years. Of note, again, is how
rarefied and remote these calculations are – empirical, systematic
and precise as they are – from any practical considerations. This
time span is far beyond any society’s capacity or need for planning.
Like the size of the Earth and distance of the Moon, the precession
of the equinoxes is an object of cultivated and refined curiosity,
befitting a free Greek citizen, in which precision is an abstract,
aesthetic ideal.
 The Moving Earth Hypothesis
Greek astronomy is distinguished by its theoretical aspirations, and
its empirical inquiries were both directed and enabled by these
aspirations. It is therefore very interesting to see the role that
empirical concerns – concerns about what was known from
observations – played in theoretical considerations.
Particularly interesting from this perspective is the question of
whether it is the Sun that moves around the Earth or vice versa. It’s
interesting because there is no direct way to resolve this conundrum
by observation from Earth, and because it’s common to think that the
ancients simply assumed that the Earth stood still. This is not the
case. Aristotle deemed both options prima facie plausible:

As to its position [of the Earth] there is some difference of

opinion. Most people – all, in fact, who regard the whole heaven
as finite – say it lies at the centre. But the Italian philosophers
known as Pythagoreans take the contrary view. At the centre,
they say, is fire, and the earth is one of the stars, creating night
and day by its circular motion about the centre.
Aristotle, On the Heavens, Book II, ch. 13
(http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html)

For himself, we saw, Aristotle took the position that the Earth is
stationary at the center of the cosmos. But he admits that this –
unlike the sphericity of Earth – is not a position he can support by
observations, only by general considerations of the shape of the
cosmos.
With even the authoritative Aristotle remaining somewhat
reticent in the matter, both options seem to have remained
respectable, because a century later Aristarchus took the opposite
view: that Earth, together with the rest of the planets, moves about
the Sun.
Although he is the most famous believer of a heliocentric
cosmos (Helios is Greek for the Sun) of Antiquity, we only know
about his claims indirectly. The original work in which this hypothesis
was presented was lost – we know about Aristarchus’ hypothesis
primarily from Archimedes, the great mathematician and inventor of
Syracuse (287–c. 212 BCE) whom we’ll discuss later. But it seems
reasonable to assume that his arguments for the centrality of the
Sun, which imply the motion of the Earth, were similar to those
Aristotle ascribed to the Pythagoreans, though perhaps a little less
general and metaphysical and more specific and astronomical. As
we saw, Aristarchus had particular interest in the light coming from
the Sun, and his analysis of eclipses gave the Earth only a
secondary role – a cause for shadow.
What is most important about Aristarchus’ suggestion is that it
was seriously considered – and rejected. The main argument against
it was evoked by Archimedes. If the Earth moves around the Sun (so
was the reasoning) it has to cover very great distances. It should be
very far away on, say, the vernal equinox, from where it was on the
autumnal equinox. This means that we should have a very different
line of sight to the heavens, and should be able to note what is called
parallax – a difference in the angles we observe between the stars.
But such annual stellar parallax was not observed. The stars are
arranged in the heavens in the same way throughout the year – the
constellations don’t change with the seasons. If we were, as most
agreed with Aristotle, at the center of the cosmos, this is exactly how
it should be. If Aristarchus was right, then the only possible reason
we do not observe any stellar parallax had to be that the stars were
so far away that the size of our orbit around the Sun was completely
negligible in comparison to this distance. In Greek parlance, it had to
be as if the whole orbit of the Earth were like a point in proportion to
the distance to the stars. One could even estimate this outrageously
large proportion. The human eye, at its very best, can distinguish
half a degree. The distance from one side of the orbit to the other is
180°, so if Aristarchus was right, then in order for us not to observe
stellar parallax, the distance to the stars should be more than 360
times the diameter of the orbit. This in and of itself seemed
ridiculously large to the Greeks. Moreover, with the calculations of
Aristarchus himself, as well as Eratosthenes and others, they
thought they had a fairly good estimation of our distance to the Sun,
which is of course the radius of the Earth’s orbit. This number, times
360, was so large they could hardly express it with their number
system. In fact, Archimedes presents this argument in the context of
introducing a new way in which even such ridiculously large numbers
could be written. It was absurd, and the Greeks, in spite of being
apparently somewhat attracted to the idea of a moving Earth (or they
wouldn’t have reintroduced and discussed it occasionally), had to
reject it.
 The Legacy of Greek Astronomy: Ptolemy’s
Orbs
Still, the main legacy of Greek astronomy was theoretical. It
culminated in the work of the Alexandrian Claudius Ptolemy (c. 85–
165) whose main book, known throughout the mediaeval world by its
Arabic title Almagest (from the Arabic pronunciation of the Greek
magiste – greatest), remained the most important work in astronomy
well after the collapse of the Hellenic realm, until the second half of
the sixteenth century (Figure 3.14). The significance of Ptolemy’s
astronomy, like that of Aristotle’s philosophy and Galen’s medicine
(which we discuss in Chapter 8), lies much beyond any of its
particular claims. The Almagest shaped the fundamental practices,
criteria and methods of studying the heavenly motions everywhere,
from Europe through the Muslim realm to China. For 1,500 years, to
be an astronomer meant to employ and slightly modify the
theoretical tools provided by Ptolemy in order to improve upon the
calculations of previous generations working within essentially the
same framework.
 Figure 3.14 Saturn’s epicycles in a Latin edition of Ptolemy’s
Almagest from 1496. Georg von Peuerbach (1423–1461)
translated and edited the first four books, and his disciple
Johannes Regiomontanus (1436–1476) completed this edition
after his death. Note: as explained in Figure 3.15, the center of the
deferent is d, but the points of reference are t – Earth (terra); and
e – equant.

The Almagest begins with a careful explication of Aristotelian

cosmology. Clearly, to Ptolemy and his disciples over some fifteen
centuries, his work was a brave attempt to save the phenomena
according to the rules set by Aristotle: to reduce the changes in
planetary positions to circular, concentric motions of uniform angular
velocity. All in all, it was a glorious success; Ptolemaic astronomers
produced accurate circular models of the heavenly motions. But in
order to do that, they had to compromise almost all of Aristotle’s
rules – except for circularity. In a sense, the essence of Ptolemaic
astronomy is these bold compromises.
To begin with, Ptolemy gives up Eudoxus’ three-dimensional
model of moving spheres-within-spheres. Instead of attempting to
handle the complex mathematics of all these interdependent
motions, Ptolemy constructs an independent two-dimensional
circular model like that on the bottom left of Figure 3.15 for each one
of the planets. The three-dimensional model made sense physically:
the moving, nested spheres were physical objects that carried the
planets and moved one another. For the sake of simplicity and
workability, Ptolemaic astronomy sacrifices the aspiration to make
such physical sense.
Figure 3.15 The Ptolemaic System and its geometrical tools: the
planet is assumed to move in uniform angular velocity.
Manipulating the center of the planet’s motion and Earth’s position
in relation to it yields the non-uniform observed motions. Top left –
eccentricity: Earth – T – is outside the geometrical center c of the
deferent. Top right – the way eccentricity accounts for changes in
observed angular velocity: if the planet moves in uniform angular
velocity around the center C, it sweeps ∠cab and angle ∠cfg at the
same times, but from T these angles will look different. Bottom
right – the epicycle and the way it explains apparent retrograde
motion: the planet P always moves counter-clockwise, but when
it’s on the inner part of the epicycle, it will appear to the observer
at T that it moves in the opposite direction. Bottom left – the
elements of a complete model. The center of uniform angular
velocity of the deferent is neither T nor C but E – the equant point.
 C is at the same distance from T and from E. The line TP should
conform to observations, and the rest is to be constructed to yield
uniform circular planetary motions.

Worse: every one of the computational tools introduced by

Ptolemy is a crafty violation of one of the fundamental laws of
cosmology that his astronomy is supposed to serve – concentricity
and uniform velocity.
First, Ptolemy’s models place the Earth outside of the
geometrical center of each planetary orbit (Figure 3.15, top left). With
this eccentricity – the planet is ex-centric, out of center – Ptolemy
calculates the apparent changes in planets’ angular velocity as if
they are merely a matter of perspective. Examine the top right of
Figure 3.15: if a given planet travels around the center C with
uniform velocity, and takes the same time to get from a to b as it
does to get from g to f, then the angles it will traverse in those times
will be equal: ∠aCb=∠gCf. But if we, on the Earth, are out of the
center, say at E, it will appear to us as though the planet traveled
once a longer angle, ∠aEb, and once a shorter one: ∠gEf. By
manipulating the eccentricity – the distance between E and C – the
Ptolemaic astronomer could make the model produce for a given
planet, from a circular orbit with uniform velocity, the non-uniform
angular velocity that we observe from Earth.
Secondly, Ptolemy offers (following the work of Hipparchus and
Apollonius) an ingenious way of presenting retrograde motion as an
apparent outcome of circular motion with uniform velocity. The model
places the planet on a small circle – the epicycle – which is carried
by a bigger circle – the deferent (Figure 3.15, bottom right).9
The planet P moves along the epicycle around its center A,
which in turn moves along the deferent ABD around its vacant
center E (the Earth, remember, is at its calculated eccentricity). Both
circles move in the same direction, so the apparent angular velocity
changes with the planet’s position on the epicycle – another way to
account for the non-uniformity. More crucial, however, is that when
the epicycle carries the planet inside the deferent, it appears to us as
if it has changed its direction and is moving backwards: retrograding.
Setting the relative sizes and velocities of the two circles and adding
more epicycles on top of epicycles, the astronomer could make the
model produce any complex apparent trajectory while maintaining
circular orbits and uniform velocities. The power of this tool is such
that a thirteenth-century Persian astronomer and polymath, Nasir ad-
Din al-Tusi, even showed how a combination of two uniform circular
motions (known as ‘the Tusi couple’) can generate an apparent
rectilinear motion (Figure 4.12).
Sometimes, however, eccentricity and epicycles were not
enough to account for the planets’ changes in direction and velocity.
At other times, they actually worked against each other – for
instance, the eccentricity and epicycle required could be too large to
fit into the deferent together. For such cases Ptolemy introduced
perhaps the boldest of his tools – the equant point (E in Figure 3.15,
bottom left). The equant is a point inside the deferent – neither the
geometrical center nor the eccentric Earth – around which the
angular velocity is uniform.
 The procedure can be understood thus: the astronomer would
try to construct a model under the assumption that the planet’s
motion around the geometrical center of its orbit (the deferent) is in
uniform angular velocity. Since from the Earth the velocity doesn’t
look uniform, he would calculate how far away the Earth should be
from the center – both of the orbit and of uniform motion – to create
this non-uniformity, which he’d assume is only apparent, as the
illustrations at the top of Figure 3.15 demonstrate. If this distance
turned out to be too large, or the epicycle would get in the way, he
would place the Earth at a convenient point, and set the center of
uniform motion at the calculated distance – no longer the
geometrical center of the orbit. This new point is the equant point – E
in Figure 3.15, bottom left.
Usually the two tools were used in tandem: eccentricity was
simply halved, and the models placed the Earth and the equant point
at the same distance and on opposite sides of the geometrical center
of the deferent, as seen in Figure 3.15, bottom left. Yet the equant
point was quite different from all other Ptolemaic tools. Unlike
eccentricity, which made the planet revolve uniformly around a
particular point with a clear meaning – the real geometrical center of
its orbit (even though this center was no longer populated by the
Earth) – the equant was a point with no distinction of its own; it was
only there to make the model work. The astronomer had no physical
or geometrical constraints in choosing the placement of the equant;
he simply chose the point which would make his model best fit the
phenomena and be the most convenient for calculation.
 Conclusion
Some readers may be familiar with the celebrated work of the
philosopher Thomas Kuhn on scientific revolutions. Reflecting on the
above, it should come as no surprise that Ptolemaic astronomy
served Kuhn as the inspiration and model for his idea of ‘normal
science’: science working in a smooth and systematic way,
according to clear rules and criteria, to solve well-defined questions.
Using Kuhn’s terminology, we can say that the Ptolemaic astronomer
had a clear ‘paradigm’ – Ptolemy’s Almagest – that he could
emulate. He had clearly defined ‘puzzles’ to solve: sets of planetary
positions which he had to reduce to models like that in Figure 3.15,
bottom left. He had a set of tools with which to construct these
models as well as clear criteria for successful models. He was also
aware of a number of nagging ‘anomalies’: unsolvable problems
which he conveniently ignored while meticulously constructing his
models.
But as we’ll see in later chapters, Ptolemaic astronomers of
centuries to come, most notably Copernicus, were acutely aware
that the marvelous power of their tools was also their weakness.
They could produce excellent calendars because these tools were
so flexible, but this flexibility came at the price of the very ideas they
were supposed to serve. The equant point in particular seemed like
outrageous technical self-indulgence; if a planet moves with uniform
velocity around a point which is not the center, it obviously does not
move with uniform velocity around the center. In using an equant, the
astronomer was breaking the very rules of heavenly orderliness
which were supposed to direct his practice. Ptolemaic astronomy
made no physical sense – no Earth to move around, no spheres to
carry the planets. In fact, it was treading dangerously close to
relinquishing the very ideal of saving the phenomena and returning,
in practice, to the Babylonian approach of providing a theory-free
algorithm for calculating planetary positions (even if theirs was a
geometrical algorithm, unlike the Babylonian arithmetical table).
For the fifteen centuries following Ptolemy, his system was the
astronomers’ ‘normal science.’ By the end of this long period, we’ll
see later in the book, it was the attempt to rescue the old ideals of
concentric, uniform, circular motion that brought about the complete
upheaval of astronomy, and with it of much else that was believed
about the cosmos and our place in it.
 Discussion Questions
1. Is there something interesting to be learned from the fact that
most of us know so little about the most basic phenomena – the daily
motions of the planets?

2. Does the idea that superlative precision primarily fulfills aesthetic

values seem to you relevant to modern science? Can you provide
examples for or against this idea?

3. What can be learned from the fact that Hellenistic astronomers

and philosophers considered the possibility that the Earth moves and
rejected this for empirical reasons?

4. Which of the Hellenistic empirical astronomical findings – the size

of the Earth, the cyclical deviations of the calendar, the relative sizes
of the Earth and the Moon, etc. – do you find most impressive and/or
most telling?

5. Is it fair to say that the most impressive achievement of Hellenistic

astronomy came at the expense of its most fundamental premises,
and what is the significance of that?
Suggested Readings
 Primary Texts

Aristotle, On the Heavens, Book II, 13–14

(http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html).

Ptolemy, Almagest, Book I, 1; 3; 5; 12; Book III, 3. In: Toomer, J. G.,

Ptolemy’s Almagest (London: Duckworth, 1984), pp. 35–37, 38–40,
41–42, 141–153.
 Secondary Sources

Aaboe, Asger, Episodes from the Early History of Astronomy (New

York and Berlin: Springer, 2001).

Dreyer, J. L. E., History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler, 2nd

edn. (New York: Dover (1953).

Evans, James, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy

(Oxford University Press, 1998).

Goldstein, Bernard R., “Saving the phenomena: the background to

Ptolemy’s planetary theory” (1997) 28 Journal for the History of
Astronomy 2–12.

Kuhn, Thomas S., The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy

in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992).

Neugebauer, Otto, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, 2nd edn. (Dover,

1969).

Ptolemy, Claudius, Ptolemy’s Almagest, G. J. Toomer (trans.)

(Princeton University Press, 1998).

Van Helden, Albert, Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions

from Aristarchus to Halley (University of Chicago Press, 1986).
1 In the Southern Hemisphere, the Sun’s trip through the sky has a
northerly bend. Anyone who grew up in one hemisphere and has
moved to the other will attest how deeply these directions are
ingrained in us: even after many years, it is still unsettling to find
that the direction of the Sun is the opposite of what you’d expect.

2The Hebrew word is ַ‫( ָר ִקיﬠ‬Rakee’a), which connotes a thinly

beaten sheet of metal.

3 The axis actually moves – we’ll touch on this below – but very
slowly, so from the point of view of initial observation we can treat
it as stationary.

4 In English there is an ambiguity between ‘day’ as the time of light

and ‘day’ as the time from one sunrise to the next. In this chapter,
I’ll try to avoid the confusion by calling one complete rotation of the
heavens an ‘astronomical day.’

5 This would finally change when Europeans took to the oceans

for trade and conquest, but this is not until the late sixteenth
century at the earliest.

6 Whether these motions measure time or time is nothing but

these motions is a very interesting philosophical question, but out
of our scope here.

7 I owe this idea to Ido Yavetz.

8 Pronounced ‘pa-che’ or ‘pa-ke.’ From the ablative case of the

Latin pax, literally meaning ‘in peace’ or ‘without insult,’ and used
to mean something like ‘in respectful contradiction to …’.
9Over the centuries, Ptolemaic astronomers, especially in the
Muslim realm, developed models with small deferents and large
epicycles, and many other variations.
 4
Medieval Learning
◈
 The Decline of Greek Knowledge
What happened to Greek knowledge? Not just the astronomy of
Eudoxus, Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, but the natural philosophy
of Aristotle and his disciples with its forays into what we’d call botany
and zoology; the medicine of Hippocrates and Galen (to whom we’ll
return in Chapter 8); the geography of Ptolemy; the mathematics of
Euclid and Archimedes and much more – all that knowledge, the
longing memory of which Raphael captures so marvelously at the
beginning of the sixteenth century (Figure 4.1) – and of which we
now have only fragments or recollections of.

Figure 4.1 Raphael’s The School of Athens fresco from 1510 in

the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican.
 The Burning of the Library
Folk history offers an attractive answer: it all burned down with the
library in Alexandria. The library was indeed a marvelous edifice of
culture. It was established in 283 BCE by Demetrius Phaeleron – a
student of Aristotle’s Lyceum (see Chapter 2) and an ousted dictator
of Athens. It was part of the mouseion (Μουσεῖον), a temple of the
muses, financed and protected by Ptolemy, the Hellenic king of
Egypt.1 Ptolemy provided the library with a mandate to collect all
knowledge, supported by aggressive instructions and means to
purchase, confiscate and borrow (with no intention to return) every
text within reach. At its prime, so ancient sources claim, the library
comprised some 500,000 papyri, and when one realizes that it would
only hold one copy of every text, and that the best modern university
library holds a few million books (Harvard library boasts 17,000,000),
many of them in multiple copies and editions, the magnitude of this
ancient cathedral of knowledge becomes overwhelming. And the
library was indeed burned down. The water of the Nile, we’re told,
was for days dyed black with the ink.
Yet the import of the catastrophe becomes less clear when
considering that it occurred at least three times: in 48 BCE, with
Caesar’s conquest of Cleopatra’s kingdom; in 391 (from now on,
when not otherwise mentioned, all dates are CE), during Christian
riots against pagan temples; and in 642, by the invading Muslim
warriors of Caliph Omar. The fact that the story is so remarkable yet
so unspecific suggests that it recalls more than a specific incident: it
records a trauma; a cultural memory of a great treasure lost. The
library was indeed destroyed, and more than once, but the loss of
Greek knowledge cannot be attributed to a singular dramatic event.
It was, rather, a long, gradual decline, during which the particular
concept of knowledge that we described in the previous two chapters
lost its cultural anchors.
 The Schools of Athens
Here is another way to think of the particularity of Greek knowledge
and learn some general lessons from its rise and decline about the
construction of the cathedral of science:
Around 387 BCE, Plato begins to meet regularly with fellow
scholars and disciples in an olive grove at the outskirts of Athens –
the Hecademia, named after the mythical hero Hecademus –
establishing the school that will come to be known by this name:
Plato’s Academia. Some fifty years later, around 335 BCE, Aristotle
returns to Athens with the Macedonian conquerors and establishes
the Lyceum, his school, in a gymnasium named after the neighboring
temple of Apollo Lyceus. In 312 BCE, Zeno of Citium (not to be
confused with Zeno of Elea, author of the famous Parmenidean
paradoxes) starts teaching in the Stoa poikilê (‘The Painted
Colonnade’) of the Athenian agora, founding the Stoic school. Just a
few years later, in 306 BCE, Epicurus buys a house and a garden, in
which he establishes the Epicurean school.
It is very telling that the great schools of Greek philosophy are
named after their places of residence: knowledge requires a real,
physical place, even if it aspires to be most general and abstract. A
place allows for memory: a school would have a library, the most
magnificent exemplar of which was of course the one in Alexandria.
(We tend to think of memory as place-less, floating somewhere ‘in
the cloud.’ But ‘the cloud’ has a very physical place: big server-farms
in locations like the Nevada Desert.) It would have a dominant
father-teacher figure, whose teachings comprise the core of the
library and whose memory is related to the place, perhaps
mythically. These teachings are the core of the doctrine which
defines the school – Platonism or Aristotelianism; Stoic Skepticism
or Epicurean Atomism – and consecutive generations of scholars
would debate the interpretation of the master’s ideas while
developing them and arguing against the rival schools.
This was a very fragile network. It could only be maintained by
that unique Greek culture which we described in Chapter 2, if in an
admittedly idealized manner; a culture that assigns high value to
impractical, free debate; that takes with utter seriousness the power
of argument; that accepts the great speech as the prime political act.
By the time the library was burned for the first time, this culture had
already lost its vivacity.
Figure 4.2 Alexander’s conquests (336–323 BCE), which marked
the boundaries of the Hellenistic realm. From Cassell’s 1890
Illustrated Universal History, Vol. I: Early and Greek History by
Edmund Ollier. Artist unknown.
 From the Greek Polis to the Roman Empire
In the four centuries between the establishment of the Athenian
philosophical schools and Caesar’s invasion of Egypt, the role of
Greek culture and language in the life of the people of the Eastern
Mediterranean basin dramatically changed. When Alexander the
Macedonian (356–323 BCE) – allegedly Aristotle’s tutee – left the
Greek Peninsula in 336 BCE to embark on the heady journey of
conquest that took him through Mesopotamia and Persia and into
India (Figure 4.2), he left in his trail at least a half-dozen Greek-style
poleis (city-states) named after him, from Egypt to Afghanistan; a
lasting impression of Hellenic military prowess; and monuments of
Greek material culture, from theaters to public baths. When
Alexander died in 323 BCE (in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II,
King of Babylon), at only 30 years of age, his generals were left to
divide between them (not peacefully) the enormous areas of the
ancient kingdoms of Egypt and Mesopotamia as booty. The rather
tight-knit Greek archipelago of poleis thus turned into a vast, loose
galaxy whose language of commerce and governance as well as the
culture and religion of its courts, was Greek, whereas local
languages and cultures remained intact. Jews spoke Hebrew and
practiced Judaism; Syrians spoke Aramaic and worshiped Canaanite
gods; Cleopatra, from whom Caesar seized Alexandria and Egypt,
was a Hellenistic queen of a Hellenistic kingdom – the first of her
dynasty to learn the local language.
 The great Hellenic conquest had, then, a paradoxical
consequence. ‘High’ Hellenic culture, the culture of the ruling class,
masters of abstract knowledge – especially, as we saw, in the Greek
context – became detached from the ‘low’ culture of everyday life.
The Roman takeover of the Hellenic realm in the two centuries
before the Christian era deepened this alienation. Quite contrary to
the Greek aristocracy’s ideal of freedom from worldly constraints, the
Romans stylized themselves as simple and industrious. The Roman
noblemen, unlike their Greek predecessors, prided themselves on
their practical prowess, rather than an abstract freedom from the
vicissitudes of this world. Leaders of a nation of warriors – suckled
by the she-wolf – rather than scholars or artists, they happily
adopted many facets of Greek high culture, which they
acknowledged as superior to theirs. They took on Greek mythology
and poetic structures, philosophy and rhetoric, which meant that
Greek remained and even deepened its hold as the learned
language of the evolving Roman Empire. At the same time, however,
it was deprived of its role as the language of traders and politicians –
this role had now been taken over by Latin, the conquerors’ tongue.
Removed from most facets of life, the fragile network of Greek
learnedness had little to sustain it, and required no grand
catastrophes to decay.
The Encyclopedic Tradition
 The First Roman Encyclopedists
This is also how the state of scholarship was perceived by the great
Latin scholars of the time: Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE) and
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE). Both were minor Roman
nobility and politicians by trade. Both were witnesses and
participants in the mayhem of the final days of the republic and early
decades of dictatorship – Varro was rather flexible with his loyalties,
whereas Cicero’s staunch republicanism resulted in his execution as
‘enemy of the state.’ Both were well versed in Greek high culture by
virtue of their intellectual ambitions and both even traveled to Athens
and studied in the Academia for a while. So for Cicero and Varro
saving Greek knowledge for future generations had the urgency of
rescuing a civilization from oblivion, and they attempted to do so by
collecting every part of it they could lay their hands on, translating it
into Latin and then organizing and condensing it into what will later
be called encyclopedias – Cicero in a series of dialogues and Varro
in his now-lost Nine Books of Disciplines (Disciplinarum libri IX). The
consequences of their efforts were complex. On the one hand, they
had undoubtedly saved many Greek ideas from oblivion, and for
centuries to come Europeans would owe almost all their knowledge
of those ideas to the encyclopedic tradition that Varro and Cicero
originated. On the other hand, this very tradition may have pushed
many of the original texts into extinction: as encyclopedias came to
define the canon of knowledge, those texts which were not
summarized, or at least mentioned in them, fell out of the purview of
scholars and were forgotten. But it might have had a similar effect on
those texts which were included and preserved. Available in digested
version, there was less incentive to go through the expensive and
laborious effort of reproducing them, and the full, original version
went extinct. (Recall that each and every text had to copied by hand.
This will only change with the introduction of the movable press in
the fifteenth century that we’ll discuss in Chapter 5.)
Moreover, in digesting them for their Latin readers, Varro and
Cicero were unwittingly dismantling both the particularly Greek ideas
they labored to save and the intellectual infrastructure that gave
them their meaning. Greek learning with its plethora of schools, as
we saw, was a highly combative field of competing positions. The
encyclopedists did not try to emulate this arena of fierce criticism and
nuanced argumentation. Instead, they presented a reservoir of
sterilized concepts, ready to be put into rhetorical use and organized
according to ‘disciplines.’ These disciplines became important in
shaping knowledge and we’ll return to them below.
Figure 4.3 A unicorn from Pliny’s Natural History in a 1644 Dutch
edition (Handelene van de Natuere, Amsterdam). His report on it
is quite reserved – he clearly doesn’t pretend to have witnessed
one: “There are in India oxen also with solid hoofs and a single
horn; and a wild beast called the axis, which has a skin like that of
a fawn, but with numerous spots on it, and whiter; this animal is
looked upon as sacred to Bacchus” (Natural History, Book VIII,
Ch. 31, V. 2: 280–1, http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/57011150RX2).
 Pliny’s Natural History
But the Latin encyclopedic tradition did not merely rehash old Greek
ideas. One of the most important troves of real and new knowledge
for many centuries to come was compiled by another Roman minor
nobleman-turned-politician: the Natural History (Historia Naturalis) of
Gaius Plinius Secundus (23–79), better known as Pliny the Elder,
who lived about a century after Varro and Cicero. Born in northern
Italy, Pliny worked his way up the military ranks as the Roman
republic, so dear to those earlier Roman scholars, was fading into
distant memory and a new tyranny was forming itself under the
deranged rule of Caligula and Nero. When the military finally took
control of the empire and his old comrade Vespasian became
emperor, Pliny was called into service and sent on administrative
duties as far as Hispania, Africa and Gallia Belgica. He died
heroically while trying to save a friend trapped by the famous
eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Throughout his adventurous and exciting life, Pliny wrote history,
biographies and works on grammar and rhetoric. He would do it at
night, after and before his military and administrative chores, and
Natural History, the pinnacle of his work and his only surviving text,
carries the marks of the urgency and verve of its production. It’s a
work befitting a young and quickly expanding empire. Much less
interested in disciplining and categorizing knowledge as it is in
capturing its vastness, it attempts to display as much as possible of
the enormity of the world in all its breathtaking variety. Pliny’s
introduction to his third book captures this mood:

Thus far have I treated of the position and the wonders of the
earth, of the waters, the stars, and the proportion of the universe
and its dimensions. I shall now proceed to describe its individual
parts; although indeed we may with reason look upon the task
as of an infinite nature, and one not to be rashly commenced
upon without incurring censure. And yet, on the other hand,
there is nothing which ought less to require an apology, if it is
only considered how far from surprising it is that a mere mortal
cannot be acquainted with everything. I shall therefore not follow
any single author, but shall employ, in relation to each subject,
such writers as I shall look upon as most worthy of credit. For,
indeed, it is the characteristic of nearly all of them that they
display the greatest care and accuracy in the description of the
countries in which they respectively flourished; so that by doing
this, I shall neither have to blame nor contradict any one.
Pliny, Natural History, Book III, Intro., V. 1: 151
(http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/57011150RX1)

There are thirty-seven of these books, comprising no less than 117

chapters – a massive work, befitting this “task as of an infinite
nature.” Pliny offers no fundamental philosophical principles to lead
his work, but it is ordered: from the world as a whole, through the
stars and the planets, to the marvels of meteorological phenomena –
wind and rain; lightning and thunder; and even “showers of milk,
blood, flesh, iron, wool, and baked tiles.” Next comes the Earth and
its various parts: “the countries, nations, seas, towns, havens,
mountains, rivers, distances, and peoples who now exist or formerly
existed” and then “to Man, for whose sake all other things appear to
have been produced by Nature” (Pliny, Natural History, Book VII, ch.
1). From there Pliny goes on to describe birds, fish, trees, remedies,
metals, precious stones – every fact that he can gather from “writers
… most worthy of credit.” He grants this trust to hundreds of them,
whose names he respectfully acknowledges, but has little place for
their evidence or arguments – it is facts that he collects, many of
them quite wondrous, like the “wild beast which kills with its eye,” the
unicorn of Figure 4.3, or the dragons of distant shores:

Æthiopia produces dragons, not so large as those of India, but

still, twenty cubits in length. The only thing that surprises me is,
how Juba came to believe that they have crests. The [Æthiopian
dragons] are known as the Asachæi … and we are told, that on
those coasts four or five of them are found twisted and
interlaced together like so many osiers in a hurdle, and thus
setting sail, with their heads erect, they are borne along upon
the waves, to find better sources of nourishment in Arabia.
Pliny, Natural History, Book VIII, ch.13, V.2: 231
(http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/57011150RX2)

Pliny finds most things trustworthy, and every detail as important as

the other: name and size; behavior and historical anecdotes;
legends, practices and use.
 The Medieval Encyclopedists
This is not to say that Roman culture produced no sophisticated
knowledge beyond Natural History. The opposite is true. Mostly, it is
know-how that this culture is credited with: the masons’ arch,
discussed in Chapter 1, along with the aqueducts, roads and
theatres in which it was deployed, as well as the managerial skills to
distribute water, dispatch soldiers and organize spectacles all are
aspects of this know-how. But even this kind knowledge had a
theoretical, abstract component to it, like the analysis by Vitruvius we
mentioned in Chapter 1. Moreover, Cicero himself was not just a
rhetorician and opportunistic compiler of Greek thought: his Stoic
philosophy, like that of another Roman politician-turned-scholar a
couple generations later – Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 B C E –65 C E )

– was original and very influential. The work of some of the great
heroes of Greek learning of the early centuries of the Christian era
was so steeped in Roman culture that, even when it was conducted
in Greek, it may just as accurately be considered Roman
Knowledge. An excellent example is Galen (Claudius Galenus, c.
130–c. 200), the most influential writer on medicine for 1,500 years,
whom we’ll discuss at length in Chapter 8. A Greek aristocrat by
descent who moved in the Hellenistic realm of Asia Minor, Greece
and Alexandria, he first made a name for himself in the distinctly
Roman practice of physician to gladiators, and spent the peak of his
career in Rome.
 Yet by the end of Galen’s life most of the writings of his
Hellenistic predecessors were hardly available, and of the grand
edifice of Greek learning only scattered fragments and wistful
memory were left. This memory is what is expressed in the myth of
the burning of the library in Alexandria and what turned the
encyclopedic writings of Varro, Cicero, and especially Pliny into a
long-lasting tradition. The last and very influential pagan member of
this tradition was Martianus Capella, who (like Augustine) flourished
in Roman North Africa in the fifth century and whose On the
Marriage of Mercury and Philology (De Nuptiis Philologiæ et
Mercurii) was so popular there that some 250 manuscript copies of it
still survive and those from the sixth century had already gone
through many earlier hands. The very title of the book reveals the
concept of knowledge embedded in it: philosophy (represented by
philology) and rhetoric (represented by Mercury, the emissary god)
are being joined together. Gone is the strict Greek distinction
between pure episteme and practical doxa as well as Plato’s hostility
to rhetoric and its pretense to knowledge, interfering with
philosophy’s pursuit of Truth. The two are now to be wedded, and
knowledge is served to them as gifts from the seven ‘free’ disciplines
(from Varro’s list, Martianus deleted medicine and architecture and
maintained the seven liberal arts we’ll discuss later), represented by
their respective muses (Figure 4.4, left). As the image in Figure 4.4,
right, powerfully reflects, debate – the lifeline of Greek learning – has
become an anathema, and logic (termed ‘dialectic’) is not there to
order and adjudicate argumentation, but to quash it.
 Figure 4.4 Medieval illustrations of Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis
Philologiæ et Mercurii (The Marriage or Philology and Mercury),
where philology stands for philosophy, and Mercury, the god of
commerce and words – for rhetoric. On the left: a copper
engraving illumination by Herrad of Landsberg (1125/1130–1195),
“Hortus Deliciarum” (Garden of the Delights); an allegory of
“Philosophy surrounded by the seven liberal arts,” each
represented by its muse. On the right: “Dialectic conquers the
serpent of debate.” This is an earlier illustration of a tenth-century
manuscript.

Figure 4.4, right, is taken from a Christian edition of Martianus’

encyclopedia. Indeed, the aversion to dispute and disagreement
became especially apparent when Christian scholars adopted their
Roman predecessors’ longing for the lost treasures of Greek
knowledge and took upon themselves the task of gathering them for
future generations. Isidore (c. 560–636), the bishop of Seville,
compiled an influential encyclopedia towards the end of his life which
he titled Etymologiae and organized mostly, as the name suggests,
around the origins of the meanings of words. A century later, The
Venerable Bede (672–735) – an English monk who earned his title
by being probably the most erudite person of his time – added a
historical approach to the collection of all knowledge. For much of his
acquaintance with the ancients, however, Bede was already
indebted to Isidore, just as Isidore was to Martianus and just as
Rabanus Maurus (c. 780–856), a German monk who became the
bishop of Mainz and the great encyclopedist of the next century,
would be indebted to him. With little access to the originals, the
encyclopedists had to trust earlier encyclopedists on both matter and
form: Isidore’s De Natura Rerum (On the Nature of Things) – his
summary of his knowledge of astronomy – became the model for
Bede’s text of the same name and of similar content. Bede’s text
was then emulated by Rabanus in his De Rerum Naturis just as his
De universe … sive etymologiarum opus, as its name reveals,
mimics Isidore’s Etymologiae.
 Christianity and Learnedness
For Christian scholars of the early Middle Ages, Greek learning
posed less of a threat when it was stripped of its highly contentious
character. They were much more comfortable when presenting
deeply antagonistic positions – say Plato and Aristotle’s competing
ideas of the relations between matter and form – as nothing worse
than differences in wording. Yet it was far from obvious that
Christians should devote such attention to Greek knowledge in the
first place. As we saw in Chapter 1, early Christian thinkers were
much more inclined to dismiss it for its pagan origins. And it is
important to stress that people like Bede or Isidore were not just
scholars who happened to be Christians. Their Christianity was the
most fundamental part of their being – intellectually, personally and
institutionally: Isidore was a bishop and Bede, as he attests, almost
never left his monastery. But the social and cultural role of such
people was dramatically different from that of the likes of Tertullian,
who could contemptuously ask, a few centuries earlier, “what indeed
has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (see Chapter 1).
 The Changing Cultural Role of Christianity
In the first decades of the fourth century – about half a century after
Tertullian’s death and just before Augustine’s birth – Rome saw a
period of new prosperity after a long decline. This came under the
rule of Flavius Constantinus (272–337), better known as Constantine
the Great. Constantine fought his way to the throne and ruled with an
iron fist (from 306 to 337), but he was also a capable administrator
and a fearless reformer. Two of his reforms would have a crucial, if
indirect, impact on the way knowledge would take shape in Europe
for many centuries.
The first, in 330, was to move his capital from Rome to the
ancient city of Byzantium, which Constantine renamed,
unsurprisingly, Constantinople. On the coast of the Bósporos straits
(today’s Bosphorus) and thus at the gate to Asia Minor, Byzantium
represented a clear strategic and commercial vision; Constantine
was consolidating the emperor’s rule after decades of
decentralization. But the long-term cultural effect of the move was
the opposite of the unification he had in mind: it radically deepened
the gap between the western parts of the empire, where Latin was
the language of politics and commerce, and the eastern parts, which
would remain Greek-speaking. A century later, Rome would be
sacked – by the Visigoths in 410, by the Huns under Attila in 450 and
finally by the Vandals in 455 – and the communication between
scholars on the now-hostile border would become very strenuous.
For those on the Latin-dominated west, the Hellenistic treasures of
the east would fade into nostalgic memory.
The other reform, in 331, was to reverse the standing of
Christianity. Succumbing to its growing popularity, Constantine lifted
the restricting measures aimed at curbing its spread (and provided
many opportunities for martyrdom that Christians seem to have been
taking in at a rate that the authorities found alarming). He then went
further, granting Christianity enough privileges to turn it, for all
practical purposes, into something of a state religion. Whether
Constantine himself converted, and if so how sincerely – questions
that occupy historians – and even the fact that his acts would be
reversed (and reversed again) by future emperors carry relatively
little significance. What is crucial is that Christianity came to adopt
the organized, centralized, hierarchical structure of the Empire with
its common language – Latin – and its written law. When Rome fell
and the Western Empire – already more of a federation of Germanic
tribes than a coherent empire – collapsed, the Catholic Church found
itself the custodian of this law and of the learnedness it required.
The Church, as discussed in Chapter 1, was primed for the
challenge. Augustine, a colonial Roman for whom these vicissitudes
were literally world-changing, dismissed Tertullian’s contempt: “we
ought not to give up music because of the superstition of the
heathen … we ought not to refuse to learn letters because they say
that Mercury discovered them” (De Doctrina Christiana, II, XVIII).
Learning – any learning, as long as belief was unshakable –
elevated the soul.
 The Church took to the task as it usually did – institutionally, but
with a strong sense of its shortcomings: “Woe to our age, for
scholarship has died out among us,” wrote Gregory (538–594),
bishop of Tours and a fine scholar himself, in his massive Decem
Libri Historiarum (Ten Books of Histories, or History of the Franks, as
it’s commonly known). Already a couple of generations before,
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius (480–c. 525) was keenly aware
that his excellent Greek – he may have been educated in the East –
was becoming a rarity. Boëthius was a high official in Rome, by then
Christian and under Gothic rule, and much of his political rise and fall
was predicated on the relations between Rome and Constantinople.
So he was also self-serving when he took it upon himself to collect,
translate and comment on as much of the Greek masters as he
could, especially in logic and mathematics. It was still a worthy
endeavor: his version of Aristotle’s logical works, for example,
became the only significant portion of the latter’s corpus available in
Europe until the twelfth century, and some Greek arithmetic we still
know only through his translation and adaptation. Boëthius’
aspirations were shared by his successor in the Ostrogoth court of
Rome: the long-lived Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus (c. 485–
c. 585; Boëthius, by comparison, finished his life by execution, on
whose details there are a few versions, all equally horrid).
Cassiodorus went as far as trying to establish a Christian academy
in Rome – the very idea that repelled Tertullian. When this failed, he
founded a monastery with an adjacent learning center on his family
estate in Vivarium, Southern Italy. The Vivarium monastery was
dedicated to the study of the marvelous collection of texts, both
sacred and secular, in its library. The collection was not Cassiodorus’
own: it was the fruit of a spirited project of gathering, copying and
translating manuscripts; the monks at Vivarium were scholars.

Figure 4.5 The scriptorium. Usually the monk would not be alone
in the scriptorium – like most aspects of monastic life, intellectual
work takes place in the presence of others. But the image, from a
fifteenth-century manuscript and depicting the translator and
copyist Jean Mielot (died in 1472), captures well the devotional
concentration of the work in the scriptorium, which by decree was
conducted in complete silence.
 The Monastery and the Scriptorium
With Vivarium as a model, the monastery became Christianity’s
primary institute of knowledge. At the heart of many monasteries
was a library, and at its heart – the scriptorium; the room of the
scribes (Figure 4.5). In the scriptorium, manuscripts – usually on
vellum, fine parchment made of calf skin – were produced and
reproduced: copied, translated, annotated, commented on and
illustrated. Almost no censorship and very little selection were
practiced – the veneration of the wisdom of the ancients outweighed
any dread of “heresies … instigated by philosophy,” as Tertullian had
put it (see Chapter 1). The hunger for this wisdom was insatiable and
any text was deemed worthy of fulfilling it: sacred or profane,
heretical or obscene. A strict law of silence ruled the scriptorium: the
work there was a spiritual exercise. Texts were not only reproduced
materially; they were absorbed, committed to memory, elevating the
soul. And this spiritual learnedness was institutionally sanctioned.
The monk’s vows bound him to a life devoted to prayer and work,
strictly governed by a written “Rule of the Order,” but if he was
literate, he could discharge his work duties in the scriptorium. “My
desire has always been either to study or to instruct or to write” said
Bede, “in that I have always observed the rule of the order and the
daily singing of the hours in church” (Bede, Historia Ecclesia, cited
by Pedersen, 48).
Bede was a Benedictine, and the Rule he was following had
been written some 150 years before his birth by St. Benedict
(Benedict of Nursia, c. 480–550). But in the world surrounding the
monastery, there was very little orderliness. The Roman Empire was
first taken over by the Germanic tribes populating the areas it
occupied to its north, and its final collapse left Europe divided into
numerous kingdoms, princedoms and fiefdoms. The relations
between and within these entities were strictly hierarchical, but they
were ruled much more by loyalties than by law. At the bottom of the
hierarchy stood the serfs – the peasants bound to the land they
cultivated but didn’t own. They paid for it in crops and labor to the
lord of the manor – the fundamentally self-sufficient rural estate. The
lord owed his allegiance to the king who granted him the estate in
exchange for services rendered – usually military. Often the
exchange happened many generations earlier, between ancestors of
both, but the lord’s first loyalty was still to his remote king rather than
to his local serfs. The kings and princes within the Kingdom of the
Franks – that is, the Holy Roman Empire – owed their allegiance to
the emperor, elected by the most powerful of them every time the
previous one passed away.
It befell the Church to offer some structure and stability to this
amorphous cluster of local customs and long-distance loyalties –
known as ‘feudalism’ – by which Europe was governed. With its
official structure, its uniform language (Latin) and its universal code
of law (the Roman), the Church provided the only institutional cross-
European uniformity. Even more important was the Church’s role we
discussed in Chapter 1: to grant overall legitimacy to this political
system. This legitimation it provided by embedding the political
hierarchies in to the ‘Great Chain of Being’: the metaphysical and
religious hierarchy stretching from profane matter up to the abstract
divine (Figure 1.13). It was a legitimacy essential for ruling.
Emperors who tried to defy the pope’s decrees learned that their
military might was no match to the power he could unleash through
the symbolic act of excommunication. So much so, that Henry IV’s
willingness to take upon himself any measure of humiliation in order
to relieve the pope’s wrath – to ‘walk to Canossa,’ where the pope
withdrew himself – became a proverb of surrender.
 Medieval Know-How
It was only under the auspices of the Church that organized
production of knowledge could take place. Declining commerce with
the great cities of the Mediterranean and little indigenous urban
culture meant that Europe of the centuries after the collapse of
Rome had no cultural infrastructure to support anything similar to
Hellenistic learning. This is not to say that the people of the manor or
the budding medieval town developed no knowledge worthy of our
story, only that this was almost exclusively the ‘know-how’ that by its
very nature leaves behind artifacts, but few testimonies as to how
they were produced.
Traces of this know-how, however, are to be had – sometimes
embedded in the artifacts, sometimes more directly. Recipe books,
for example, tell of elaborate knowledge of local flora and fauna and
their nutritional and medicinal value. This was the domain of the
witch, the rural physician and the herbalist; the recopies of the town
apothecary show that his knowledge (unlike the rural ‘medicine
woman’ or herbalist, the apothecary was always a man) spanned
further: he was literate, imported materia medica, and mixed his own
preparations. In the manor, as we learn from paintings and remains,
natural energy was harnessed in increasingly efficient ways. The
improved use of beasts of burden, which we discussed in Chapter 1,
is perhaps the simplest of examples. Mills, marshalling the elements
and comprising sophisticated mechanical devices such as cranks
and geared wheels, provide a more elaborate example. Mills steered
water and wind, moving grindstones to produce flour from grain, big
saws to cut wood, and large bellows to stir up furnaces in which iron
was smelted. The mills were a great classical invention whose use
significantly declined with the collapse of the Western Roman
Empire, but re-emerged in the eighth century and onwards: the
Domesday Book, a 1086 survey of England and Wales prepared for
William the Conqueror, reports 5,624 (!) water mills in England alone,
and the number seems to have doubled every century. Many
monasteries, as they aggressively transformed themselves into
manors by appropriating the land around them, became centers of
technological development of this kind. Brewing, distilling, dyeing
and founding were ways to add value to the raw materials by which
the serfs paid their tithes – their charges for using the land. The
monasteries thus had the wherewithal and the motivation to develop
practical disciplines like herbalism and metallurgy – and with them
alchemy – as well as mill technology.
Within the monastic realm, ‘practical’ didn’t only mean ‘material.’
Observance required observing time: both “the daily singing of the
hours” (as Bede termed it above) and the yearly arrivals of the holy
days. The daily task was greatly aided by the same mechanical
technology that allowed for mills: geared wheels were essential for
the great medieval invention of the mechanical clock. Wheels were
not enough: the clock required the insight that in order to measure it,
time needed to be broken down into segments, and thus too the
mechanical contraption to perform the task: the verge-and-foliot
escapement (Figure 4.6). The origins of the European escapement
are unknown – a very different escapement was used in the great
eleventh-century Chinese astronomical clock of Su Song. We’ll also
probably never know if and how the medieval application of geared
wheels related to the technology of the Antikythera mechanism we
discussed in Chapter 3, which also had a chronometric task. If there
were such ancient resources from which this technological
knowledge stemmed, the monastery would indeed be the place
where they could be expected to surface.
Figure 4.6 Verge-and-foliot escapement – the heart of the
medieval mechanical clock. Illustration by David Penney ©. The
crown wheel c is moved clockwise by weights – the clock’s engine
– and its axle h is connected to the dial, directly or through some
more gears. The teeth a and b, in right angle to each other, are
pushed by the wheel, causing verge g, hanging on the chord f, to
oscillate left and right. The swing of the balance (‘foliot’ – fool) d
alternately engages and disengages the teeth, allowing the crown
wheel to ‘escape’ (hence the term) and leap only one tooth at a
time. The pace of oscillation is regulated by moving the weights e
inside or out. The further out the weights are, the higher is their
‘positional weight’ (see Chapter 9), the longer the oscillation, and
the slower the pace of the clock.
 Monastic daily life followed artificial time, ordered by the bell
marking the hours for prayer (think of the children’s rhyme Frère
Jacque), in which the mechanical clock with the ticking of the foliot
had a natural place. The annual time was kept with the help of the
computus: an applied version of the Hellenistic astronomical
calendar, by which the dates relevant to the Christian were
determined (Figure 4.7). The computus was a ‘paper tool,’ rather
than a mechanical one, but it was as much a piece of practical,
technological know-how and the time it kept was as artificial as the
clock’s. It did not attempt to capture accurate heavenly positions
(such as the equinox and the full Moon which mark Easter) but to set
regular dates, more or less around those astronomical events, by
which rituals could be regulated and instituted.
Figure 4.7 Medieval knowledge of Hellenistic astronomy. A
diagram of the relation between the phases of the Moon and its
position relative to the Sun (Sol, on the right) from Abbo of Fleury’s
(c. 945/950–1004) Opinion concerning the System of the Spheres.
The text is part of a compilation of astronomical texts, written in
Durham cathedral by a number of scribes during the second
quarter of the twelfth century, now at the University of Glasgow
Library (MS Hunter 85). The most important is Bede’s 19 Year
Cycles (referring to the Metonic cycle – see Figure 3.12), a
computus providing the dates for Easter for the years 1–1253 (so
 for some 500 years ahead of his time), showing powerful
command of the practical sides of that astronomy.

The monastery was not confined to bookish knowing-that,

knowing-how was not necessarily material, and both knowing-that
and knowing-how had important social and institutional roles. In the
town, a peculiar medieval institution of knowledge developed: the
guild, an association of practitioners of a craft. There were many
dozens of guilds in any town, and hundreds in Paris or London: for
the masons, carpenters, tailors, surgeons-barbers, silk merchants,
drapers – one for every trade. As the economy developed and with it
the distribution of labor, the guilds splintered into specific domains of
skill: The Worshipful Company of Carpenters is to this day separated
from The Worshipful Company of Joiners and Ceilers (both going
strong in the City of London since 1271 and 1375 respectively)
because carpenters use nails while joiners use only glue. The guild
provided to its members control over tools and materials, protection
against competition, mutual financial and political support and even
some religious solidarity, but most importantly – it sanctioned the
knowledge of its members and monitored its distribution.
A boy would be taken by his father to a master’s workshop or
store at an early age and be put under his custody as an apprentice.
He would do menial jobs in the household in exchange for room and
board and would acquire the trade and its secrets through work;
starting with the simple tasks, which gained in complexity as he
gained in age, skill and his master’s trust. It was to the guild that the
master would have to answer if he relinquished his duties – say, by
enslaving the boy without instructing him – and it would be the guild
that would test the boy – now a young man – to decide if he had
acquired the trade. Upon acquitting himself well in the guild’s test,
the apprentice would become a journeyman, taking to the roads and
offering his services to other masters, now for salary but still with an
eye to improve his skills. After the number of years set by the guild,
the journeyman would be allowed to take the final examination, and
if successful, would be ‘set free by the guild’ – which meant he had
become a master himself, permitted to set up his own shop and take
apprentices.
The guilds were very important in the development of medieval
politics and economy – some even say stunting it with their in-built
hierarchy and conservatism. For us the guilds provide two lessons
beyond the particulars of medieval ways of knowing. First, they are
another example of the essential relations between institutions and
the knowledge they produce. Argumentation and the dialectic
competition of ideas, for example, were built into the Greek
philosophical school; careful maintenance and piecemeal evolution
of material tools and bodily techniques were promoted by the guild. It
turns out – and that’s another lesson and somewhat of an antidote to
our discussion in Chapter 1 – that pure ‘know-how’ can also be
organized and systematically reproduced, even if not in written form.
 Education and the Church
The know-how produced and maintained by the guilds was
organized, but by its nature as trade knowledge it was local,
particular and secretive. This fractured nature was representative of
European culture in the millennium following the demise of the
Roman Empire. The Church was unique in its commitment and
wherewithal – institutional, linguistic and intellectual – to develop,
sustain and distribute ‘knowing-that,’ and this fact did not escape the
notice of Charlemagne – Karl der Grosse, or Charles the Great
(742–814) – the king who united the Franks under his rule and
established the Holy Roman Empire. The Franks were warriors –
anything but scholars – yet Charlemagne was apparently attuned to
the value of education. He already had a monk by the name of
Alcuin of York (730–804) – scholar, theologian and poet – teaching
the seven liberal arts in his court, and in 787 he decreed the
following:

[the King] has judged it to be of utility that, in the bishoprics and

monasteries committed by Christ’s favor to his charge, care
should be taken that there should not only be a regular manner
of life, but also the study of letters, each to teach and learn them
according to his ability and the Divine assistance.
Cited in F. V. N. Painter, Great Pedagogical Essays (Hawaii:
University Press of the Pacific, 2003 [1905]), p. 156
Already educating its future clergy in cathedral schools and its
monks in monastery schools, the Church was ready for the task. But
beyond the education of Europe’s elites, the Catholic Church had
now been officially entrusted with the very creation of its episteme.
 The University
Learnedness was the prerogative and duty of the literate monk, and
learnedness requires conversing with other scholars – face to face or
through their writings. An informal institution had thus developed:
that of the wandering learned friar, making his way between
monasteries, consulting their libraries, scriptoria and fellow scholars.
He could travel alone or with a young scholar-apprentice or two, and
if he gained a name for himself, a small group of disciples could
have gathered around him. If this brotherhood of scholars –
collegium in Latin – would grow more numerous than was
convenient for travel and courteous to request other monasteries to
host, it might opt to settle in a town, probably finding residence in the
cathedral. When a number of such collegia assembled in a town,
they might seek a charter from the king that, if granted, would turn
them into a universitas.
 Sovereignty and Its Bounds
By the twelfth century, the relative calm and prosperity (which we
discussed in Chapter 1 in relation to the cathedral) allowed towns –
many of them newly established – to sponsor such institutions. Like
the guild, the universitas was an urban institution peculiar to the
medieval fragmented society. It was a community that was granted
partial sovereignty by the king, the pope or even the emperor, and
thus made independent of the local authorities, such as the town’s
senate or the region’s fief. It could be a religious body such as a
Jewish community; a fundamentally economic one like the guild; or
the assembly of colleges of monastic scholars for which we now
reserve the title ‘university.’ The first university was chartered in
Bologna in 1088; in Paris there was teaching already from the mid-
eleventh century and the university was chartered in 1150; Oxford
was teaching from 1096 and chartered in 1167, and Cambridge in
1209 and 1231, respectively. Over the next two centuries universities
would be established throughout Christendom – from Portugal to
Bohemia; from Sicily to Poland and Scandinavia; from Scotland to
Germany.
The independence of the universitas meant that it conducted
itself and judged its members according to its own rules – a very
important privilege. In the case of our community of scholars, this
privilege meant that, being a Church institution, students and faculty
were protected from the gallows and the stake, since Church law
didn’t allow for capital punishment (when the Church wanted
someone executed, it would deliver them to the secular authorities).
But this independence of the university was carefully constrained. It
had no swords and horses to defend it, only custom, and could only
be maintained as long as those with real power did not feel
threatened. We are well-acquainted with this dance of power: military
or police stay off university campuses, until unrest on its lawns
threatens to boil to the streets. But as long as the political authorities
could be persuaded that all mischief was well contained, the
privilege of universitas bound them to not interfere.
There was a formalized way for university scholars to declare
that their deliberations were strictly within the bounds of the
university and thus protected by its privilege of sovereignty. They
would designate a claim as discussed ex cathedra – namely, within
the context of teaching; or ex hypothesi, as mere hypothesis. This
meant that they didn’t commit to the truth of the claim; they neither
believed in it nor intended to proselytize it. Under these designations
all scandalous, not to mention heretical, positions could be
discussed: could it be that God isn’t good? Are there things He can’t
accomplish? Or even: could it be that He doesn’t exist? Ex cathedra
or ex hypothesi, the discussion was to be taken as a purely
intellectual exercise, posing no threat to the world outside the
university. We are familiar with these practices, if not as well
formalized: a modern-day lecturer can discuss the most racist, sexist
or otherwise offensive view she chooses, as long as she makes it
clear that the view is discussed, not advocated.
 Interlude: The Foundations and Decline of Academic
Freedom
It is crucial to pause shortly and reflect on the lesson just learned.
The freedoms and responsibilities we associate with the university
and think of as essential for scholarship and education are not a
modern achievement but remnants of an ancient institution. The
academic freedom from political interference, the right to inquire into
and to teach what one deems worthy, independently of the shifting
preferences of public and politics – these are peculiar medieval
privileges. They are not protected by civil liberties but tolerated as
habit and custom. They don’t reflect secular belief in human rights
but religious trust in vocation: ‘tenure’ is not a labor protection
granted to an employee, but a designation of an acceptance into a
community of devoted learners. This is the reason it cannot be
revoked for economic or organizational considerations, but only for
severe breach of the community’s code of conduct. The university
has very quickly taken on the task of educating elites and training
professionals, as we’ll see below, but at its core it is not an institution
providing a service to the wider society but a community of learners,
whose reason for existence is its very scholarly pursuit. In this form,
the university has been extremely long-lived and stable: its core
structure, procedures and pedagogy have remained virtually the
same over its 800 years of existence. Universities have been
remarkable in producing and disseminating knowledge – humanist
and scientific; abstract and practical; medical and technological. But
these achievements, unparalleled by any other institution of
knowledge, were but secondary consequences of their fundamental
aim. This was, as we explained, to give home, independence and
sovereignty to a community of scholars, for whom scholarship is a
vocation.
The university has proven extremely resilient – or rather flexible
and crafty – to external, hostile political pressure, but less so to the
modern pressures caused by its own success. In the last decades of
the twentieth century, universities were recruited as instruments of
mass education and grand, expensive research. They became large
institutions, requiring very large resources, provided from public
funds and thus regulated by agents of the public realm. Almost
unwittingly, universities relinquished the very independence that their
title connotes. Indeed, by the first decades of the twenty-first century,
they started succumbing to demands to reform their medieval ways
so that they could be rationalized as a contemporary service
provider: to consider their value as measured by its cost on the one
hand and the satisfaction of an envisaged clientele on the other. For
those who may assign this work as a textbook, these are formidable,
if not traumatic changes. It is left to be seen if the culture of those to
whom it may be assigned will still have a place for a sovereign
universitas of learning.
 Masters, Students and Pedagogy
Who populated the medieval university? They were all male. Quite
early on the universities diversified and neither students nor masters
necessarily belonged to a monastic order, but they were regarded as
members of clergy by virtue of belonging to the university, and were
hence regulated and protected by its laws. Because they mostly
came from afar – anywhere within the vast realms of Christendom –
these protections were not only privileges, but necessary for survival.
The students were often very young – in their early to mid-teens –
and for many of them this was their first formal education. They
could be second sons, whose parents envisioned for them a career
within the court or Church bureaucracy. The Church recruited its
officials from the educated cadres produced by the university, so the
basic Latin and mathematics of the first couple of years of study
were necessary. They could also be, more rarely, Church-educated
peasants; then as now, education was a good means of social
mobility. Very quickly, it was to the university that a young man went
to become a physician or a lawyer. A university could comprise
something between 1,000 and 1,500 students at any one time –
Paris would take in 500 a year, most of them leaving after a couple
of years. Overall, it is estimated, European universities educated
some 750,000 from the middle of the fourteenth century to the end of
the sixteenth; not a small segment of a population averaging about
75 million.
 They would study in two main ways we still use and one which
we have regrettably lost. In the lectura (Figure 4.8, left), the master
would stand at his podium, a manuscript in front of him, and would
read, interpret and comment on the text to a presumably mostly
passive (though hopefully attentive) audience. The comments
gradually took the form of questions and answers and these
quaestiones, copied and disseminated formally and informally,
became the paradigmatic genre of medieval writing – their structure
and sophisticated language suggests that the questions were
generated by the master, not the students. In the repetitio, a young
master or a senior student reiterated and elucidated the material
taught in class. Finally, in the disputatio (Figure 4.8, right), two senior
students argued a point in front of the class.
 Figure 4.8 Two of the main pedagogical institutions of the
medieval university (the third being the repetitio or tutorial). On the
left is the lectura, represented by the great fifteenth-century legal
scholar Pietro da Unzola lecturing at the University of Bologna.
Note that Unzola is depicted as reading and interpreting a text, but
painted shortly after the invention of the movable press (see
Chapter 5), the image also has some of the students looking at
books, even though the text from which the miniature is taken –
the Liber iurium et privilegiorum notariorum Bononiae – is itself in
a manuscript form. On the right: the disputatio. The illustration is
from the Statutes Book (Statuenbuch) of the Collegium Sapientiae
– a theological seminary established in 1555 in Heidleberg. Note
the hourglass behind the students, a testimony to the formalized
and competitive nature of the debate.

The disputatio truly captures the spirit of high medieval

scholarship and its complex of intellectual freedom protected by
careful institutional constraint. The format of the disputatio was rigid.
A question would be chosen by the master; one disputant would
present a thesis, to which the other provided an anti-thesis; the first
would then provide an argument, which would be answered by a
counter argument, followed by an example and a counter example,
and so forth, until the master would deliver a determinatio – a
decision on who had won. Within this highly structured and clearly
pedagogical context, however, the most explosive theses could be
vehemently argued and even prevail, if supported by better
arguments (although the master would also clarify the official Church
position on the point, the position in which all must believe). The
disputatio was a crucial part of the curriculum. To become a bachelor
of arts, the student had to attend and ‘determine’ a disputation; to
become a master, he had to both participate in one disputation and
chair two more.
 Curriculum
Tradition prescribed the seven liberal arts as the foundation of all
learning, which made good sense: entering the university, students
had to acquire the basic tools of scholarly language and reasoning.
They therefore started with the Trivium – the three linguistic arts:
grammar (of Latin); rhetoric; and logic (Figure 4.9, left). Logic was
often called dialectic and was taught according to Aristotle’s logical-
methodological texts, his Organon, especially once they became
fully available (more on that below). Two years of this sufficed for
most students; those who stayed and passed their exams would
continue on to study the Quadrivium, or the four mathematical arts:
arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (Figure 4.9, right). These
particular disciplines, again, were the product of tradition. But this
division of mathematics was also given good sense by the Platonist
mathematician Proclus of Athens (412–485), the head of the
Academia in his time, in his commentary on Euclid: arithmetic dealt
with discrete static objects (represented by the numbers); geometry
with extended static objects (lines and bodies); astronomy with
discrete moving objects (the planets); and music – with extended
moving ones (strings). These disciplines were hardly practical, but
they trained the mind and prepared the student for going out into the
world or continuing his education.
Figure 4.9 The university curriculum, set as an allegory of the
seven liberal arts, corresponding to the Hortus Deliciarum in
Figure 4.4. On the left – the Trivium: Grammar taught by
Priscianus, Rhetoric by Cicero and Dialectics by Aristotle. On the
right – the Quadrivium: arithmetic taught by Pythagoras, Geometry
by Euclid, Music by Milesius (the legendary king of the Irish) and
Astronomy by Ptolemy. The image is a miniature manuscript
illumination for the didactic poem Der Wälsche Gast (The Welsh
[meaning here – Romance] Guest) by the German-writing Italian
Thomasin von Zirclaere (1186–1235), lecturing to young nobles
about chivalry.
 If the student chose to further his education, then after
completing the requirements to get his baccalaureate – to become a
bachelor of arts – he could decide whether to join the higher faculties
– law, medicine or theology – or to continue in the arts faculty. The
former two were fundamentally professional schools: with LLD (or Dr.
Juris) one was certified as a lawyer; with MD as a physician. Though
the teaching was mostly theoretical, periods of practical
apprenticeship were included. The case of theology was somewhat
more complex: it was the queen of disciplines, highly abstract and
very difficult. Obtaining a ThD could take ten to fifteen years;
however, it all but assured a good career in the service of the
Church.
If the student decided to remain in the arts faculty and work
towards the title Magister – master, that is, teacher – then he would
move to study the three philosophies: metaphysics, ethics and, most
importantly, philosophy of nature. This meant, primarily, studying
Aristotle’s works like De Anima (On the Soul), De Caelo (On the
Heaven) and De Generatione et Corruptione Animalium (On the
Generation and Corruption of Animals), and the commentaries on
them. It took some time before the lower faculty was allowed to
confer its own doctoral degree – the PhD – which then, as now, did
not offer much by way of a career path outside the university.
Grammar was taught with a textbook composed by the obscure
Priscian in sixth-century North Africa, and astronomy with the
Tractatus de Sphaera (Figure 4.10) by the University of Paris teacher
John of Hollywood, known as Johannes de Sacrobosco (c. 1195–c.
1256); a digested, non-technical version of Ptolemy’s Almagest. For
arithmetic and music there were treatises by Boëthius, and the basis
for all theology was the Sentences (Quatuor Libri Sententiarum) of
Peter Lombard (Petrus Lombardus, 1096–1160). This was a massive
compilation of Biblical and Church Fathers’ thought, elaborated in
Aristotelian modes of argumentation while carefully maintaining and
stressing Augustine’s hierarchy between pagan and Christian
knowledge:

Aristotle said that (there are) two principles, namely, matter and
species, and a third called the “operative (cause)”; also that the
world always is and was. Refuting the error, therefore, of these
and similar (men), the Holy Spirit, handing down the discipline of
truth, signifies that God at the beginning of times created the
world and before times eternally existed, commending (thereby)
His Eternity and Omnipotence.
Lombard, Sentences, Book 2, Dis. 1, ch. 3.
 Figure 4.10 The primary astronomy textbook in the medieval
university: Tractatus De Sphaera by Johannes de Sacrobosco
(John of Hollywood, c. 1195–1256). As befitting a working book,
this manuscript copy, from c. 1230 (currently at the Stillman Drake
collection of the University of Toronto), is heavily annotated by at
least two hands from two different times.

The encyclopedic tradition provided the masters of the early

universities with a wealth of such works, useful as textbooks. But
they were scholars first, and teachers second. The intellectual urge
that drew them together in the first place was enhanced by their
assembly, and with it – the craving for the complete versions of the
works they were teaching. These works, however – the original texts
of Plato and Aristotle, Euclid and Ptolemy, Cicero and Galen – were
not available to them.
 The Great Translation Project
The original works were to be found close to where they were
created – in the cities of the Hellenistic realm. The north-western part
of this area – Greece and Asia Minor – still comprised the declining
Byzantine Empire. The rest – Mesopotamia and North Africa – had
been conquered by the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries,
and was now part of great Muslim empires stretching from Persia to
the Iberian Peninsula. The demand created some supply: from the
places where Christianity and Islam rubbed shoulders –
Constantinople, Sicily and especially Spain – samples of these texts
were trickling in. Ambassadors, who were often scholars themselves,
sometimes carried them, for their own use or as offerings.
Merchants, sensing an opportunity, brought them as luxury goods.
Constantinus Africanus (c. 1020–1087) is an interesting
representative of the merger of travel, trade and scholarship which
came to typify the age: a North African Muslim merchant, he used to
sell Arabic medical manuscripts of the Galenic tradition in Salerno in
South Italy, until he converted to Christianity, became a Benedictine
monk in Monte Casino, and turned translation into his vocation. The
texts collated and translated by Constantinus and his brethren in
Salerno and Monte Casino would shape European medicine for
centuries, and we’ll return to them in Chapter 8.
Monte Casino was an early model of what was to come. Once
Christian scholars took direct responsibility for the acquisition of
these texts, an exhilarating project of intercultural exchange
transpired. Its center was the city of Toledo, at the heart of the
Iberian Peninsula, which Alfonso VI of Leon conquered from the
Muslims in 1085 and turned into the capital of Castile. Toledo was an
important Christian center under the Visigoths’ rule in the sixth and
seventh centuries, but for the Umayyad Caliphs who captured it at
the beginning of the eighth century it was a remote provincial town,
very far from their capital, Damascus. It became a focus of feuds
between Arabs and Berbers, local and imperial soldiers and rulers,
and by the time of the Christian conquest it was only a small city-
state. Yet it was still an important center of learnedness, both Muslim
and Christian, and on the foundations of this learnedness the
Archbishop Raimundo (Raymond de Sauvetât, reign 1126–1151)
turned the acquisition of these longed-for texts into a Church project
by establishing the College of Translators at the library of the
cathedral.
It was a college indeed: a scholastic brotherhood, whose
members came from all over Europe. The most famous of those
traveling translators was Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187), who came
from his hometown in Northern Italy in his 20s and spent the rest of
his life in Toledo. In the five decades of work, he translated some
seventy books from all branches of science, among them works of
Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes and Ptolemy, as well as many great
Muslim scholars like Ibn Sina, Al Kindi, Al Razi and Thabit ibn Qurra
(more about whom in Chapters 5 and 8). In fact, even if the original
work was in Greek, the translation was almost exclusively from
Arabic. The Muslim scholars had long turned Greek knowledge into
their own, and had first translated it to their own language of
knowledge (we will return to that shortly). Gerard apparently
mastered Arabic, but more often than not, the translation was a
painstaking process by which a text would be rendered, word by
word, from Arabic to the local Castilian, and from that to Latin. A few
centuries later, the humanists of Renaissance Italy would smugly
ridicule this process and the quality of its products, but it was a
heroic effort, testifying to the true craving for this knowledge. It was
also a true cross-cultural and cross-religious effort, in which people
like John of Seville – a Spanish Jew converted to Christianity –
would play a crucial role as mediators between cultures and
languages.
Figure 4.11 The multicultural context of the translation projects
illustrated by two parchment leaves from the fourteenth century.
Both are in the Arabic dialect of the Jews of the Western Muslim
realm written in Hebrew script, but are not by the same scribe. The
manuscript on the left is “On the causes of hiccupping” and “On
the treatment for hiccupping.” It is on a palimpsest (see Chapter 5)
whose undertext is in Hebrew, which likely originated in the
Maghreb or Andalusia, and carries later annotation in Latin and
Castilian (note too the little drawings of hands pointing at
presumably crucial points in the text). The manuscript on the right
is a transliteration of Kitab al-Mansuri by al-Razi, originally
composed in Arabic near Tehran or Baghdad in the tenth century.
Its subtitle is “On the effect of pickles and sour substances”
Originating from northern Iberia (probably Mallorca), it was later
annotated in Latin. Together the manuscripts draw a beautiful
itinerary of medieval knowledge traversing long distances and
political, linguistic and religious barriers. One can surmise that
after being penned by Jewish scribes, they made their separate
ways from North and South Iberia to Castile and perhaps
Catalonia, where they were read and annotated by physicians or
scholars who could read them in their very particular dialect – or
perhaps were collaborating with someone who could – but were
more comfortable annotating in the Christian languages, so were
probably university educated. Thanks to Rowan Dorin and Hagar
Gal for the research and analysis.
Muslim Science
 The First Translation Project
The Christian scholars traveling to Toledo were looking for the
complete, original Greek texts they knew in fragments, but they were
not retrieving their own lost cultural heritage. First, the Hellenistic
culture that produced these texts became ‘European’ only in
hindsight, in the Europeans’ own mind. The ancient Greeks had little
interest in the people to their north, whom they called ‘barbarians’
because the northern speech sounded to them like
incomprehensible gibberish. They knew, admired, and sometimes
feared and detested the great cultures to their east and south –
Persia, Babylon and Egypt – and these were the directions in which
they expanded their own culture, into the realms where Muslim
culture would rise. Secondly, the Muslim scholars who inherited and
adopted these texts were not holding them as a deposit. They had
been using them to construct their own intellectual edifices for
centuries.
When Mohamed united the Arabs, converted them to Islam, and
led them to conquer the Fertile Crescent and the Eastern
Mediterranean, they were mostly a nomadic culture. But it did not
take long for the conquerors to get off their horses and camels and
adopt much of the means and ways of governance of the empire
they'd deposed. This required translating the documents of the
Byzantine rulers, from whom the Arabs wrested the Hellenistic
realm, and the skills for such a translation project were possessed by
the Greek-literate bureaucracies they inherited from Byzantium.
Translation Projects like that were a very long tradition in
Mesopotamia: the Akkadians translated Sumerian documents
already in the second millennium BCE. The Byzantine Christian-
Orthodox intelligentsia, however, brought with it a disdain for pagan
knowledge, similar to what we have read in Tertullian. During the first
great Muslim empire – the Umayyad Caliphate, which reigned
between 661 and 750 from its capital Damascus all the way from
Persia to Iberia – not much Greek science was rendered into Arabic.
This would change dramatically when the Abbasids deposed the
Umayyads. With their power base in the east – today’s Iran and Iraq
– they could take a much more neutral approach towards Hellenistic
culture and had good political reasons to turn careful attention to its
treasures. The notion of ancient knowledge was common to many of
their constituents, who prided themselves on their own antiquity: the
Jews remembered Moses, Abraham and Solomon, and the Syrians
were convinced of their Babylonian origins. Most politically crucial,
the newly Islamized Persians provided a convenient myth of
antiquity: that all Greek knowledge was in fact of Persian origin,
stolen by Alexander who had it translated and its sources destroyed.
Under the savvy caliph al-Mansur (Abu Jaʿfar Abdallah ibn
Muhammad – 714–775) the fable was gladly adopted, providing
justification and drive for a two-centuries-long project of translating
ancient knowledge into Arabic: from Indian and Persian, but first and
foremost from Greek.
Court-sponsored and politically motivated, the knowledge
sought and translated was, at first, mostly practical, with medicine
taking precedence. Astrology was highly valued: for its place in
medicine; as means for military and political prognostication; and as
an ideological tool that enabled the Abbasids to demonstrate that
their rule was predestined and inevitable. With astrology came
astronomy, its necessary handmaiden, crucial for rites and prayer
directions (Ptolemy’s work was crucial to both). With astronomy
came the necessary mathematics. Aristotle’s logical works, including
such difficult work as the Topics, were translated numerous times
because they were deemed crucial for inter-faith disputations. These
became increasingly important as the Abbasids’ divergent political
base drove them to fashion themselves as Muslim rulers, rather than
exclusively Arab. With this political-cultural shift came a religious
change: Islam became a proselytizing religion, bent on converting
the infidels. This required developing a sophisticated theological
stance, for which not only Aristotle’s metaphysical works were
translated, but also the Atomists’. Even Euclid’s Elements may have
been translated with an important practical application in mind: its
geometry is inscribed into the marvelous new capital that Al-Mansur
built for himself in Baghdad, on the banks of the Tigris and away
from the Umayyads’ Damascus.
Within a generation the translation project took on a life of its
own. Like its Christian counterpart 300 years later, it was often an
organized and cooperative project: the most famous of the
translators, Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873), had a veritable workshop,
employing his son Ishaq ibn Hunayn (830–910) and other members
of their extremely erudite extended family. Hunayn was a cross-
cultural mediator of the sort we’ve discussed: an Arab whose mother
tongue was actually Syriac. As a Nestorian Christian, his knowledge
of Greek – his liturgical religious language – was as thorough as his
Syriac, so his collaborators would often render into Arabic what he
first translated from Greek into Syriac.
This was an expensive undertaking, but translation became a
source of pride and prestige to all involved. Sponsorship was
provided by all parts of the Abbasid elite – political, intellectual and
economic – who came to perceive the translation project as proof of
their superiority over the Byzantines. Those Greek-speaking
predecessors were so corrupted by Christianity, they maintained,
that they lost their bond with and their claim over their magnificent
heritage, whose genuine bearers were now the Muslims. The
Caliphs would fashion themselves not merely as great warriors, but
as great scholars. Harun al-Rashid (766–809), Al-Mansur’s
grandson, became legendary for his wisdom and erudition (his
sobriquet means ‘The Just’), and a subject of many folk stories. He’s
often credited with the establishment of Bayt al Hikmah (the ‘House
of Wisdom’), which was apparently more of an archive and library
inherited from the Persians than the ‘Arab Academy’ it’s sometimes
purported to be. But the fable itself tells of the import erudition
acquired in the public persona of the caliph – and especially
erudition related to ancient knowledge (Greek, but also Persian and
Indian). Harun’s son, Al-Ma’mun (Abu Jaʿfar Abdallah, 786–833),
used this erudition – the caliph’s claim to personal command of
logical and dialectical skills – to legitimize seizing supreme religious
authority. These skills acquired such prestige, apparently, that they
could be brandished in a strictly Muslim religious context despite
their foreign and pagan origins.
 Originality and Traditionality
The Muslim rule reunited the Hellenistic realm and opened the
borders between central Asia, Asia Minor and North Africa, enabling
the cross-fertilization of cultures and language – a flow of people,
ideas, goods, agricultural species and techniques. It created great
wealth and the urban culture necessary for the development of
sophisticated knowledge, and by the end of the tenth century, when
the whole Greek corpus had been essentially made available in
Arabic, scholarly attention in the Muslim realm turned to critical
inquiry of the potentials it presented.
The attitude they developed would frame scholarship across
religious and cultural borders throughout the Middle Ages. It is, in
fact, the core of what has come to be called ‘Medieval
Scholasticism’: a venerating adoption of the Greek logical and
cosmological framework, especially as shaped by Aristotle, with a
careful critique of details, especially when these details failed to
meet the criteria of rationality and evidence set by this very
framework.
This attitude was most long lasting and influential in astronomy.
Muslim astronomers eagerly translated and adopted all of Ptolemy’s
books, and especially the Almagest (the title with which they adorned
it and is still in place), but they were unwilling to ignore the fact that it
violated the very rules of Aristotelian cosmology on which it was
supposedly founded (discussed in Chapter 3). The dissatisfaction
was expressed already around the turn of the eleventh century,
when the Greek-Arabic translation project was still going, by Abuˉ
ʿAlıˉ ibn al-Haytham (965–1040):

The epicyclic diameter is an imaginary line, and an imaginary

line does not move by itself in any perceptible fashion that
produces an existing entity in this world … Nothing moves in
any perceptible motion that produces an existing entity in this
world except the body which [really] exists in this world … no
motion exists in this world in any perceptible fashion except the
motion of [real] bodies.
Cited by Saliba, Islamic Science, p. 332.

“The configuration, which Ptolemy had established for the motion of

the five planets, was a false configuration,” Ibn al-Haytham
unhesitatingly concludes. “The motions of these planets must have a
correct configuration, which includes bodies moving in a uniform,
perpetual, and continuous motion, without having to suffer any
contradiction” (cited by Saliba, Islamic Science, p. 343).
Ibn al-Haytham points here at two fundamental problems with
Ptolemy. First, he is inconsistent, departing in practice from his own
theoretical commitment to uniform concentric motion. And this
implies, secondly, that his vaunted model is physically impossible.
For Ibn al-Haytham that means that epicycles are as bad as
equants, but this is not the way medieval astronomers – first the
Muslims and later on Christians – understood his challenge. They
didn’t attempt to replace the Ptolemaic model with a physically
possible one. Instead, they remained loyal to its methods and
procedures and worked on solving the more disturbing inconsistency
– the equant – by means of what they perceived as a less disturbing
one – epicycles. We have already mentioned in Chapter 3 the most
successful of these attempts: that of the Persian astronomer and
polymath Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn al-Hassan al-Tuˉsıˉ (better
known as Nasir al-Tuˉsıˉ, d. 1274). Al-Tuˉsıˉ has shown how a circle
rolling inside a bigger circle can make a point on its circumference
move along a straight line drawn through their common center
(Figure 4.12). Setting both circles in motion in opposite directions,
manipulating their sizes and velocities to achieve the desired relative
(angular) velocity, astronomers could construct models in which the
planet constantly changed its distance from the Earth. They could
thus identify the planet’s center of motion with its center of uniform
velocity, annulling the disturbing need for an equant point (and other
such arbitrary devices of forcing order on planetary motion).
 Figure 4.12 The Tusi Couple. On the left, a diagram of its modern
version, materialized by geared wheels. As the smaller wheel roles
counter-clockwise within the larger one – whose radius is double –
point M moves up and down in a straight line through their
common center. On the right, it’s original introduction by Nasir al-
Din Tuˉsıˉ in his Compendium of Astronomy (this manuscript from
1289). The planet, carried by the small epicycle rolling between
two deferents (the three reiterations of this small circle represent it
at different positions), moves back and forth in a straight line in
relation to their common center. This eliminates the need for
eccentricity, let alone an equant point: Earth can be set at the
geometrical center of all motions. On the right, another version:
the model for Mercury developed by al-Tusi’s disciple Ibn al-Shatir
(ʿAbu al-Hasan al-Ansari) in his La Nihaya al-sul (The Final Quest)
from 1304. Carried by the small double epicycles, the center of the
big epicycle carrying Mercury continuously changes its distance
from the center.

Tusi Couple is thus an emblematic achievement of medieval

science as shaped by the Muslims and adopted by the Christians:
ingenious manipulation of the elements of the Hellenistic tradition
with only a very rare challenge to its principles. This doesn’t mean at
all that medieval scholars were satisfied with minor theoretical
modifications of the science they inherited from the Greeks. Muslim
astronomers in particular were very aware of the empirical
shortcomings of that knowledge (the practical bent discussed above
may have something to do with that), and made a concerted effort to
ameliorate it. Well-organized astronomical observations are
documented already from the time of Al-Ma’mun, and although they
usually didn’t last beyond the life and generosity of their patron,
they’ve created a tradition that culminated in the eastern regions of
the Muslim realm. Al-Tusi himself had the opportunity to head a well-
equipped, well-manned observatory, founded for him by his Mongol
patron Prince Huˉlaˉguˉ, brother of the fearsome Kublai Khan, in
Maraˉgha (south of Tabrıˉz in modern Iran). In the 1420s, an even
more splendid observatory was established in Samarkand by
another warlord-cum-scholar – Ulugh Beg (or Bey; 1394–1449),
grandson of the fierce conqueror Tamerlane. These institutions
provided astronomical observations which were not only many-fold
more numerous than Ptolemy had access to (the Almagest is based
on fewer than 100 observations over some 700 years), but of a
different order of accuracy. The Samarkand observatory included,
among many other splendid instruments, a 50-meter-tall (!) mural
quadrant.
Even so, the instruments in Maraˉgha, Samarkand and later
Istanbul were developments of the ones reported by Ptolemy:
gnomons and sundials; quadrants and sextants, astrolabes and
armillary spheres (Figure 4.13). In this sense, Ibn al-Haytham and
his demand for a fundamental overhaul of Hellenistic science were
an exception highlighting the rule. This is particularly telling because
he was otherwise probably one of the two most influential scholars in
the Middle Ages (the other – Ibn Sina, whose most important work
was in medicine – we’ll discuss in Chapter 8), not only in the Muslim
realm, but also in Christian Europe, where he was known as Alhazen
(or Alhacen, after his first name, Al-Hasan). His main legacy was in
optics, where his book, Kitaˉb al-Manaˉzir (Book of Aspects), offered
the same synthesis he was calling for in astronomy. It comprised a
strict mathematical analysis of lines of vision and their reflection and
refraction; an empirical study of light, color and other visual
phenomena, and a careful physiology of the eye. Its power was such
that, when it was translated into Latin as De Aspectibus at the turn of
the thirteenth century, it created a discipline named after it:
perspectiva. The books written in that tradition, new in Christian
Europe, by such luminaries as Roger Bacon (1214–1292), John
Peckam (1230–1292) and Erazmus Ciołek Witelo (c. 1230–c. 1300 –
see Figure 6.5), were fundamentally commentaries on Alhazen. Yet
none of them would pick up his revolutionary project in astronomy.
This would only happen about 400 years later in the work of
Johannes Kepler.
Figure 4.13 The epitome and last vestige of Ptolemy-style
observational astronomy: the observatory in Galata,
Constantinople (by then, under Ottoman rule, and known as
Istanbul). Established by Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf al-
Shami al-Asadi (Turkish: Takiyüddin, 1526–1585) in 1570, the
observatory featured many of the novel institutional characteristics
that would mark Tycho Brahe’s contemporary observatory (see
Chapter 7). As one can clearly note, the instruments in use here
(not unlike Tycho’s, but with the important difference in size) are
traditional angle-measuring devices, as the image clearly displays.
Tellingly, the observatory was closed down and its purposefully
constructed building demolished by 1580. The image is a copy of
a 1581 illuminated manuscript.
 Discussion Questions
1. If knowledge needs a place, can you think of types of knowledge
that have lost their places? What has happened to them?

2. It is tempting to compare the encyclopedic tradition to its

contemporary online version. Does the analogy hold? To what
degree? Are the effects on knowledge and its culture similar?
Different?

3. What is the importance of the unique continuity of the university as

an institution of knowledge? Does the fact that its main pedagogical
means are still fundamentally the same after so many centuries
constitute an advantage or a drawback?

4. What kind of a university would you have liked to be a part of?

What kind of relations would it have between its faculty (the
academics)? Between faculty and students? Between the university
as a whole and the surrounding world? Does your university come
reasonably close to your ideal?

5. Are there lessons to be learnt from the translations projects,

whether about knowledge in general or about scientific knowledge in
particular? From the length of these projects? From the people and
institutions involved? From their cultural and political import?
Suggested Readings
 Primary Texts

Plinius, Gaius Secundus (Pliny the Elder), Natural History (Historia

Naturalis), John Bostock and Henry T. Riley (trans.) (London: Henry
G. Bohn, 1855–1857), http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/57011150R,
Dedication and Book I, chs. 1–2 (V.1, pp. 6–16); Book II, chs. 17–31
(V.1, pp. 50–63).

Abuˉ ʿAlı¯ ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen), “Alhacen’s Theory of Visual

Perception,” Mark A. Smith (ed.) (2007) 91(4–5) Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society 343–346, 561–577.

Grosseteste, Robert, On light (De Luce), Clare C. Riedl (trans.)

(Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1978).

“The Reaction … to Aristotelian … Philosophy” in E. Grant (ed.), A

Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1974), pp. 42–52.
 Secondary Sources

On the fate of Greek science:

Lehoux, Daryn, What Did The Romans Know? An Inquiry into

Science and Worldmaking (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

On the Muslim adoption of Hellenistic science:

Gutas, Dimitry, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic

Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society
(London: Routledge, 1999).

On Muslim science and philosophy:

Rashed, Roshdi (ed.), Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science

(London: Routledge, 1996), Vols. 1–3.

Rashed, Roshdi, “The Ends Matters” (2003) 1(1) Islam & Science
153–160.

Sabra, Abdelhamid I., “The Appropriation and Subsequent

Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary
Statement” (1987) XXV Journal for History of Science 223–245.

Saliba, George, Islamic Science and the Making of the European

Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

On European medieval science and philosophy:

Grant, Edward, Physical Science in the Middle Ages, Cambridge
History of Science Series (Cambridge University Press, 1977).

Lindberg, David C., Science in the Middle Ages (University of

Chicago Press, 1978).

Lindberg, David C., The Beginnings of Western Science: The

European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and
Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (University of Chicago
Press, 1992).

On the rise of the university:

Grant, Edward, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle

Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Pedersten, Olaf, The First Universities, Richard Nort (trans.)

(Cambridge University Press, 1997).

1There was no relation between King Ptolemy and the astronomer

Ptolemy, but medieval scholars did occasionally confuse them,
drawing the astronomer with a crown on his head.
 5
The Seeds of Revolution
◈
 Monotheism and Pagan Science
Historical periods are almost always introduced in hindsight, with
some agenda. This is doubly true for ‘Middle Ages,’ a term we've
thus far employed to designate the period after the fall of the Roman
Empire. The millennium this term designates was far from being just
‘in the middle,’ and the people living through it experienced as many
changes and upheavals as in any other era. But at least as regards
the coming to being of science, one can hardly dispute that it was
the ushering in of a new age, with the adoption of Hellenistic –
Pagan – science by the dominant monotheistic cultures: first the
Muslim, then the Christian.
We saw in Chapter 1 how early Christianity moved from
Tertullian’s strict rejection of “philosophy … the rash interpreter of the
nature” and its “heresies,” to the compromise sketched by Augustine,
for whom “pagan learning … contains also some excellent
teachings.” But the late medieval scholars who thoroughly immersed
themselves into these “excellent teachings” required much more
detailed answers to the challenge of assimilating the pagan concepts
and modes of thought into the demands of monotheistic belief. It was
a major challenge, whose resolution would shape knowledge in this
new era and for centuries to come.
 The Fundamental Discrepancy
The Hellenistic approach to the study of nature, especially that
evolving from Aristotle’s clear and uncompromising formulation
discussed in Chapter 2, is pagan not in the sense of suggesting
many gods, but the opposite: in not allowing any. Most generally, it
relies strictly on the collection of natural facts and a critical use of the
human mind; it leaves no place for revelation, which, as we
discussed in Chapter 1, is fundamental to the monotheistic religions.
This is perhaps the most difficult for Judaism to accept, because the
moment of God’s direct communication with the Israelites at Mount
Sinai defines it both as a religion and as a nation. Secondly,
Aristotle’s natural philosophy assumes strict causal determinism –
every phenomenon has a clear natural cause – and leaves no place
for miracles. For Christians this was particularly unacceptable,
because miracles constitute their founding mythology – the virgin
birth and the resurrection, as well as their basic rite, the Eucharist, in
which the bread and the wine miraculously turn into the flesh and
blood of Christ. Thirdly, Aristotle argues specifically for the eternity of
the cosmos, leaving no place for creation, the most fundamental
belief shared by all monotheistic religions. Finally, there is no place
for an eternal soul in Aristotle: the soul can be distinguished from the
body but not separated from it, and it perishes together with the
body. This is difficult for both Christianity and Islam, with their
concept of punishment and reward in the afterlife.
 To the modern reader, it may seem that medieval scholars had a
choice. On the one hand, they could – like many scientifically minded
thinkers would do centuries later – abandon religion. But this was not
an option that they even had the vocabulary to entertain: as we
discussed in Chapters 1 and 4, religion provided the framework for
every aspect of their life and thought. On the other hand, those
scholars might have decided – like the early Church fathers and
many monotheistic zealots since – that science needed to be
rejected because it was too incompatible with religion. But they were
too thrilled with the intellectual horizons opened up by Aristotle and
the rest of Hellenistic thought to entertain this option either. Muslim,
Christian and Jewish scholars strove to hold on to both horns of the
dilemma – monotheistic belief and pagan science – and found two
ways out of the contradictions. These were paved by two people who
probably never met, although they were born within ten years and a
10-minute walk from each other, in Cordoba of Al-Andalus: the
southern, Muslim region of medieval Spain.
 Ibn Rushd
The elder of the two was ʾAbu¯ l-Walıˉd Muhˆammad Ibn ʾAhˆmad
Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), whose authority as Aristotle’s interpreter in
Christian Europe, where he was known as Averroes, can be gauged
by the fact that whereas Aristotle was often referred to simply as ‘the
philosopher,’ Averroes was known as ‘the commentator.’ He was a
jurist from a jurists’ family, and served as a judge and high-level
courtier until the pressures of Christianity from the north and the
invasion of North-African Berbers from the south brought about
religious fundamentalism that forced him to flee to North Africa and
he finished his life in Marrakesh.
The fundamental principle of Ibn Rushd’s synthesis was the
primacy of reason over belief – diametrically opposed to Augustine’s
approach which we discussed in Chapter 1. The Qur’an itself, he
argued, commanded the devout Muslim to study philosophy. Even
the very conviction of the existence of God, in Ibn Rushd’s analysis,
is mandated not by irresistible illumination but by philosophical
consideration: it follows from the orderliness of nature and the way
it’s so well-suited for humans to thrive in. The God arising from such
considerations turns out to be rather different from the one
enunciated by religion. This philosophical God is an absolute and
necessary entity, so His existence, His will and His knowledge are
one. Creation, therefore, could not have been an act at a certain
moment in time: God’s will cannot change, and since He had by
necessity always known that the cosmos would be created, it was
always by necessity true that the cosmos would be created (in that
Ibn Rushd followed Ibn Sina, whom we’ll discuss in Chapter 8 and
whose thought he usually rejected as over-Platonist and his
interpretation of Aristotle as simply wrong). In other words: the
cosmos exists not because of what God does, but by virtue of what
He is, hence it is necessary and eternal.
Ibn Rushd was turning God into a completely abstract ratio; a
pure intellect. This allowed him to express the fundamental
Aristotelian principles of necessary causation and the eternity of the
cosmos as divine properties and consequently to practice pagan
science as if it were sanctioned by monotheistic creed. In the
scriptures, of course, God does change His will and His mind,
deciding to create and later to destroy the world, and since the
scriptures cannot be wrong, Ibn Rushd reasoned, their language
must be simple – sometimes allegorical, often personified – to
convey to the vulgar the truth the philosopher obtains through
contemplation. This line of reasoning came to be called ‘the two-truth
doctrine’ by the Christian scholars deriding it.
It is not difficult to imagine how liberating Ibn Rushd’s
philosophy was to monotheistic scholars seeking legitimacy for their
enthusiasm for pagan science, and how disturbing it must have been
to the more conservatively minded. In Christian Europe, in Latin
translation, he immediately drew a group of followers. The group was
entered in the University of Paris around Siger of Brabant (c. 1240–
1280s), a rowdy fellow, who otherwise distinguished himself by
heading a faction in a series of non-intellectual brawls, which almost
led to his execution. Most of what we know about the doctrines and
arguments of this group comes from their fierce adversaries, who
called them ‘Averroists,’ but we can gauge their popularity from the
efforts directed at suppressing their teachings. We can understand
that the rising enthusiasm for Pagan science in the universities
during the thirteenth century clearly caused serious concern among
religious authorities, both within and around these institutions of
learning and education, because a series of regulations were issued
to curb it. We can also learn from the growing seriousness and
details of these rulings that they were not particularly successful.
They culminated in condemnations decreed in 1277 by Etienne
Tempier, the Bishop of Paris, which include over 200 articles of
Aristotelian “Abominable errors” that no one should “defend or
support” on penalty of excommunication. These articles are
formulated in a way demonstrating sophisticated engagement with
the pagan doctrines rather than the suppression they were purported
to achieve. It is prohibited to believe, for example, (Article 6) “that
when all celestial bodies have returned to the same point – which
happens in 36,000 years – the same effects now in operation will be
repeated”; or (Article 98) “that the world is eternal because that
which has a nature by which it could exist through the whole future
has a nature by which it has existed through the whole past” (quoted
from Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science, pp. 47–49).
 Moshe ben Maimon
Christian scholars would not relinquish the study of pagan
knowledge; nor could they afford the radical interpretation offered by
Averroes. The compromise they would end up adopting was first
formulated by Averroes' fellow Cordovan: Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon
(1135–1204), known in Hebrew by the acronym Rambam and in
Latin Europe as Moses Maimonides. Although Maimonides’ family
was forced into exile by the same strife that affected Ibn Rushd –
they traveled all across North Africa to Egypt – he was still a product
of the Jewish golden age of Muslim al Andalus and its magnificent
cross-cultural wealth. He was still the most venerable figure of the
two-millennia-long Jewish Rabbinical tradition; in Cairo he became
the court physician and head of the Jewish community; and his great
philosophical book, More Nevokhim (Guide of the Perplexed) of 1190
or thereabouts, was written in a Jewish dialect of Arabic using the
Hebrew alphabet, explaining and commenting on Aristotelian thought
and its Muslim interpretations to his “perplexed” Jewish flock.
Maimonides has no place for either Augustine’s preference for
faith or Ibn Rushd’s for reason. God created both the world and the
scriptures, and both are for human understanding and carry the
same single truth. Yet since God put us in the world before giving us
The Book – the Torah – understanding nature should precede and
direct the interpretation of scriptures. Both these types of knowledge
are directed by reason – fallible and limited human endeavors – and
God himself is entirely beyond their bounds; we can only say what
He’s not – not corporeal, not in time, etc. The scriptures are an
absolute authority on issues of faith and law, even if their reasons
remain unknown to humans, but they don’t contain clues about the
make-up of the world. The study of this subject belongs to reason
and observation, and in practice – to Aristotle and the philosophers.
What to do, then, about the pagan lines of thought embedded in
Aristotle’s teachings? These need to be defeated on their own terms
– using Aristotelian science to defeat Aristotle’s arguments – in
particular concerning the eternity and necessity of the cosmos. So,
on the one hand, the orderliness of the cosmos reveals that it had to
be by design, which entailed the existence of a designer, hence an
all-knowing God:

Do you hold that it could have happened by chance that a

certain clear humor should be produced, and outside it another
similar humor, and again outside it a certain membrane in which
a hole happened to be bored, and in front of that hole a clear
and hard membrane? … Can someone endowed with
intelligence conceive that the humors, mem-branes, and nerves
of the eye – which … are so well arranged and all of which have
as their purpose the final end of this act of seeing – have come
about fortuitously? Certainly not … This is brought about of
necessity through a purpose of nature. [And since] nature is not
endowed with intellect and the capacity for governance [this]
craftsman-like governance … is the act of an intelligent being.

Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, III.19,

Shlomo Pines (trans. and ann.) (University of Chicago Press,
1963), p. 479
 On the other hand, the many contingent elements of the cosmos
show “that all things exist in virtue of a purpose and not of necessity,
and that He who purposed them may change them and conceive
another purpose” (Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, II.19, p.
303). God had willed the cosmos this way, and might have willed it
differently, for reasons we cannot fathom:

For in the same way as we do not know what was His wisdom in
making it necessary that the spheres should be nine – neither
more nor less – and the number of the stars equal to what it is –
neither more nor less – and that they should be neither bigger
nor smaller than they are, we do not know what was His wisdom
in bringing into existence the universe at a recent period after its
not having existed. The universe is consequent upon His
perpetual and immutable wisdom. But we are completely
ignorant of the rule of that wisdom and of the decision made by
it.

Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, II.18, pp. 301–302

 Thomas Aquinas and Thomism
It took only a few decades for this compromise between pagan
learning and monotheistic belief to take root in Latin Europe. Its
powerful advocate was the Dominican friar Albert of Cologne (1200–
1280), whose great erudition earned him the moniker Albertus
Magnus. The eldest son of a Count, Albert had an emblematicallly
medieval scholarly career: he studied at Padua, Bologna and Paris;
taught theology at Hildesheim, Freiburg, Ratisbon, Strasburg and
Cologne, and became the pope’s court intellectual, defending official
orthodoxy. In this capacity, his preference for Aristotelianism over
Augustinian Neo-Platonism had a resounding impact, especially
coupled with his interpretation of and commentaries on the whole
Aristotelian Corpus, by then available in Latin. A careful reading of
Maimonides informed this interpretation: there is only one divine
intellect, and hence only one truth, Albertus insisted in his clearly
titled text De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroem (The Unity of the
Intellect against the Averroists) of 1256. The study of nature, like the
interpretation of the scriptures, is therefore the study of the laws
instituted by God, and carries its own religious value. This also
means that philosophy of nature, even by the pious, should
concentrate on the orderly and the regular, not the miraculous.
Natural philosophy is the study of the causes God inscribed into
nature, not of His reasons for doing so, so it has no reason to clash
with religion.
 This synthesis of pagan science and monotheistic creed,
formulated in a Muslim context by a Jewish Rabbi, would be made
into the framework of Christian scholarship by Albert’s disciple and
colleague, Thomas of Aquino (1225–1274).
Thomas, often called ‘Aquinas,’ had a similar background and
career to his mentor, although it started with some more excitement.
A son of a noble Italian family, he received his education at the
ancient monastery school in Monte Casino and the relatively new
university in Naples, but his decision to join the Dominican Order at
an early age didn’t sit well with his father. He was abducted by his
brothers and imprisoned for a year in the family estate. After much
failed persuasion and a heroic struggle with a prostitute (who was
sent to seduce him), he was allowed to escape through the window
and go to the University of Paris, where he spent years as both
student and lecturer, mostly under Albert. He wrote vastly (from 1879
to 2014, only thirty-nine of the projected fifty volumes of his Opera
have been published), his views moving in and out of the
mainstream.
Yet for most of his life, Aquinas was not a teacher but a roving
scholar for the pope, and in this position he had the authority and
responsibility to develop the details of the synthesis between science
and religion. He reasserted the Augustinian principle of the primacy
of revelation in matters of faith, but stressed with it the Aristotelian
principle of the primacy of experience and empirical knowledge in
the matters of this world. He went as far as to agree that,
philosophically, the eternity of the cosmos is the most probable
hypothesis, although neither creation nor eternity can be
conclusively demonstrated. Yet since faith dictates that the eternity of
the world is false and heretical, creation is what the Christian has to
wholeheartedly commit to.
Like Maimonides and Albert, however, Thomas found no
contradiction between the two routes to knowledge: both lead to truth
because God is the source of both. God operates in the world
through its laws, which He instituted, so their study, through reason
and experience, is a religious virtue. This route still only leads to
limited knowledge – philosophy can only reveal the ‘secondary
causes’ – the causal relations between things as God created them.
The ‘primary causes,’ which are God’s reasons for creating things
the way He did – indeed for creating them at all – we could only
know if God decided to reveal them to us – through revelation.
Interpreting His words – the scriptures – is the task of theology.
Treating “by the light of divine revelation … the same things which
the philosophical disciplines treat … by the light of natural reason,”
theology is the highest of disciplines (Summa theologiae, Que. I, Art.
1, www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/439/st1-ques1.htm).
Injecting content into these principles, Thomas turns to Plato’s
philosophy to bridge the gap between Aristotle and Christianity. He
adopts and develops the distinction and relations between form and
matter, mostly along Aristotelian lines: matter is one – uniform,
passive, the seat of all potentialities; form is unique, active, the
principle of development and change. In humans, the soul is ‘the
form of the body,’ like in Aristotle; but it also can and does exist
separately, like in Plato. Cosmologically, Thomas allows for pagan
astronomy by identifying the Aristotelian heavens with the Biblical
‘firmament’ and Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’ with God. In matters
where Christianity is not necessarily implicated – whether it’s
epistemology or theory of representation – Thomas is as keen an
Aristotelian as any of his Muslim predecessors.
There were other intellectual options: members of other
educating orders, especially the Franciscans, didn’t feel beholden to
the Dominican philosophical positions and offered their own. But as
the dust of contention settled, it was Thomas’ synthesis that would
come to define and structure scholarship in Latin Europe for at least
four centuries. It wasn’t simply a matter of popularity among
scholars: it would be embedded into the university curriculum and its
very structure of disciplines. ‘Thomism’ would become virtually
synonymous with ‘scholasticism’ – the way Europeans of the High
Middle Ages understood and investigated their world, their God and
themselves from the Age of the Cathedral until early modern times.
 The Renaissance
The relative calm and prosperity that allowed Europeans to build
material and intellectual cathedrals was short lived. In 1337, a war
over the succession to the French throne broke out between the
Plantagenets, the rulers of England, and the Valois, who ruled
France. It would last until 1453, modestly titled the ‘Hundred Years’
War,’ and drew in most of Western Europe. The Holy Roman Empire,
already battling Mongol pressures from the north-east since the
middle of the thirteenth century, managed to engage itself in a series
of doomed belated crusades to the south-east, which not only
exhausted resources and lives, but left in their trail the destabilizing
presence of military orders like the Templars and the Hospitallers.
The religious-intellectual stability represented and buttressed by
Thomism broke into a succession of ugly religious-cum-political
conflicts, the worst of which saw the pope move from Rome to
Avignon for most of the fourteenth century. By far the worst disaster,
however, was neither political nor religious, but natural (although it
most probably had been carried around by armies and traders). It
was the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, which
appears to have originated in Kyrgyzstan around 1338–1339. It
disseminated to India and China, where it killed an estimated 25
million people, reached Constantinople in 1347 and from there it
spread to the Middle East and Europe, where it proved most lethal.
An estimated third of the population between Persia and Egypt was
killed and no less than half of Europe’s: Paris lost 50,000 out of its
100,000 inhabitants and Florence – 70,000 out of 120,000.
 The New City-State and Its Prince
Yet rather amazingly, from the devastation emerged a prosperity the
likes of which Europe hadn’t experienced since the heydays of the
Roman Empire. One reason may have been the brutal fact that the
same resources were now shared by far fewer people; another was
perhaps the energy unleashed in the process of rebuilding. More
long-lasting was the opening of trade routes to the east by the
Mongol unification of Asia – the same opening that allowed the
spread of the plague – whose pioneers of a century earlier have
been immortalized in the picturesque character of Marco Polo. The
fantastic wealth that this cross-continental, cross-cultural commerce
brought to trading cities in Italy like Genoa and Venice was
augmented by an economic novelty: the bank. This institution
embedded new and bold ideas, like the use of money not only as a
currency but as a commodity; borrowing not only for immediate relief
but for investment; monetizing risk; and lending – with the aid of
bonds and promissory notes – more than is available in ‘hard
currency.’ All these allowed for a multiplication of resources and
made some families – notably the Medicis of Florence – even
wealthier than the long-distance merchants (and later – explorers)
whose expeditions they were financing.
Shielded by the Alps from the land warfare of the new empires,
Italy was particularly poised to exploit these new opportunities. With
the Papacy leaving and the Holy Roman Empire retreating to deal
with its challenges from the north, a power vacuum was created in
which these newly wealthy cities – Genoa and Venice; Florence and
Milan; Pisa, Luca, Siena and others – could claim their
independence and run their business to their own best (mostly
pecuniary) interests. The city-state, reminiscent of that of antiquity,
re-emerged, and with it – a new type of knowledge and a new type of
knower.
Most of these cities became, initially, republics, or rather joint
oligarchies, run by senates composed of representatives of the
powerful families. More often than not, however, one of these
families managed to wrest sole (though always contested) control,
imposing their own head as the prince: the Este family in Ferrara;
Sforza and Visconti in Milan; della Rovere in Urbino; and the
greatest of them all, as we have noted, the Medici clan of Florence.
These self-appointed princes were never assigned a role in the
grand religious and cosmological theater which had imbued the rule
of their predecessors with a sense of inevitability (see Chapter 1).
They could not claim the bravery and loyalty of knights, the ancient
lineage of kings, or the Church’s blessing of emperors. They had
acquired their rule of clan and city recently, by intrigue, wallet and
stiletto, and their subjects knew it. They had to acquire legitimacy,
and so they did – by building a court and surrounding themselves
with painters and sculptors, poets, rhetoricians and philosophers.
The task of these artists, writers and scholars was to glorify the
prince; to reproduce his image, literally and figuratively, as a grand
persona, to whom governance belonged by right. The patronage of
Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘il Magnifico’ (1449–1492) – who personified
more than anyone else the character of the Renaissance prince –
extended to painters like Andrea del Verrocchio, Sandro Botticelli,
Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti and to scholars like
Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Niccolò
Machiavelli’s The Prince of 1513, analyzing the personal traits and
political strategies befitting such a prince, was dedicated to
Lorenzo’s grandson, Lorenzo Piero (1492–1519). The Sforzas of
Milan competed with the Medicis for the services of da Vinci, and
also had a particular taste for music: the glory of Lorenzo’s
contemporary Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1444–1476) was sung by
composers the likes of Josquin des Prez, Alexander Agricola and
Gaspar van Weerbeke. The glorification didn’t always work: all this
divine music didn’t make the Milanese forget Galeazzo’s cruelty nor
the rival families forget Sforza’s transgressions, and the stiletto
claimed his life on Christmas day at the church entrance.
 The Humanists
The artists and scholars congregating around the Renaissance court
represented a new type of person of knowledge. They were neither
‘free’ like the Greek philosophers, nor educators like the university
faculty. Towards the scholars in the monasteries these new court
intellectuals directed particularly vicious criticism: the scholastics’
commitment to the life of the mind – their vita contemplativa – was
but a barren self-indulgence in words, they charged. Proper for the
artist, the writer or the philosopher was the vita activa – a life about-
town, fully engaged in politics and commerce. ‘Humanists’ is what
they called themselves: students of and participants in human life in
this world, rather than contemplating the next. Aggrandizing
themselves and their princes, they titled their cultural project
‘Renaissance’: the alleged rebirth of ancient Hellenized Rome,
reducing the thousand years since its fall to mere ‘Middle Ages', the
time in between, separating old and new glory. Petrarch (Francesco
Petrarca, 1304–1374), perhaps the first of the humanists and the
one who shaped their interests in the Greek and Roman classics,
their disdain for the “Dark Ages” (a term he’s credited with coining)
and their innovative attitude towards their vernacular languages –
Tuscan for him – worked for the most glorious prince of all, the pope.
Rather than theology, cosmology and natural philosophy, the
humanists concentrated their interests in earthly and politically
effective disciplines like history and rhetoric. Philology, in particular,
received a new and exciting role (which we discuss more in Chapter
6) as a new translation project was underway. The humanists were
fascinated by the masterpieces of their adopted classical heritage,
but were contemptuous of the translated versions produced by the
efforts of 200 years earlier (discussed in Chapter 4): Aristotle was a
hero of a glorious past, while Scholastic Aristotelianism they found
barren and distorted. They therefore set out to recover the original
texts, equipped with the great wealth of their brave new world and
enabled by the newly opened routes to the East. Monks of the
Eastern Church, fleeing Muslim pressure, brought with them
manuscripts – light, portable and now highly coveted by the deep-
pocketed princes, seeking all genres of marvels and rarities to adorn
their court. A heroic allure befitting of the age came to adorn the
project: in 1406 one Jacopo Angelo saved himself and a manuscript
of Ptolemy’s Geography from a sinking ship; in 1417, the only
surviving manuscript of Lucretius was brought from “a remote
monastery” by Poggio Bracciolini. The imploding Byzantine Empire,
before finally falling to the Muslim Ottomans in 1453, provided not
only manuscripts but the necessary linguistic skills as well: in 1396,
the desperate Byzantine emperor Manuel Paleologus arrived in Italy
in an attempt to recruit emergency assistance. He clearly
overestimated the solidarity of his Christian brethren, and returning
empty-handed, he also left behind an intellectual from his entourage:
Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1355–1415) remained in Florence, and
began teaching Greek language and literature to Florentine courtiers
and humanists.
 The Meeting of Scholar and Artisan
The court was not the only site where the great new riches were
generated and dispensed: the marketplace was another. Economic
prosperity; erosion of social and political barriers; a new cultural
celebration of earthly goods, challenging the traditional Christian
ascetic values – all came together in the thriving urban marketplace,
creating clear opportunities for both artisan and scholar to climb the
walks of life. Everything promising to produce wealth or glory could
find a public willing to pay: a new brilliant text – poetic or scientific; a
new technological invention – practical or spectacular; a new tool –
material or intellectual. The marketplace provided the scholar and
the artisan with an opportunity to meet and the incentive to
communicate: the scholar’s abstract theories could help the artisan
re-examine and improve traditional means and habits of doing and
making; the artisan’s practical, empirical skills allowed the scholar to
question and subvert old theories. The market rewarded practicality
and innovation. Even mathematics, the most ephemeral of scholarly
disciplines, became useful, helping the merchant calculate interest
rates and investment returns and the painter design visual
harmonies. The ancient dichotomy between knowing-that and
knowing-how was eroding, and in the trading zones between
episteme and techne new knowledge was being created.
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1466) is an excellent representative
of this stage in the construction of the cathedral that is science. Born
to a Florentine notary and city official and related through his mother
to the extremely rich Spini and Aldobrandini families, he was still
trained as a goldsmith – the practical vocation befitting his artistic
talents and apparently no longer a disgrace even for a wealthy and
educated family. His theoretical education was originally limited to
his father’s teaching, until later in life a friendship with the
mathematician, merchant and physician Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli
(1397–1482) spurred his interests in mathematics.
In 1413, Brunelleschi demonstrated the power of the
combination of practical and theoretical skills and talents – when the
ambient culture allowed them to be exercised together – with an
invention that would reshape European art: mathematical
perspective. He didn’t leave an account of the invention (a little more
about his secrecy later) but a description of the way it was
introduced in Florence’s Piazza del Duomo (by his friend, the scholar
Antonio Manetti, 1423–1497) provides good hints. The spectators
were to stand in the dark entrance of the Duomo – the cathedral of
Santa Maria del Fiore – and look across the piazza at the Battistero.
In one hand, they held Brunelleschi’s painting of the baptistery,
facing away from them, and through a hole in the painting peeped at
its reflection in a mirror they held in the other hand (Figure 5.1).
Lowering the mirror and raising it again they were treated to a visual
marvel: one couldn’t tell the real building from the reflected painting
(especially since the mirror, painted silver around the edges,
reflected also the sky and the moving clouds). Medieval painters
understood that in order to represent depth on a flat canvas, lines
which in the real world are parallel should be drawn as converging,
but the exact geometry of this convergence eluded them (note the
raised figures and the slipping plates in Figure 5.2). Brunelleschi’s
theatrical display hints at the way he may have discovered the
angles of convergence to create a convincing sense of depth: by
tracing them on a mirror. Brunelleschi was putting to use the ancient
mathematical science of optics and the new developments in the art
of producing mirrors (befitting the age of vanity) to produce a new
spectacular technique, befitting palazzo and piazza: the ability to
create a powerful illusion (Figure 5.3).
Figure 5.1 On the left: The Piazza del Duomo in Florence with the
Battistero (baptistery) on the left and theSanta Maria del Fiore
cathedral on the right, with Brunelleschi’s octagonal dome on top
of it. On the right: Jim Anderson’s depiction of Brunelleschi’s
perspective spectacle. The observer stands inside the heavily
shaded cathedral entrance (note the shadows in the photograph
on the left), facing the baptistery. She (apparently both ladies and
gentlemen were invited to the demonstration) holds Brunelleschi’s
painting of the baptistery with its painted side facing away, towards
the baptistery, looking at it through a hole in the canvas. In the
other hand, she holds a mirror facing her. When she lowers the
mirror, she sees the baptistery; when she lifts it, she sees in it a
reflection of the painting, and a reflection in the painting of the sky
and clouds. According to Manetti, one could hardly tell the
difference between the real baptistery and its reflected
representation.
Figure 5.2 Medieval attempts at perspective: a fourteenth-century
illumination of a manuscript of the Chronicles (of the Hundred
Years’ War) by Jean Froissart (c. 1337–c. 1405), depicting a
banquet with the Duke of Lancaster and the King of Portugal
(British Library Ms. Royal 14EIV, f.244 v.). Note that the illuminator
attempted to portray depth and had an idea of how to achieve it:
the lines of tile are converging and the more remote figures are
higher up. Without the geometrical rules of perspective, however,
he cannot create an illusion of three-dimensionality: the table
appears tilted as if the plates and food are about to slip off it.
 Figure 5.3 An example of perfect linear perspective and the
powerful illusion of depth it enabled the artist to create: Piero della
Francesca’s Ideal City (c. 1470). All the lines that would be parallel
in reality – the street, the paving, the stories of the buildings on
both sides – converge towards one point on the imagined horizon
behind the circular building in the middle. The effect is an apparent
three-dimensionality on the two-dimensional canvas.

The Duomo provided the literal and metaphorical foundations for

another demonstration of Brunelleschi’s virtuosic ability to merge
material and theoretical knowledge, or knowing-how and knowing-
that. Five years after the invention of linear perspective, he
submitted a bid to build a dome to the cathedral. The required size of
the envisioned dome – bigger than Rome’s Pantheon – turned its
construction into such a challenge that the cathedral had remained
dome-less since its construction a century earlier. The method of
building a large dome at the time called for ‘centering’: filling the
space beneath the dome with heavy scaffoldings to carry its weight
until the keystone was put in place and the structure became self-
supporting (see Chapter 1). For this massive size the method
seemed structurally dangerous and prohibitively expensive, and
Brunelleschi won the tender by promising to dispense with it
altogether and meet the challenge at a fraction of the expected price.
 Brunelleschi built two domes. The beautiful octagon we’re
accustomed to seeing (Figure 5.1, left) is actually a light roof, carried
by a heavier vault into which Brunelleschi’s ingenuity was invested.
On the artisanal side, it was constructed with innovative ‘fishbone’
brick-laying techniques, which enabled him to wrap the courses
around the curve, creating stability before the whole structure was
complete. A combination of craftsmanship and erudition allowed
engineering creativity: inspired by a new translation of Vitruvius (see
Chapter 1), Brunelleschi designed and built cranes and hoists of
unprecedented efficiency (Figure 5.4). Bringing in new mathematical
skills, he apparently had in his own dwelling a scale model of his
dome, on which he could experiment with his novelties. Most
crucially and quite mysteriously, Brunelleschi’s vault was not
hemispheric but parabolic. Perhaps by calculations (though quite
unlikely), or perhaps by experimenting on his model or in some other
way, Brunelleschi realized that other, more complex curves provided
more stable arches than the simple and perfect circle.
Figure 5.4 An example of Brunelleschi’s combination of knowing-
how and knowing-that: a revolving crane built for the work on the
Duomo. This hoisting machine employs an assembly of the
Archimedean ‘simple machines,’ discussed in Chapter 9, that
would be crucial for Galileo: winch, pulley, infinite screw. It’s
difficult to know which part of this assembly Brunelleschi learned
from traditional masons and which part he developed following
theoretical principles, but as a working machine it was novel and
exciting enough for this diagram to be drawn by Bonaccorso
Ghiberti, the nephew of Brunelleschi’s competitor/collaborator
Lorenzo.
 As with the invention of perspective, we’re bound to use the
words ‘apparently’ and ‘seemingly’ because Brunelleschi – like the
artisan of the guild and unlike the scholar of the monastery or the
university – kept his knowledge secret. Whether it was theoretical
and abstract or practical and material, it was trade knowledge, a
commodity for which one had to pay. Brunelleschi was an ambitious
and scrupulous man: when the Florentine senate, wary that his
promises were too good to be true, forced him to partner with
Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455), his erstwhile rival for this and
previous projects, he accepted the condition so as not to lose the
tender, but then feigned illness, returning only when receiving sole
responsibility and 90 percent of the pay. When his Florentine
masons demanded a raise, he replaced them with Pisan ones,
taking the locals back only after a substantial pay cut. These are not
mere anecdotes, but characteristics of the new age and its new
knowledge: Brunelleschi’s virtuosity was his livelihood, and he traded
it for profit and glory.
 The Movable Press and Its Cultural Impact
Knowledge turned from spiritual elevation to material goods,
technological innovation became prized and texts – a coveted
commodity. So it is hardly surprising that there were those who
sought to benefit from them. Manuscripts were very expensive. The
material they were written on – parchment (processed hide, also
called vellum) – was so costly that scribes often tried to erase and
write over manuscripts, creating palimpsests on which priceless
classics are sometimes found, hidden under insignificant scribblings.
More importantly: the work invested in copying manuscripts was
enormous, and required rare learnedness. The ability to produce
texts quickly, cheaply, regularly and in significant quantities loomed
as a lucrative prospect. The feat was achieved around 1450 – some
fifteen years after Brunelleschi completed his dome – by another
goldsmith, a German, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz (c. 1400–1468),
with the invention of the movable press.
 The Invention
Like his Florentine brother-in-trade, Gutenberg was an entrepreneur
and a risk-taker, whose career saw rises and falls. He even shared
Brunelleschi’s interest in mirrors: one of the purposes of the press
project was to relieve him of the debts incurred in a previous failed
project of mirrors devised to capture the holy light of relics. Since,
like Brunelleschi, he kept his knowledge secret, we know little about
the process of developing his technology that appears to have taken
him a whole decade. The main stages of this technology changed
little for centuries:
A character – a letter or a punctuation mark – is carved onto a
punch, which is then used to create an indentation in the matrix. The
matrix is put into a mold and the mold into a wooden block, into
which molten metal is poured to make a type (Figure 5.5). A
collection of types of all the required characters is the font, which is
arranged in a rectangular case with many compartments. The
typesetter sets the types in lines – the letters positioned to form a
mirror-image to the manuscript – and the lines are arranged into
galleys held by a wooden frame. Ink is spread onto the galleys, a
paper placed and pressed, and a page is printed (Figure 5.6).
Figure 5.5 The punch, matrix and mold of the movable press. The
punch and matrix changed little over the centuries. The mold here
is a nineteenth-century version, easier to use than the original
ones but still fundamentally the same. The core of Gutenberg’s
invention – the ability to produce varied texts by a standard
process – persisted even as his technology gave way first to offset
lithography late in the nineteenth century and then to digital
printing. It is nicely captured by Theodore de Vinne, the author of
the 1876 The Invention of Printing (New York: Francis and Hart)
from which the images are taken: “The depth of the stamped letter,
and its distance from the side, must be absolutely uniform in all the
matrices required for a font or a complete assortment of letter [in
order] to secure a uniform height to all the types, and to facilitate
the frequent changes of matrix on the mould … For every
character or letter really required in a full working assortment of
types, the type founder cuts a separate punch and fits up a
separate matrix; but for all the characters and letters which are
made to be used together, there is but one mould. Types are of no
use … if they cannot be arranged and handled with facility, and
printed in lines that are truly parallel … The uniformity of the body
… is as essential as the variety of face” (pp. 55–56).
Figure 5.6 The basic stages of the Guttenberg printing press,
which changed little until the introduction of rotary and offset
printing in the mid-nineteenth century. Here depicted in the
illustration ‘The Printer’s Workshop’ by Jost Amman to Hartmann
Schopper’s Panoplia (Book of Trades) from 1568 (Frankfurt am
Main: Sigmund Feierabend). In the background two typesetters sit
in front of type drawers and set the pages using a composition
stick. In the foreground, the younger man on our right – the
apprentice or novice – applies ink to the galleys and then lays a
blank sheet of paper from the pile in front of him. The inked frame
with the paper on top is then moved under the press and
pressured by the screw. The older man – the master – on our left
 checks the freshly printed page and puts it on the pile in front of
him.

Like all complex inventions, Gutenberg’s was mostly an

assemblage of known technologies: the press was a converted olive
press (used to obtain oil); ink and paper were in common use
(although Gutenberg also improved his ink); and printing from a
mirror-image was a well-known technique, used originally in China
for decorating silk, and employed in the Muslim world and Europe
since the Middle Ages. Befitting a goldsmith, Gutenberg’s main
material innovation was an alloy: the metal composite which could
be cast into durable characters that preserved their sharp relief upon
cooling. This material invention embeds the crucial innovation of the
movable press, which is a conceptual innovation: standardization.
Standardization is what made Gutenberg’s press profitable: all types
were of the same size, ensuring that the same matrix and mold, as
well as the metal of an over-used type, could be used again and
again with minimal adjustment. Standardizing the sizes of pages
meant the frames could also be reused. Gutenberg’s innovation was
conceptual, but could not be achieved without his unique material
skills: he was not alone among his contemporaries in attempting to
standardize printing in similar ways; his way succeeded because his
alloy and ink were simply better.
Standardized printing dropped the price of books to a fraction of
their previous cost, and their availability rose exponentially. The
cultural experience may perhaps be compared to ours with the
advent of the internet, but it was significantly more dramatic: people
who can now access the internet could have afforded books
beforehand; but until the movable press, unless you were a scholar
by vocation, you were unlikely to ever encounter a manuscript. A
book, on the other hand, was a common artifact – it was not found in
every household, but usually within the village, at least in the hands
of the priest. And for scholars the change was even more dramatic:
no longer was the master the only one holding the text, hence
wielding final authority over its content and proper interpretation –
every student could avail himself of one (Figure 4.8, left, nicely
captures the transition). That also meant that censorship became
much more difficult; for example, when Galileo was put under house
arrest in Florence and the Inquisition prohibited the publication of his
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he had the book
published in Strasburg. A marvelous imaginary community became
possible: the ‘republic of letters,’ uniting scholars from all over
Europe, and soon thereafter – all over the world. These scholars no
longer needed to travel like the friars of yore to study a manuscript in
a library: they could buy and collect books, establish their own library
and correspond with other scholars who could own similar libraries
and the same books.
 Imitation and Inspiration
The same books: standardizing reproduction standardized the text.
The manuscript used to be a unique artifact: copying required every
copier to comprehend and interpret the text in order to recognize the
idiosyncrasies of his predecessor’s script and correct earlier
mistakes of copying or misunderstanding, and every copier
introduced his own. Each copy was personal and final, but each
version was also open to reinterpretation and change by the next
scribe to copy it. Once the typesetter replaced the scribe, copying
ceased to be a scholarly re-creation of a text and became a technical
task, oblivious to content. “Imitation was detached from inspiration,
copying from composing” (Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an
Agent of Change, p. 126): the ‘author’ became sharply distinguished
from the copier, and the concepts of copyrights and plagiarism could
be invented.
Standardization allowed accuracy and authority. The book was
public and unchanging: the galleys were proofed and corrected
before printing, and all copies printed from them – all books of the
same edition – were identical. Standardization also allowed neutral
indexing and cross-referencing. It enabled the law of the land or the
authoritative interpretation of the scriptures to be unified and
centrally enforced: it could be formulated in one place – the capital or
a holy city – printed in another place, and distributed unchanged
throughout the kingdom or among all believers, many travel-days
away, overriding any local lore and custom.
 Standard pagination meant indexes and cross-referencing.
Proofreading allowed tables, calendars and diagrams – all of which
were very precarious in a manuscript since even the most minor
error could render them meaningless. Incorporating older techniques
of printing – woodcuts and engravings – allowed images to be
added, which had an impact far beyond decoration. Logic, in
particular, which since Aristotle was a linguistic art, verbally
analyzing modes of thinking and argumentation, was reconceived as
a visual means of disciplining reason. A leader among the new
generation of humanists pursuing this visual turn was Petrus Ramus
(Pierre de la Ramée), who was born in 1515 and stabbed to death
during the Bartholomew Day massacre on August 26, 1572. “All the
things that Aristotle has said,” wrote Ramus irreverently, “are
inconsistent because they are poorly systematized and can be called
to mind only by the use of arbitrary mnemonic devices” (quoted by
Ong, Ramus and the Decay of Dialogue, pp. 46–47). For Ramus and
scholars for whom the press was an integral part of learned life, logic
needed to be organized, practical, creative and bring to mind new
relations between things and concepts – all of which could be
achieved visually, as in Figure 5.7. Logic could and should serve as
an accurate map between concepts, and geographical maps could
and should accurately represent the world: the standardized, proof-
read press eliminated the inevitable inaccuracies in a copied
manuscript that used to limit maps to a symbolic role (Figure 5.8).
Figure 5.7 The hierarchical organization of logic according to
Petrus Ramus, introduced as the table of contents for his 1594
Dialectica libri duo. Logica is divided into inventio (the formulation
of arguments) and iudicio (their judgment); the former is then
divided into ‘artificial’ and ‘testimonial’ and so on. None of the
terms or the relations between them are particularly novel, but this
way of presenting and thinking of them is new, and dependent on
the standardized reproduction enabled by the movable press: such
a complex image would not have been trusted to be copied
accurately by hand.
Figure 5.8 The changing idea of visual representation arising from
the printing press, as exemplified by two mappae mundi (maps of
the world). On the left, a so-called a T-O map (after its shape) from
Isadore of Seville’s 623 Etymologiae (see Chapter 4). Although
this image is taken from its first printed version (1472), the text
was written well before standardized reproduction could be
imagined, so the map is drawn without any pretense of
geographical details – all these would have been lost when copied
by hand. Isadore obviously didn’t think the world ‘looked’ like that –
he was representing a religious idea of its arrangement, with
Jerusalem at the center and the paradise at the outmost East –
“east of Eden,” as told in Genesis – and at the top (note ‘Oriens’ at
the top and ‘Occidens’ at the bottom). The 1657 map on the right,
by the Dutch engraver and cartographer Nicolaes Visscher I
(1618–1679), is titled “Of the history of Paradise and the Lands of
Kanaan.” As its name demonstrates, the map is just as mythical,
but it is drawn with a clear idea of visually capturing real
geographic features, like mountains, rivers, seas and islands (note
that Cyprus is quite accurate, though not to scale). This is possible
because once engraved on a copper plate of the standard size,
the image could be proofed and then pressed continuously and
uniformly.
 Global Knowledge
Maps would become the emblem of the knowledge befitting the
budding new age. Standardized, visual and impersonal, they allowed
the skilled user to find his way towards and around previously
unknown places.
 Navigating the Open Seas
Navigation in foreign terrain had not been an important type of
European knowledge. Voyages were almost exclusively on well-
traveled routes and navigation was based on local know-how.
Captains and pilots were acquainted with the sea they were traveling
through much like guides on land: they recognized currents and
winds and features of the shores that they tried to keep within sight.
This was knowledge acquired by apprenticeship and mastered
through practice. But in the second half of the fifteenth century – the
two generations following the invention of the movable press –
Europeans departed the comfort of their land-bound seas and took
to the oceans.
They could not hope for such immediate, personal acquaintance
with such vastness. The islanders of the South Pacific, great nomads
of the open sea, could navigate by cloud patterns and bird
trajectories, but even they were island-hopping. Between 1405 and
1433, vast Chinese fleets were dispatched to explore the shores of
South East Asia, India, the Arab Peninsula and East Africa. But even
they, under the command of the eunuch-admiral Zheng He, traveled
along well-known trade routes. Neither the Polynesian Wa’a Kaulua
(the double-hulled canoe) nor the Chinese Chuán (the large sail
ship) attempted what the European Caravel did: to sail from home to
a destination on the other side of the globe, not knowing for sure if it
was really there, how far away it was and what would lie along the
way.
 That they would even try such feats almost defies explanation.
The prospects of returning from these voyages were so low that one
wouldn’t expect curiosity, honor or even greed to outweigh the fear.
Yet they did try, and the reasons do seem to have been fortune and
glory.
The thriving trade through Mongol-ruled Asia that we mentioned
above insatiably whet Europe’s appetite for goods from the East –
silk and porcelain from China; spices from India; exotic fruits from
Malaya and medicines from Sumatra. Their own new-found
prosperity made the Italians, and then their neighbors and
competitors north and west of the Alps, somewhat more capable of
paying for these luxuries with wool and leather. Yet lucrative as it
was, the new global trade left the European merchants dissatisfied.
The main beneficiaries were their Muslim counterparts, particularly
Arabs who ruled the trade routes through Asia and the Indian Ocean
and brought these coveted commodities to the port towns of the
Eastern Mediterranean – Alexandria, Tripoli, Constantinople – from
where Genovese and Venetian ships would take them to markets
throughout Europe. Bypassing the Muslim mediation – and for the
Iberians and the French also the Italian stronghold on the
Mediterranean – promised enormous profits but entailed tremendous
risks. It also required the conviction that the mariners’ own risk
wasn’t reckless, but that the unknown routes could ultimately be
made known.
 Discoveries
By the end of the fifteenth century, Europeans were on their way to
mastering this new knowledge. First were the Portuguese, closely
followed by the Spaniards. In 1456, Diogo Gomes made it to the
Cape Verde archipelago near the west coast of Africa, and in 1460,
Pedro de Sintra reached Sierra Leone. Within the next decade, João
de Santarém and others made it past the equator to the islands of
the Gulf of Guinea and to the coasts of today’s Ghana, achieving the
intended commercial goal: trading gold directly with the local Arabs
and Berbers. A crucial breakthrough in the continuous encroachment
around the coasts of Africa came in 1488, when Bartolomeu Dias
sailed around the southern tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean: a
marine route was opened to the breathtaking riches of the spice
trade. In 1498, Vasco da Gamma completed the task by making it to
Calicut. Meanwhile, Christopher Columbus convinced the Spanish
Court to allow him to circumvent the now-Portuguese stronghold on
the Asian trade by sailing west. In 1492, he discovered, instead of a
route to China, a new continent. The name it came to be known by
steals some of Columbus’ deserved glory but tells of the context of
these discoveries. The name America originates with the Florentine
Amerigo Vespucci, whose letter to his employer, published in 1502
and translated and distributed soon all over Europe, announced that
it was indeed a Mundus Nouvus (for the Europeans) – as was the
letter’s title – on which Columbus had landed, rather than the eastern
shores of Asia. The employer was none other than Lorenzo de’
Medici, whose bank was financing many of the expeditions under
Vespucci’s close watch, sometimes as an active participant. Like
capital, knowledge was transgressing boundaries: Columbus the
Italian had offered his services to the Portuguese king before settling
for the Spanish; his compatriot Giovanni da Verrazzano explored
North America’s Atlantic Coast under the French flag, from South
Carolina to Newfoundland; the Englishman Henry Hudson sailed up
the Hudson River on behalf of the Dutch.
Columbus didn’t make it to China, but his cousin Rafael
Perestrello did, landing in Guangzhou in 1516, inaugurating trade
with the mainland. Japan opened to European trade – in particular in
firearms, which the Japanese were quick to reverse-engineer,
produce and sell to the Koreans – in 1543. Soon Japan was directly
connected to the New World: in 1565, Andrés de Urdaneta
deciphered the regular directions of the Pacific trade winds:
eastward north of the equator; westward south of it – similar, if on a
much larger scale, to the Atlantic. This opened up a direct route
between Japan and the Philippines, which had just been violently
claimed by King Philip II of Spain. Struggling to wrest some of the
riches of the eastern trade from the Iberians, who ruled the South
Seas, the Dutch, French and English turned north. They explored the
shores of (now) California, Virginia and Canada searching for the
Northern Passage to China and India. They could not find it, nor
fortunes like those of South and Central America, but beyond
unknowingly preparing the immense migration movement to follow,
they were honing their marine skills: in sailing, navigation and piracy.
In 1580, Francis Drake, who excelled in all three, led a captured
Portuguese ship – the Santa Maria, renamed Mary, then renamed
Golden Hind – in circumnavigating the globe.
The first to attempt this venture did not survive it. Back in 1513,
Vasco Núñez de Balboa used much violence to cross the Isthmus of
Panama and reach the shores of the Pacific, and in 1519, Ferdinand
Magellan, crossing the straits now bearing his name, made it from
the Atlantic to the Pacific by sea on his way back home. Only one of
the five vessels that had left on the expedition survived to complete
the circumnavigation and return to Spain, and only thirty-five men of
the original 240, under the only remaining captain: the Basque Juan
Sebastián Elcano (Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines). It
was not a valid trade route – the fortunes that Drake would bring
back from his circumnavigation fifty years after this first one were
robbed from the Spaniards, rather than earned by commerce. But
East and West were connected.
 Global Commerce
Yet more than through these heroic – or reckless – voyages, the
globe was now interconnected by the very booty for which Drake
raided the Spanish colony in Panama: silver. Since the Chinese and
Japanese merchants were far less impressed with European goods
than the Europeans were with theirs, European purchasing power
was limited. But East Asians needed no introduction to silver, which
had served them as common currency for many centuries, officially
and unofficially. Like gold, silver was useless beyond its symbolic
and aesthetic value, and it was not as rare and precious, hence not
as dangerous to handle. It was extremely coveted in all cultures
familiar with it – even if these cultures were completely oblivious to
the existence of one another. Around the Mediterranean, silver has
always instigated and bankrolled wars: in the fifth century BCE the
Athenians financed their war against the Persian invasion with silver
from their Laurium mines; in the third to second centuries BCE Rome
and Carthage waged wars over the silver mines in the Iberian
Peninsula.
The Spanish conquerors of the New World thus knew what they
were looking for, and in 1531, a decade after Mexico’s bloody
conquest by Hernán Cortés, three Spanish miners found it in the
remotest regions of his occupation, near Taxco. Fifty years of
prospecting and plundering later, the quest for the precious metal
culminated in the materialization of the legendary Sierra de la Plata –
Silver Mountains – in Potosí (today’s Bolivia). On the backs of local
forced laborers and African slaves, European merchants now had
the wherewithal to buy porcelain from China, silk from Japan and
spices from India.
What emerged was not only a two-way exchange of goods for
silver, but a global network in which commodities, currencies and
especially knowledge – technologies and skills – were competing
and changing hands. We already mentioned the weapons that the
Japanese bought from the Portuguese, taught themselves to
produce and sold to the Koreans. Their evolving marine-military
capacities – coupled with a willingness to use the extreme violence
that made them effective – allowed the Portuguese to monopolize
the trade between the Indian Ocean and Europe. Mariners of the
South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal were not familiar with the
ancient Mediterranean custom of violently enforced territoriality of
marine trade routes, and soon the Portuguese could extend their
monopoly to the inter-Asian trade, taking textiles from India to
Indonesia, spices from Indonesia to China, and silk and porcelain
between China and Japan. They – and the Dutch and English who
aggressively wrested away their monopoly in the early seventeenth
century – were no longer selling goods but marine skills and
technology: a ship built in Rotterdam could sail to the Indian Ocean
where it would spend its entire life operated by a local crew under a
Dutch captain.
Other kinds of knowledge were traveling in other directions. The
porcelain trade with Europe was so lucrative that its manufacturers in
Jingdezheng, more than 800 kilometers from the Hong Kong port
from which it would be shipped, were reshaping their vases to suit
what they learned or speculated to be European taste. The secrets
of their trade were also moving. Japanese porcelain makers couldn’t,
and seemingly had, previously felt a need to emulate the quality of
high-end Chinese porcelain. But by the middle of the sixteenth
century, eager to tap into the European wealth, they were buying
kilns and expertise from their competitors in Korea (on whose soil
they were soon to wage war against China, using Spanish
weapons). Europeans had been trying to mimic this marvelous art
since the first Qingbai vessel was presented to Louis the Great of
Hungary in 1338 by a Chinese embassy on its way to the pope. But
with little success: Chinese clay – Kaolin – was necessary, and even
more importantly: Chinese know-how.
Theoretical knowledge proved to be susceptible to the
challenges and opportunities of the new global networks. European
scholars, especially if they shared the humanists’ sensitivity to the
changing world around them, could not escape the realization that
much of what they knew about the world was simply wrong.
Augustine had convincing arguments why there should not be
humans on the other side of the globe: there was no reason to
believe that it wasn’t covered in water and the scriptures didn’t report
any of Adam’s offspring traveling south. Yet, convincing as his
arguments were, he was wrong: there were humans in the Southern
Hemisphere. Careful calculations based on the Biblical story
concluded that Noah’s flood supposedly occurred around 2350 BCE,
but the Chinese had much earlier records – reliable records – of
kingdom and worship. The Chinese in particular, but also the great
cultures of Asia and the Americas, demonstrated that human dignity
and morality could thrive without the knowledge of God. Europeans’
knowledge of the non-human world proved as wanting: the Indian
Ocean wasn’t land-locked, as Ptolemy had said. Aristotle recorded
had some 500 species of animals in his writings and Dioscorides’ De
Materia Medica – the definitive first-century encyclopedia –
mentioned about 600 species of plants (see Chapter 8). But, by
1594, the botanical garden of the Faculty of Medicine of Leiden
University listed 1,060 species in its inventory and many more were
coming: from Mexico and India; Indonesia and the West Indies;
Japan and Malabar; tropical Africa and China.
 Knowledge for the New Age
For all participants in and observers of this global network of
exchange, and in particular for Europeans – the most active and
aggressive among them – new knowledge was required. More
crucial than trying to fill the great lacunas with content was the
realization that both knowing-that and know-how had to change their
form. Knowledge was being created and exchanged by traveling and
for traveling, so it had to take a shape that would allow it to travel.
Knowledge of this new form needed, to begin with, to be factual
and accurate, especially since it often came from afar and therefore
could not be immediately verified. Crucial decisions had to be based
on trust: a merchant whose silk turned out as good as promised
would be able to sell his next boatload before it saw a shore. In
contrast, the Medici Bank would not extend credit again to an
explorer whose previous reports had not proven credible.
This new knowledge needed to be standardized and
translatable. Spanish and Chinese traders in Guangzhou or
Portuguese and Indian merchants in Malacca needed to converse on
the quality and purity of porcelain, silver and turmeric; an Indonesian
crew and a Dutch captain in the Bay of Bengal needed to
communicate expertise and experience gained on opposite sides of
the globe and relate to one another information about winds, sails
and currents.
Life depended on this knowledge being precise. Quantities of
water and food needed to be precisely calculated; large enough to
suffice until the next landing – yet not so large as to dangerously
slow the ship. Marine maps needed to be precise enough that the
pilot – quite likely unacquainted with the seascape, as we discussed
– could steer away from unobservable hazards and into a safe but
unfamiliar shore. In the middle of the ocean, the only clues for
navigation were the position of the heavenly bodies, so for the first
time in their history star maps and ephemerides (position tables) had
to be precise. Around the equator, an error of one degree –
completely acceptable for the academic astronomer – would result in
a deviation of more than 100 kilometers off the planned path. The
horrible fate of a ship missing an island where provisions were to be
loaded is captured well in the legend of the ‘Flying Dutchman’ – the
ghost ship floating aimlessly on the ocean.
Mathematics, the most abstract of disciplines, became the most
practical tool for the banker on land and the sailor at sea. The
ancients had an aesthetic fascination with the precision of
mathematics and this very precision meant to them that it belonged
strictly to the realm of the ideal (see Chapters 2 and 3). Now this
precision was of immediate, vital, worldly value. The precise
calculation of things like interest rates, risks and relative values was
as indispensable to the financial survival of the entrepreneur in the
complex, perilous and extremely lucrative new venture of global
marine commerce as the precise calculation of heavenly positions
was for the literal survival of the mariner who carried his goods.
This practical value turned mathematics into a coveted trade.
Already since the fourteenth century in Italy, merchants and
craftsmen had been sending their sons to study mathematics in local
‘Abacus Schools’ (sons, because girls were almost universally
deprived of formal schooling). There, boys learned how to solve
complex arithmetical problems that they might come upon in the
course of their work: converging rates; compounding interest; finding
unknown quantities from known ones. Their primary study material
was the 1227 edition of the Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation) by
Leonardo Pisanus (Fibonacci), which introduced the Indo-Arabic
numeral and decimal system and quasi-algebraic strategies for using
it.
There was now place and resources for new teaching material
and new charismatic mathematician-teachers. Niccolò Fontana
Tartaglia (1499–1557) was one, and his life and career represent the
times similarly to the way Brunelleschi’s represented the precious
century. His father, a courier who delivered mail in the regions of the
Republic of Venice to which their town Brescia belonged, was
murdered by robbers when Niccolò was about 6. When he was 12, a
soldier of the invading French army slashed his jaw and palate,
leaving him a stutterer (hence the nickname ‘Tartaglia’). His family
could no longer afford tuition, but he taught himself Greek, Latin and
mathematics so impressively that he came under the patronage of a
wealthy nobleman, and by his late teens was already an abacus
teacher in Verona, gaining enough reputation to take his teaching
career to Venice. Tutoring provided him with an income, and
mathematical spectacles provided the fame that brought the
students and the patrons. The spectacles were comprised of public
mathematical contests, in which participants competed to solve
mathematical problems on a stage in the town square in front of a
boisterous audience. The competitions also included solving difficult
mathematical riddles – Tartaglia’s solution to the cubic equation
made him particularly famous (and involved him in a bitter plagiarism
dispute with Girolamo Cardano, whose wealth and nobility left
Tartaglia no chance to win). Less dramatic demonstrations of
mathematical competence came by way of publication: a definitive
translation of Euclid’s Elements into Italian and a book boldly titled
Nova Scientia. No less boldly, the book promised the Duke of
Urbino, to whom it was dedicated, to teach his gunners how to
properly aim their cannons with the help of mathematical analysis –
a new arena for the scholar to meet the artisan.
Global Institutions of Knowledge
 Trade Companies
Abacus schools were not the only new institutes of knowledge. Even
more representative of the new age were the bodies established to
maximize profits from the global trade. They didn’t hesitate to use
violence for that purpose, as we noted, but their main tool was
creating, gathering, standardizing and monopolizing knowledge. The
Iberian empires assigned the task to royal institutions: the
Portuguese established the Casa de India in Lisbon in 1501 and the
Spanish soon followed with the Casa de Contratación (House of
Trade) in Seville in 1503. These Casas had control over customs,
taxes, marine contracts and schedules, but most importantly: they
were in charge of the Padrón Real (Padrão Real in Portuguese) –
the Royal Register (Figure 5.9). This was a large, secret, constantly
evolving world map, heavily annotated and supported by charts and
records assembled by a small army of cartographers, navigators,
record keepers and administrators, headed by the pilot major – a
position created especially for Amerigo Vespucci in 1508. “No pilot
shall use any other chart but only one which has been taken from the
Padrón Real,” commanded the royal appointment letter to Vespucci,
“on pain of a fine of fifty dobles.” Returning from the “lands of the
Indies, discovered or to be discovered,” the pilot would report, under
oath of accuracy and secrecy, all “new lands, islands, bays, or
harbors, or anything else that they make a note of them for the said
Padrón Real” (Markham, The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci, p. 65).
 Figure 5.9 A presentation copy of the Padrón Real by the
(Portuguese) master cartographer Diogo Ribeiro of the (Spanish)
Casa de Contratación, offered to the pope in 1529 and kept in the
Vatican Apostolic Library (no working copies of the map survived).
The lines criss-crossing the oceans are ‘portolan’ lines, which
designate sailing directions, primarily between ports.

The new knowledge was flowing in: from global periphery to

center of epistemic authority and political power, where it was
verified, standardized, formalized and dispatched again to the
periphery to be applied and augmented. In the other trading super-
powers, England and the Netherlands, this center was taken by the
private joint-stock companies: the East India Companies (the Dutch
and the English); the Muscovy Company; and the Virginia Company.
These were private, rather than royal institutions, which organized
themselves to allow their wealthy shareholders to maximize return
on their investment and minimize their risk by joining their funds. But
the royal charters they managed to obtain (the first from Queen
Elizabeth to the English India Company on the last day of 1600) and
their vast and superbly profitable monopolies – at its prime, the EIC
held half (!) of world trade – made them almost sovereign entities.
The companies took over territories, established their own laws,
which they enforced with their own military power – yet like the
Casas, they were, crucially, institutions of knowledge. They provided
their outgoing captains with knowledge of their destinations and
required that it be improved and expanded. And it wasn’t just
geographical knowledge and marine know-how that the companies
were seeking and distributing, but any knowledge that could further
their profits: new raw materials, from minerals to foodstuff; new
crops, from spices to medicines; new products of art, from silk to
porcelain. New knowledge of the people and cultures that the
captains came across was particularly crucial: could they be
subjugated? Could they be traded with? How? What were their
languages, habits and customs, and could they be used to further
trade or subjugation?
It’s telling to compare the casas and companies to the
emblematic medi-eval institution of knowledge: the guild. Like the
guild, they were established to maximize profit by controlling and
monopolizing knowledge. But it was a different kind of knowledge.
The guild’s was local and material; literally embodied in the master –
and the only way to control it was to regulate the master’s behavior:
his relations to his brethren, apprentices and customers. The
companies’ knowledge, on the other hand, was global and abstract.
It was inscribed into maps and registers, dispatched afar, and
circulated. Its value was in its flow, which is what the companies
sought to control.
 The Jesuits
For the Jesuit Mission, global commerce was an opportunity to
gather souls rather than pecuniary profit, and the lofty ambition and
great challenges and dangers associated with it called for a careful
formalization of the global flow of knowledge. The Societas Jesu was
established in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), a Spanish-
Basque soldier-turned-priest, in the midst of a great schism in the
Church (about which in Chapter 6). Befitting its founder’s personality
and experience, the Society of Jesus was conceived as a fast-
moving ‘army’ of preachers directly under the pope’s personal
command, yet it soon became apparent that the best weapon of the
time was the new knowledge, education the best strategy. In 1548,
the first Jesuit college opened in Messina, Sicily – a high school not
only for future Jesuits but for all boys; the idea of educating girls was
considered, but never materialized. By Ignatius’ death there were
thirty-three such colleges; by 1600 – 236; and by 1615, 372 all
around Europe. In 1627, the Society of Jesus was educating 40,000
students in France alone. Its schools were so popular not only
because they were free – sponsored by a patron or the town – but
because their curriculum was innovative and up-to-date, including
rhetoric, classics, theater and, crucially, mathematics.
For those who joined the Society and especially those identified
as ‘scholars,’ suitable for the mission, education was intensified: they
became novices for two full years and moved from their hometown
college to one of the central institutions such as those in Coimbra or
Évora (in Portugal) where they continued to study Greek philosophy,
Christian theology and the most advanced sciences of the day. If
they made it to the Collegium Romanum – the order’s university in
the center of Rome – they could study with some of the most
innovative scholars of the time. The missionaries-to-be would usually
spend some time as masters before being dispatched to one of the
colonial colleges near their assigned mission – Rio de Janeiro if they
were headed to Brazil; Goa for India; Macao for China and Japan –
where they would partake in a standardized program acquiring the
local languages and customs.
This erudition was important firstly for turning the missionaries
into better people, as the Jesuits learned from the Humanists’ Latin
heroes, Cicero and Seneca. The theology was meant to make them
more devout Christians – the college was a “Trojan horse filled with
soldiers from heaven, which every year produces conquistadors of
souls” (“Baltazar Tales,” mid-seventeenth century, cited in Brockey,
Journey to the East, p. 211) – and local knowledge was of obvious
practical necessity to conquer these foreign souls. Upon arriving at
their mission, these “conquistadors of souls” would turn from
students into active pursuers of knowledge. The regular composition
of carefully structured “edifying reports” was an integral and
mandatory part of the mission. The reports traveled in the opposite
direction of the missionaries: from their residences, through the
provincial father to the Father General in Rome, where they were
edited, digested and distributed to the colleges. The practical
information they contained would serve to prepare the novices for
their missions, and the more exciting new knowledge would help
recruit and enthuse new ones, as well as establish the credibility of
the Society as an institution of knowledge.
This epistolary project proved an unquestionable success. From
Peru, Spanish Jesuits sent in the cure for malaria – the bark of the
Cinchona or The Jesuit’s Bark. Camellias were named after the
Czech Jesuit Georg Joseph Kamel (1661–1706) in honor of the
definitive accounts of the Philippine flora and fauna he sent, mostly
through the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural
Knowledge – whose reliance on this model of correspondence we’ll
discuss in Chapter 9. The China mission produced more abstract
knowledge. In the early decades of the seventeenth century, the
astronomer Johannes Kepler – whom we’ll discuss in Chapter 7 –
was corresponding with the German Jesuit Johan Schreck. Schreck
sent him an account of the Chinese method for calculating solar
eclipses and Kepler repaid with a copy of his Rudolphine Tables,
carried by another Jesuit missionary – the Polish Michael Boym. In
the last decades of the century, the great philosopher Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz learned about the Chinese language from the Italian
Jesuit Claudio Filippo Grimaldi.
China was the most coveted missionary prize, because of its
vast populace and its illustrious culture – and for the China Mission,
erudition indeed turned out to be both a necessary and efficient tool.
The custom that earned them their infamy (and eventually led to their
disbandment in 1773) – to conquer souls through political power –
seemed particularly fit for China and its powerful centralized
government. This meant gaining the confidence and respect of the
political-bureaucratic elite – the mandarins – whose status as literati
was sanctioned by the elaborate system of exams which they had to
pass to achieve their posts.
To Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who arrived at the Macao college
in 1582 to bolster the budding China Mission, the Mandarins
appeared very much like the Humanists back in Italy, his home
country. By 1595, his Chinese was good enough to try and impress
them with Jiaoyun lunyan – an elegant collection of classical
aphorisms on friendship that he translated. The little book generated
enough interest and connections that he was allowed to travel north,
towards the court, shedding on the way the Buddhist clergy robes
the missionaries were wearing in their southern China residences for
a full mandarin garb. This move came to symbolize the Jesuit
doctrines of ‘accommodation,’ namely: adopting and adapting to
foreign customs, sometimes quite questionable from a Christian
perspective, in the service of conversions. Jesuits’ detractors, both in
Europe and in China, found this approach outright repulsive; a sign
of the order’s duplicity, religious shallowness and power-hunger. For
us, however, it signals something particularly significant about the
new global age: a new understanding of the erudite as a trans-
cultural class and of their knowledge as transcending all boundaries.
Classical erudition, however, was of limited value. Ricci could
smoothen his journey with gifts of paintings and exotic goods, but
when he finally made it to Beijing, he discovered that what most
impressed his adopted Chinese colleagues were neither those
material objects nor ancient wisdom – they were content with their
own. Rather, it was the new knowledge of the world and the means
of gathering and recording it that truly caught their attention: clocks;
prisms; maps; globes. Ricci was well-equipped to satisfy their
curiosity: in the Collegium Romanum he had been a student of
Christopher Clavius (1538–1612), one of the greatest astronomers of
the time. In 1602, at the request of the emperor and in collaboration
with the convert-mandarin Li Zhizao (1565–1630), he produced the
emblematic artifact of that era of global exchange: a mappa mundi –
a map of the world (similar to Figures 5.8, right, and 5.9; the original
is sadly lost). It was a marvelous piece: printed on a folded screen of
six panels, more than 3.6 meters wide and 1.5 meters high, and it
was also a true object of knowledge. Befitting its cross-cultural
import, it found its way, translated and annotated, to Japan, Korea
and even Manchuria. In 1607, Ricci cemented the prestige gained by
the great map with a series of mathematical treatises, capped by a
translation of Euclid’s Elements (Jihe yuanben), produced with Li
and another converted scholar – Xu Guangqi (1562–1633). These
demonstrations of skill anchored the Jesuits’ presence in Beijing for
the better part of a century – as specifically foreign experts. In the
decades after Ricci’s death they were invited to the Chinese Astro-
calendric Bureau, where their astronomical expertise was employed
in resolving the disarray in the imperial calendar.
 Conclusion
Here are the two cultural elements of astronomy we discussed in
Chapter 3: experts producing calendars and centralized government
employing them for astrological and political-ritual purposes. That the
experts and the government could meet across oceans was not
because of some inherent universality: astronomy, like cathedrals,
doesn’t travel on its own (the Jesuits also brought the cathedral with
them, particularly to South America). The reason why the Jesuits
had the astronomical skills to impress the Chinese court was that a
similar failing of the calendar was taking place in Europe (we’ll
discuss that in Chapter 7), for similar reasons, and in a similar
context: the Church’s bureaucratic-centralized interests. In fact,
Clavius’ involvement in the calendar reform is what gave him the
credentials to institute mathematics at the core of Jesuit education,
not least because of its claim to certainty and universality. This
produced missionary-mathematicians like Ricci, and his even better
skilled successors at the Chinese Astro-calendric Bureau, the
German Johann Adam Schall (1592–1666) and the Dutch Ferdinand
Verbiest (1623–1688). Moreover, their astronomical skills were of
use to the imperial government because the astronomy practiced in
the Astro-calendric Bureau was a product of an earlier era of cross-
continental exchange: the Mongol Empire of the thirteenth to
fourteenth centuries. Kublai Khan, Genghis’ grandson, who declared
himself the first emperor of the Yuan Dynasty in 1271, had imported
Muslim scholars as both officials and experts, and they brought with
them the Hellenistic-based science we discussed in Chapter 4. The
most famous of these scholars was the Persian Jamal al-Din al-
Bukhaˉrı¯, who arrived in China equipped not only with the skills of
theoretical Ptolemaic astronomy, but also the appropriate
instruments. These instruments were modeled on the ones
employed by Kublai’s brother Hu¯laˉgu¯ and his court astronomer
Nasir al-Tu¯sı¯ at the Maraˉgha observatory (see Chapter 4). They
were therefore Ptolemaic-style instruments that the Jesuit
astronomers could easily recognize, even if by the time of their
arrival, they had fallen into disrepair. Science is not inherently
universal, but Hellenistic astronomy was globalized twice: it was
imported once to Europe and once to China, with Muslim mediation
in both cases.
For the history of science, however, early modern globalization
of commerce, religion and war was particularly crucial: it ushered in
a new mathematical age. Mathematics traveled well and was useful
in crossing cultural barriers. Not only the mathematical skills had
become valuable – much of what was known could be reduced to
numbers and figures. For the Jesuits, it was the number of converts
that counted (the numbers in China, despite the great investment
and prestige, were disappointing). For the banker, goods were
reduced to their monetary value; whatever their use or beauty may
have been, they needed to fetch enough to allow for the next
investment. Money itself was, in its very essence, nothing but an
exchange rate: the value of silk could be measured in silver, and
silver's value – in porcelain. For the mariner in the middle of the
ocean, the sky above was no longer the heavens but a mathematical
grid against which to plot his purely mathematical itinerary. There
were no places on the open sea, just distances.
 Discussion Questions
1. Does the discussion of the struggles, compromises and synthesis
that characterize the encounter of monotheism with Hellenistic
science suggest to you any new thoughts about the relations
between science and religion in general?

2. Is the account of the encounter between the scholar and the

artisan and the social and cultural conditions supporting it
convincing? Does it carry any epistemological lessons?

3. The invention of the movable press and its cultural impact begs a
comparison to the rise of twenty-first-century communication
technologies. Is the comparison helpful? What insights does it
suggest? Historically? Philosophically?

4. Does the idea of ‘global knowledge’ agree with the arguments

about the locality of knowledge in general and scientific knowledge in
particular made in Chapter 1? If not, which one appears to you more
convincing and why? If the two concepts do share a middle ground,
where is it to be found?

5. Does it make sense to think of the ‘global corporations’ of early

modern times as trading primarily in knowledge? Does it make new
sense of the relations between science and globality in the current
day and age?
Suggested Readings
 Primary Texts

Aquinas, Thomas, “Q. 14, Art. 9: Can Faith Deal with Things Which
Are Known as Scientific Conclusions?” in Truth (Quaestiones
Disputatae de Veritate), Robert E. Schmidt (trans.) (Cambridge:
Hacket, 1995 [1954]), Vol. 2, pp. 247–252.

Tartaglia, Niccolo, “Letter of Dedication” from Nova Scientia, in

Stillman Drake and I. E. Drabkin (trans.), Mechanics in Sixteenth-
Century Italy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp.
63–69.

Moryson, Fynes, An Itinerary, Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell

(Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1907 [1617]), Vol. 1, “to the
Reader,” xix–xxi and ch. V, pp. 112–117; Vol. 2, ch. VI, pp. 122 ff.
 Secondary Sources

On science and monotheistic thought:

Funkenstein, Amos, Theology and the Scientific Imagination

(Princeton University Press, 1986).

On the meeting of the artisan and the scholar:

Smith, Pamela H., The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in
the Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Zilsel, Edgar, The Social Origins of Modern Science, D. Raven, E.

Krohn and R. S. Cohen (eds.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000).

On the cultural import of the printing press:

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:

Communication and Cultural Change in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge University Press, 1979).

Ong, Walter J., Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From
the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983).

On navigation and mathematical knowledge:

Alexander, Amir, Geometrical Landscapes: The Voyages of

Discovery and the Transformation of Mathematical Practice
(Stanford University Press, 2002).
Markham, Clements R., The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other
Documents Illustrative of his Career (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010
[1894]).

On Jesuit science:

Dear, Peter, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in

the Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1995).

On Jesuits in China:

Brockey, Liam, Journey to the East: The Jesuit mission to China,

1579–1724 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2007).

On global trade and knowledge:

Brook, Timothy, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the

Dawn of the Global Age (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).

Cook, Harold John, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and

Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2007).

On the Chinese adoption and adaptation of European

knowledge:

Elman, Benjamin A., On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–

1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
 6
Magic
◈
 Spectator vs. Participant Knowledge
Here is one thing that the masons building the cathedral and the
scholars occupying its chapels would have agreed on: that the
stones out of which it is constructed are heavy, and that there is
nothing one can do about it. We can, of course, accommodate this
heaviness. The scholars may try to understand why stones are
heavy and what heaviness is; the masons may try to tackle it “with
winch and pulley.” But both would agree that some things in the
world are light and some are heavy, and no knowledge can change
that.
But what if there were such knowledge? What if we could make
stones light? What if we could “defy gravity” and have “hewn rock”
hoist itself up “into heaven” (recall Ormond’s poem in Chapter 1)? Or
be “hoisted” with the help of some creature much stronger than us?
The aspiration to knowledge of this kind – immediate, useful, free of
the limitations set by the regularities of nature – is what we call
magic.
We discussed earlier why it’s a mistake to use ‘science’ as a
term of praise, and why and how we should think about it as a
historical, contingent phenomenon, bounded in time and place.
Similarly, it is a mistake to use ‘magic’ as a pejorative, synonymous
with ‘superstition,’ or connoting some strange and mysterious
occupation. We need to understand magic on its own terms. This
does not mean we should collect recipes for concoctions or formulae
for incantations, but that we need to understand who were the
people engaged in magic and what they (and their contemporaries)
thought they were doing. We need to understand how they related to
one another and to their neighbors; and most importantly for our
interests in the history of science: what they knew about their world
and how they tried to affect it. Historians and anthropologists
sometimes try to define ‘magic’ as a universal category, common to
all cultures and distinguished from science and religion in some
fundamental way. We, however, will study magic as we've been
studying science – as a particular tradition of knowledge that
developed around the Mediterranean from Antiquity until early
modern times. Whether this tradition, with its claims and aspirations
to knowledge, resembles other traditions in other times and places,
and whether such comparisons are valuable, are difficult questions
which need not divert us here. For us, the important comparison is
between this magical tradition and mainstream philosophy of nature,
the main origin of what we call science. These two sets of beliefs,
practices and institutions (or, in the case of magic, the conspicuous
lack of the latter) had complex and intense relations. Sometimes
they defined themselves against each other, sometimes in alliance;
sometimes the one borrowed from the other, sometimes vehemently
rejected it. Magic is worth studying for its own sake, but it is also
crucial to understanding the history of science, both in its similarity
and its differences.
 The Magical Tradition(s)
We've started by presenting a category – magic – and characterizing
it in contrast to other types of knowledge vested in the cathedral of
science. We cannot avoid such categories and characterizations.
History, after all, is not – and cannot be – an attempt to relive the
past. It is a story about the past, a story that we tell, to explain to
ourselves major features of our culture – the culture of science. But
these are, crucially, our categories; they are neither obvious nor
necessary, nor would the people whose work they describe
necessarily abide by them. This is true about ‘science,’ and it is even
truer about ‘magic.’ Indeed, the word ‘magic’ itself has a
distinguishable history, which gave it a meaning that did not always
agree with our characterization above. It comes from magi, the title
of the Persian Zoroastrian priests, about whom the Greeks knew
from at least the sixth century BCE. To a large degree, what the
Greeks knew, or thought they knew, about the practices of these
priests came to comprise what was customarily included under
magic: not just the production of mysterious wonders, but also
fortune telling and necromancy (summoning the dead), as well as
alchemy and astrology, which, as we’ll see, can only questionably be
described as ‘magical.'
From its very beginning, then, the use of the ‘magic’ connoted
esoteric, foreign knowledge, relating to mysterious religion. It
gradually extended to denote the alleged skills of the Egyptian
priests, finally replacing the term goe¯s (γόης), which the Greeks
originally used for their own wizards. Greek and Roman thinkers
were quite ambivalent on whether they should believe the fantastic
reports about the wonders produced by these wizards and sorcerers.
The great naturalist Pliny the Elder (see Chapter 4), for example,
hardly remarks on the magical properties of plants, yet is very
interested in those of animals – sometimes writing about them with
disgust, sometimes with ridicule, sometimes providing a recipe,
apparently convinced of its power. He’s contemptuous of the magi as
charlatans, but admits that “[t]here is no one who is not afraid of
spells and incantations” (Pliny, Natural History, 10.xxxvii.15, quoted
from Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, p. 24). Galen (c. 130–c.
200) shared this contempt, but also the conviction that herbs should
be gathered with the left hand, before sunrise. Politicians seem to
have shared intellectuals’ ambivalence: a century earlier, Emperor
Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE) had 2,000 magical scrolls burned; he
apparently wanted to take no chances.
When the term ‘magic’ was picked up by Christian thinkers, the
connotation of dangerous heresy was added to its esoteric flavor:
whatever the magi did, they did with the help of their gods. Since
these could not be real gods, they were obviously demons. Yet the
ambivalence did not disappear: monotheistic thinkers more often
denounced magic as heretical than rejected it as impossible. The
Jewish scriptures do not, of course, use the Greek term, but are full
of sorcery, wizardry and necromancy. Aaron competes with the
Egyptian priests in turning staves into crocodiles; the prophet Elijah
competes with the priests of the Baal in summoning fire to the altar;
“the witch of Endor” convenes Samuel from the dead to talk to Saul.
The Torah (the Pentateuch) does not embrace or even condone
magic – it prohibits it on penalty of death – but it has no doubts over
its efficacy. Saul desperately searches for the witch after having
banished all sorcerers from his kingdom, and he and his stock are
condemned to demise for this last transgression – by Samuel
himself, who did indeed rise: the prohibition of magic went hand-in-
hand in with the belief in its efficacy. In Christianity, this ambivalence
is particularly striking, because divine magic, in the form of miracles,
is at the heart of its mythology. Much of the Gospel is comprised of
stories about Christ’s miracles, and such miracles are (together with
martyrdom) a distinguishing feature of saints. Moreover, the
Eucharist – the central Christian ritual – is a magical act: the priest,
using an ancient incantation, defies the laws of nature by turning one
substance – bread (and wine) – into another – flesh (and blood).
From the monotheistic perspective, God created the world and its
laws, so it is in His power to circumvent them. He can make the Sun
stop at Gibeon and the Moon in the Valley of Aijalon and will do so if
approached by the right person in the right way.
The crucial distinction during much of antiquity and the Middle
Ages, then, was not between magic on the one hand and more
earthly knowledge – intellectual and practical – on the other, but
between divine and demonic magic. The difference between the two
kinds lay in the origins of power, and one could usually tell by its
effects: evil magical deeds were demonic, and benevolent ones were
miracles. Yet both kinds were supernatural; both the witch and the
saint made things behave against their nature. But wondrous deeds
could also be accomplished within the realm of nature. Nature was
full of secrets (on which we'll discuss more later), and manipulating
them was magical, because it produced irregular and unexpected
effects. Since these effects were still within the realm of nature, this
was natural magic. This allowed for another essential distinction,
which was formulated by William of Auvergne in the thirteenth
century: between natural and demonic magic. This distinction
became very useful for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural
philosophers and physicians who were seeking to adopt the
knowledge and intellectual tools developed within the magical
tradition without the risk of heresy. We will return to these thinkers
towards the end of the chapter.
 Tense Relations
There is one final distinction we need to consider: between practical
and learned magic. This is a complex and dynamic distinction,
whose boundaries are both important and shifting. One may think of
the village wise-woman as the archetype of a practitioner: someone
who knows the curative (and poisonous) properties of local flora and
fauna and is also called in to help in childbirth or set a broken bone.
This woman was surely present in antiquity and throughout the
Middle Ages (see Figure 6.1), and was still to be found in rural
communities: someone like Matteuccia Francisci who was healing
villagers in Todi, near Perugia, in the first half of the fifteenth century
(Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, pp. 59–60); or “Barbe, wife of
Jean Mallebarbe,” who dispensed curative (and allegedly poisonous)
powders in Charmes, Lorraine, in the late sixteenth century (Briggs,
Witches & Neighbors, p. 57); or Walpurga Hausmännin, a midwife
practicing in Dillingen in Southern Germany at about the same time
(Stephens, Demon Lovers, p. 1). Like the mason, she – almost
always ‘she’ – possesses a great deal of know-how, gained either by
direct inquiry of her immediate environment or by apprenticeship.
Like the mason, she is most likely semi-literate at best, so she
leaves little trace of this knowledge, and has little access to the
sophisticated considerations of learned magicians. We can’t even tell
if she thinks of herself as a ‘witch’ until – perhaps because an
untimely death has frightened her neighbors and raised their
suspicion, or perhaps because of a neighborly grudge – she finds
herself in front of the learned magician: the inquisitor. This may be
someone like Heinrich Krämer (1430–1505), who in the last thirty
years of his life prosecuted between 48 and 200 witches, according
to his various testimonies.

Figure 6.1 A female practical physician from a fifteenth-century

manuscript of John of Arderne’s medical treatise, acquired by Sir
Hans Sloane in 1694 for 5 shillings and now in his collection at the
British library. The woman applies heated cups and uses a pointed
instrument, seemingly mounted on a spring, to open a fistula
(bottom left). It is easy to imagine why such practices and such
instruments, and the women employing them, would be both
revered and suspected.

It may be strange to think of the inquisitor, whose business is to

eradicate magic, as a magician himself, but he’s definitely an
essential contributor to the magical tradition because he (the
inquisitor is always ‘he’) spent his career carefully defining magic
and gathering knowledge about it. It’s the inquisitor who made the
nuanced but fateful distinction between acceptable saga and the
demonic, evil-doing malefica – an ominous legal term for a witch.
And it’s a legal text – the tenth-century Canon Episcopi, incorporated
into the canon law in the twelfth century – that learnedly enumerates
for us all the deeds witches were believed to do; most importantly,
riding domestic animals through the air.1
Almost all we know of witches like Barbe, Matteuccia and
Walpurga comes from the inquisitors’ protocols of their trials. We can
learn from the protocols that they knew and understood little of the
stories about conferences with demons which were so important for
Krämer and his peers – they had to guess what stories these men
were expecting to hear from them so the torture would cease and
they would be allowed to die. But we can also see, from witnesses’
testimonies and her own, that many of the witch’s practices conform
to the inquisitor’s (and our) expectations: she is secretive, speaks in
the name of ancient knowledge, employs incantations and refers to
the symbolic relations between stars, plants, animals and body parts.
These are the practices that the learned magician ponders and gives
meaning to. It is the same type of complex relations between
practical know-how and learned knowing-that that we discussed in
Chapter 1, which the secretive nature of magic makes even more
intricate.
Most learned magicians are further removed from the practical
magician than the inquisitor: they are philosophers or theologians
who read and write about magic, and usually find it repugnant. Such,
for example, is Jacob Sprenger (1437–1495), Krämer’s colleague,
who was, like him, a Dominican friar and theologian, but preferred
contemplating witches as a professor at the University of Cologne to
prosecuting them. Yet this was not always the case: Nicholas of
Poland, a thirteenth-century Dominican monk, is a rare example
defying the rule. Academically trained and well versed in mainstream
medicine, he wrote rebellious pamphlets against Hippocrates and
Galen and became well-known as a healer and influential as a
preacher and mentor, treating many – from the poor to the Duke of
Sieradz (in Lesser Poland) – with amulets made of frogs and snakes.
Isaac Luria, the greatest theoretician of the Kabbalah (see below), is
another example: he was also a practical magician – healing, talking
to the dead, and producing great wonders.
Indeed, one may think about the history of magic in Christianity
through the perspective of the relations between the practitioner and
the scholar. In the case of magic, all political, educational and
religious institutions support the latter. The ambivalence towards
magic, shared in Late Antiquity by even the most careful thinkers
such as Augustine, gave way in the Middle Ages to a much stricter
view. On the one hand, scholars like Aquinas put much effort into
supporting the belief in demons by giving naturalized accounts of
them and their interaction with humans. On the other hand, the
Canon Episcopi didn’t prohibit the exercise of magic, as older texts
did, but the very belief in magical practices. The author (or authors)
of this text did believe in the witches’ encounters with demons, but
the stories the witches told about these encounters and their
consequences had to be delusions forced on them by the devil – to
believe otherwise was pagan heresy.
This attitude would change again in the fifteenth century. It was
perhaps a reaction to the rise of Aristotelianism, which we discussed
in Chapter 4. This causal, naturalizing way of looking at the world
suggested that the miracles at the heart of Christian mythology could
perhaps be also explained naturally, threatening belief. Christian
theologians resigned themselves to the idea that miracles could no
longer be expected, so some sought evidence for their possibility in
maleficia – acts of demonic magic. Since demons were fallen angels,
the magical deeds they effected through collaborating with witches
were devilish reversals of miracles. The most famous text to argue
and explain this line of thought is the Malleus Maleficarum – ‘The
Witches’ Hammer’ – of 1486. Written by our acquaintances Krämer
and Sprenger, the Malleus narrates in great, sometimes
pornographic, details the encounters between witches and demons.
Walter Stephens in Demon Lovers (see Suggested Readings)
explains that there is a strong epistemological assumption behind
these stories, which makes this text interesting to the history of
science. It is an empirical assumption: the witches need to testify to
outlandish occurrences – the supernatural acts of demons. Being so
strange, these stories have to be based on the most reliable type of
sensual knowledge, and that would be knowledge by touch, the
epitome of which is knowledge of the flesh. The Malleus’
misogynistic account of women’s sexuality is thus an argument for
the possibility of this most repugnant sexual intercourse, and hence
of their reliability as witnesses about the demon and his maleficia.
It is in texts like the Malleus’ that we find the theoretical basis for
the most horrific chapter of the history of European magic – the witch
hunt. The great witch trials began in the middle of the fifteenth
century, spread through Europe during the sixteenth century and
finally subsided by the middle of the seventeenth century – the
period between Galileo and Newton. Some 90,000 people (by
conservative estimates) – 80 percent of them women – were
prosecuted, and about half of them executed. Most of this important
story is out of our scope, but one thing is worth noting as far as the
history of science goes. Demons, we observed, were the explanation
that Christians of Late Antiquity and of the Middle Ages provided for
magical powers. For the Renaissance theoreticians of witchcraft, it
was the other way around: magical powers testified to the existence
of demons.
 Magical Cosmogonies
Yet not all scholars were hostile to magic. Indeed, as we’ll see
towards the end of the chapter, even as the witch hunt was raging,
the relations between learned and practical magicians began to
change again and magical ideas and practices came to play a crucial
role in the New Science of the seventeenth century.
To those scholars sympathetic to magic, however, one insight
was particularly challenging. To believe in magic is to believe that
humans – at least some of them – can interfere directly with the very
make-up of the world: to make something happen that defies the
regular order of things. This is an idea that the scholar finds very
hard to admit. Whether pagan or monotheistic, almost all authorities
agree on one fundamental assumption: we know this world as
spectators. We dwell in it, so we can learn its ways and gain a
measure of control within it, but we can never change its elements or
the rules governing them. The Biblical cosmogony (creation story)
makes a point of stressing this: God created the world in a way
humans cannot comprehend, let alone mimic – from nothing at all
and in a word. He created humans on the sixth and last day and put
them in it when it was already complete. He allows them (within
limits) to study this world – in Genesis 2:20, “man gave names to all
cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field” – but
not to change it. When, in Babel (which is the same place as
Babylon), they tried to challenge the hierarchy between human and
divine capacities – when they tried to build “a tower, with its top in
heaven” (Genesis 11:4) – God deprived them of their main source of
power and the apparent reason for their arrogance – their common
language. Most traditional Jewish interpreters of the scriptures, from
Antiquity through the Middle Ages and into early modern times,
adopted a strict version of this idea: we can only know Creation as it
was presented to us; we can neither know why and how God made
the world, nor make any of His creations behave other than He
commanded them to. Divine knowledge is not only beyond human
grasp – even aspiring to it is a sin. Aristotle, of course, does not
provide a cosmogony – his cosmos was never created – nor does he
worry about sinful knowledge. But since he allows for no
supernatural realm, it is even harder to imagine how, in his cosmos,
order can be diverted. Aristotle’s cosmos is all there is and the
cosmos just is its order and regularity, so just as it makes no sense
to ask what is beyond the cosmos or what was before it, it makes no
sense to try and circumvent its order.
There were, however, other sources, more esoteric but still
popular, which provided cosmogonies that gave an explanation for
the idea that humans can interfere with the laws of nature. They
supported this idea of human magical powers by presenting creation
as a more human-like accomplishment, either in addition to or by
giving humans an active role in it. Some of these sources we have
encountered in previous chapters, Plato’s Timaeus being the most
influential among them. In this dialogue, Plato narrates a cosmogony
that allows much more leeway for human intervention than the
Biblical one. Rather than creating all from nothing, the ‘artificer’ god
– the ‘demiurge’ – takes the elements (the same four Greek
elements), and, like a human artisan, arranges them into patterns to
make the material substances. Both the substances and the patterns
are there for him to work with, and Plato even feels comfortable in
allowing us a glimpse into the demiurge’s blueprint, which comprises
those orderly sequences of numbers and figures that so impressed
the Pythagoreans (see Chapter 2). No less important is that humans
are not mere spectators in the Timaeus: their personal development
reiterates the making of the world, and their soul reflects its orders
and harmonies. We have come across this idea – that the world has
a soul, and that the human soul is immediately related to it – in
another text we have mentioned: Plotinus’ Enneads, the basic text of
so-called Neo-Platonism.2 Unlike the strict submission of humans to
the order of nature in Aristotle and the strict dichotomy between
Creator and Creation in Genesis, the ‘Great Chain of Being’ gives
humans a special role in creation: it is the human soul through which
the ideal forms in the Nous – the cosmic intellect – are embodied in
otherwise formless matter. This means that without humans, the
cosmos, with all its varied creatures and species, would not have
existed, so it does make some sense that they may also interfere
with its make-up as magic requires.
 Kabbalah
It was not only in pagan texts that magical thought could find
grounding and legitimation. A short Jewish text in Hebrew – Sefer
Yetzirah (Book of Creation) – demonstrates how the monotheistic
tradition could also support such thought. Neither the author of this
book nor its exact origins were (or are) known, but this just
heightened its venerated status. It was probably composed around
the turn of the Christian era or in the following few centuries, but as
was common with similar texts, it was thought to be truly ancient –
coming perhaps from Abraham himself. Creation, in Sefer Yetzirah,
is a linguistic act. God creates the foundations of the world by
‘carving,’ ‘inscribing’ and ‘composing’ into matter the twenty-two
letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which he first endows with particular
powers (Figure 6.2). He then strikes a covenant with Abraham, and,
by giving him the Hebrew language, reveals to him the secret of the
world.
 Figure 6.2 The twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet
creatively arranged in an eighteenth-century interpretation of Sefer
Yetzira. The interpreter – Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, known as
the Gaon (genius) of Vilna – was trying to capture stanzas like the
following: “Twenty-two Foundation Letters:/ He placed them in a
circle/ like a wall with 231 Gates./ The Circle oscillates back and
forth./ A sign for this is:/ There is nothing in good higher than
Delight (Oneg – ‫)ענג‬/ There is nothing evil lower than Plague
(Nega – ‫)נגע‬.” The title of the diagram is: “Image of the twenty-two
letters … and how they are in the lines of the Sefirot and their
obliques.”

According to Sefer Yetzirah, then, the world was inscribed in a

particular human language – Hebrew – and the code was revealed
to humans in ancient times. This is a crucial amalgamation of
magical ideas, to which we’ll return: the veneration of antiquity; the
belief in the power of words; and the essential secrecy of this
knowledge. It also reflects and justifies a particular set of magical
practices: Gematria, or the search for prophecies and divine insights
in the Torah through calculating and analyzing the numerical values
assigned to letters (100=‫; ק‬10=‫; י‬2=‫; ב‬1=‫א‬, etc.). Jewish scholars of
Late Antiquity were familiar with (and usually suspicious of) magical
ideas, in both Gnostic and Neo-Platonist versions, as well as those
in Sefer Yetzirah. But these ideas only took a real hold on their
imagination with the appearance of Sefer HaZohar (Book of
Splendor) in the thirteenth century. Sefer HaZohar was probably
composed around the time of its ‘discovery’ by Rabbi Moshe di-Leon
(Moses de León, c. 1240–1305) in Spain, perhaps by di-Leon
himself or his milieu. Yet, written in Aramaic, it professed to be an
ancient work from the period after the destruction of the Jewish
temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. It was adopted by the
sages of Zefat (Safed) in Palestine (or as they called it – the Land of
Israel) in the sixteenth century, and especially their leader Rabbi
Isaac Luria (known as ‘Ha’Ari Hakadosh’). In their interpretation it
became the cornerstone of Kabbalah, the Jewish magical tradition,
which has greatly excited thinkers with occult tendencies – Christian
as well as Jewish – since early modern times.
The main part of Sefer HaZohar is a symbolic line-by-line
reading of the Torah: an interpretation of the Torah as if it contains
another message, hidden behind the literal meaning of the words. It
is a mystical message in that it pertains to the place of humans in the
world, and, especially in Luria’s version, it comes in the form of a
truly human-centered story of creation. In this Kabbalist cosmogony
(as in the Manichean), humans were not created last, but first: God
begins His work by making The Primordial Man (Adam Kadmon),
which comprises all forms – animate and inanimate – of the world to
be created. Through the eyes, ears and mouth of the Primordial
Man, the divine light emanated to create a world in the harmonious
form of the human body. But creation in this story is traumatic and
disastrous. To create the world, Luria tells, God has to first retract
Himself from His infinity in order to free the space into which the
world could be created; so it is already a God-forsaken world into
which humans are put, abandoned even before it is created. Worse:
creation itself was a catastrophic failure. It was an eruption of divine
light, and God had created vessels – Sefirot (Figure 6.3)3 – into
which this light was to flow. But the vessels could not withstand the
immense potency of the emanating light and were crushed,
scattering shards and sparkles into the primeval abyss. The shards
are the material world in which we dwell, and it is upon us, humans,
to search for and gather the divine sparkles strewn among them.
Figure 6.3 A diagram of the ten Sefirot, composed of the first letter
of each Sefira, from Moshe Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim
(Orchard of Pomegranates). The name of the book is taken from a
line in the Bible’s Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon), an erotic
poem which the Kabbalist tradition reads as an allegory for the
relations between God and his people: “your branches are an
orchard of pomegranates, with choicest of fruits” (4.13). The
outermost is ‫( כ‬KH-K), which is the first letter of ‫( כתר‬Keter –
crown), because “the first to nobility is big and surrounds all”; the
innermost is ‫( מ‬M), the first letter of ‫( מלכות‬Malkhut – kingdom),
and so on. From the interpretation of the order, Cordovero
summarizes, “we learn about the nobilities, which are like the
spheres turning in the one within the other like onion skins, and for
this reason are called heavens [or firmaments]” (Gate 6, ch. 4).
The original text was written in 1548 in Safed, but the image is
from a 1592 version printed and published in Europe – another
example of the impact of the movable press discussed in Chapter
5. The inscription above the diagram reads: “the crown (‫ )כתר‬is
home to all and origins of all.”
 Hermetica
The most popular magical cosmogony in Christian Europe came in a
text, or rather a group of texts, all in Greek, whose origin is still
shrouded in mystery – the Hermetic Corpus:

Mind, the father of all, who is life and light, gave birth to a man
like himself whom he loved as his own child. The man was most
fair: he had the father’s image; and god, who was really in love
with his own form, bestowed on him all his craftworks. And after
the man had observed what the craftsman had created with the
father’s help, he also wished to make some craftwork, and the
father agreed to this. Entering the craftsman’s sphere, where he
was to have all authority, the man observed his brother’s
craftworks; the governors loved the man, and each gave a share
of his own order.
Corpus Hermeticum I.12–13 in: Copenhaver, Hermetica, 3

This story is told by Poimandres (sometimes transcribed as

Poemander, sometimes Pimander), a divine “mind of sovereignty,” to
the alleged author of these texts: Hermes Trismegistus – the thrice-
great Hermes. The title Hermetic Corpus commonly refers to the
main group of Hermetica: seventeen dialogues between Hermes and
his disciples. Another important text usually attached to them is the
Perfect Dialogue, known in Latin as the Asclepius, after the Greek
god of medicine, who leads the dialog. Yet another – the Emerald
Table (Tabula Smargadina, allegedly found on such a table in
Hermes’ grave) – is in a sense the most influential of the corpus, as
it contains the foundations of the metaphorical language the
alchemists would use for centuries to come. One book of Arabic
origins should also be mentioned here, because, although not
exactly of the same corpus, it came into European hands at a similar
time and occupied the same intellectual niche. This is the Ghayat Al-
Hakim (‫ – ﻏﺎﯾﺔ اﻟﺣﻛﯾم‬Purpose of the Wise), known in Latin as Picatrix,
which combines distinctly material recipes of astral magic with
pronouncements on elevated magical principles (Figure 6.4). Many
more related texts were known in Antiquity, of which only fragments
survive; the largest collection is found in a fifth-century Anthology.
 Figure 6.4 A page from a Latin translation of the Picatrix, made
from a mid-thirteenth-century Spanish translation from the Arabic,
prepared by an order of King Alphonso X of Castile. Four images
of Saturn, with explanations of the significance of its placement in
the various signs, culminating in the bottom right with the one
Saturn is most associated with: death (the sickle) and rebirth (the
serpent). The manuscript is now at the Biblioteka Jagiellonska of
the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

In this quote, taken from the first of the Hermetic dialogues, one
finds perhaps the best expression of the main themes of all magical
creation stories and a model of how stories make sense of and
justify the aspirations of the magician. In such cosmogonies, creation
is not a one-time divine utterance, incomprehensible and
unchangeable. It is an ongoing “craftwork,” in which “man” – the
primordial, androgynous representation of all humans – is explicitly
invited to take part. The magician is not necessarily, therefore, a
delusional heretic, trying to take an impossible bypass around
unchangeable general laws of nature; he is rather a “loved”
participant in the process of shaping these laws.
Magical Epistemology
 Antiquity and Secrecy
The figure of Hermes Trismegistus captures another crucial aspect
of magical thought. The Hermetic Corpus was likely written in the
second century, which is the age of the oldest manuscript we have at
hand. This manuscript was only discovered in 1945 (in Nag
Hammadi in Upper Egypt), so it could not have been known to early-
modern readers of the Hermetica. Yet Hermes, its alleged author, is
said to have been an Egyptian priest, a contemporary of Moses. This
allowed his Christian devotees to find in the Corpus prophesies of
the coming of Christ, supposedly pre-dating the Old Testament,
giving credence to their belief in both Christ and Hermes. But this
emphasis on antiquity was not unique to the Christian magicians.
The magical text, as we also saw in the Kabbalistic examples, draws
its authority from its (often feigned) antiquity. This is not to say that
the ideas in the Hermetica or Sefer Hazohar are not ancient: modern
scholarship has shown that many of them had indeed originated in
Egypt and Mesopotamia many centuries before these two texts (and
the others we mentioned) were written. What is important is that
magicians never proclaim novelty or demand credit for innovation:
the more antique their knowledge, the more trustworthy it’s
supposed to be, and the more potent.
The story of the re-emergence and consequent decline of the
Hermetic Corpus in Renaissance Europe illustrates this point well. In
1462, Cosimo de’ Medici obtained a fourteenth-century manuscript
of the first fourteen dialogs of the Corpus. Byzantium was collapsing
under Ottoman pressure and many of its cultural treasures were
becoming available, at the proper price, to the supremely wealthy
and marvel-hungry princes of Italy and their Humanist clients. But in
the eyes of Cosimo this clearly was no run-of-the-mill marvel.
Marcilio Ficino (1433–1499), the best scholar of his entourage and
probably the most skilled scholar of his generation, was at the time
busy with no less than a new translation of Plato. Cosimo instructed
him to abandon it and fully dedicate himself to preparing an edited
Latin version of these newly discovered magical texts. Within less
than a century, Ficino’s 1471 Corpus Hermeticum went through two
dozen editions and was translated into French, Dutch, Spanish and
Italian – an imposing best-seller. Then, in 1614, the Hermes craze
ended abruptly. A French scholar by the name of Isaac Casaubon
(1559–1614) demonstrated, using new philological techniques, that
the Hermetic Corpus could not have been that ancient: he found
terms, phrases and puns which referred to ideas and events that
happened much later than Hermes’ alleged time. And although
magical ideas continued to thrive, Hermes and the texts ascribed to
him sunk into the realm of antiquarians and uninformed acolytes.
Why would such a thing have happened? If ideas are important
and convincing, why should it matter if they were authored a
millennium later? The first words of Ficino’s preface demonstrate
why:

At the time when Moses was born flourished Atlas the

astrologer, brother of the natural philosopher Prometheus and
maternal grandfather of the elder Mercurius, whose grandson
was Mercurius Trismegistus [Mercury is the Latin name for
 Hermes] … They called him Trismegistus or thrice-greatest
because he was the greatest philosopher and the greatest priest
and the greatest king … Among philosophers he first turned
from physical and mathematical topics to contemplation of
things divine, and he was the first to discuss with great wisdom
the majesty of God, the order of demons and the
transformations of souls. Thus, he was called the first author of
theology, and Orpheus followed him, taking second place in the
ancient theology.
Copenhaver, Hermetica, p. xlviii

For Ficino, Hermes was more important than even Plato because he
was more ancient. Casaubon was proud of his novelty – of his new
philological skills and of his ability to produce new knowledge with
them. This pride is at the heart of the natural philosophical tradition:
the great veneration of the authority of Aristotle notwithstanding, the
discovery or invention of something not known before has always
been its main pride and purpose. Figure 6.5 provides a nice
illustration: it is the first page of a sixteenth-century edition of a
thirteenth-century text on optics by the Polish friar Erazmus Ciołek
Witelo (c. 1230–c. 1300). Although he follows the work of the great
Muslim optician Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen – see Chapter 4) very
closely, Witelo makes a point to celebrate his own novelties, and the
very first words on this page read: “you have in this work, lucid
reader, a great number of geometrical elements, which you would
not find in Euclid …” For the magician, in contrast, there is no new
knowledge – only a secret truth revealed once, and corrupted by
time and fading memory, so only direct access to that secret, as from
a truly ancient text, is worth careful attention.
Figure 6.5 The frontispiece of the 1535 printed edition of Witelo’s
Perspectiva (or Opticae libri decem) from the 1270s. The text
above the image promises explanations, practicality and
innovation: “you have in this work, lucid reader, a great number of
geometrical elements, which you would not find in Euclid …
concerning the projection, infraction, and refraction of rays … of
light in transparent bodies and in mirrors plane, spherical,
 columned, pyramidal … on which the visual deceptions of Natural
Magic mostly depend” (see Figure 6.8).

The idea that magical knowledge is ancient and declining –

Scientia Prisca as it was sometimes called – is closely related to the
capacities the magician assumes to possess. Observing nature as it
is, we may discover the ways in which it behaves generally and
regularly: we can see that stones fall, so we infer that they are
heavy. But the magician expects to make nature behave in an
inordinate way at a specific instance: he intends to make a stone
rise. So by its very essence, magical knowledge pertains to what is
hidden; what nature herself holds as a secret – magic is knowledge
of the occult. This is why humans cannot discover this knowledge on
their own. It’s knowledge of a secret, and as such, it must have been
divulged – in a mythical past, presumably by a divinity, since it is an
intimate knowledge of the workings of creation. From the moment of
its entrusting to humans, magical knowledge could only deteriorate:
by the passage of time, by its handling through the generations and
by fading memory.
The idea that nature holds some secrets from us may seem very
esoteric, but it does have roots in Aristotle and Galen, the empirically
bent forefathers of natural philosophy and medicine. Some
properties of natural substances, Aristotle explains, arise from the
fundamental qualities of matter; from the combination of the
properties of the four elements. We can sense those properties. But
others we can’t: the essence of a substance is the particular
combination of matter and form defining it as an acorn, a horse or a
person, and some of its essential properties just belong to a
substance by virtue of what it is. They cannot be reduced to some
other, simpler properties: horses beget horses because they are
horses, and the loadstone attracts iron because it has a magnetic
virtue. Nothing more can be known about these properties – they
cause change in matter, but are not themselves caused by anything
else. This is the sense in which the great seventeenth-century
Aristotelian scholar Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) still calls them
“qualities occult, specificall, or incomprehensible”:

The loadestone and Electricall bodies are produced for

miraculous, and not understandable things; and in which, it must
be acknowledged, that they worke by hidden qualities, that
mans witt cannot reach unto.
Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises (Paris: Gilles Blaizot, 1644),
Preface

Clearly, secrecy for the magician is not only an abstract philosophical

consideration but also an important practice and a mode of being
and self-understanding. Practically, secrecy is crucial for the safety
of the magical practitioner, because magic is at best subversive and
at worst – as when it offers an alternative creation story – heretical.
Secrecy is also self-imposed restriction: magical knowledge,
because it’s so potent and particular, is dangerous, and should not
be divulged to anyone. Moreover: we saw that because magic defies
the observable regularities of nature, the magician is not a
discoverer or inventor but a custodian of ancient knowledge. For the
same reasons, this almost-divine knowledge is well beyond human
capacities and the magician cannot be in real control of it; he is only
a medium of its transmission and application. As a medium, the
magician needs to be prepared, not unlike the primordial vessels of
Kabbalah; he needs to be in the right elevated state to receive the
great secret that can be delivered through him. Magical knowledge is
therefore occult also in the sense that it cannot be studied by
everyone, only by the select few who have ascended to such a state;
it takes initiation.
 Circumventing Reason: The Strange Role of Language
Magic demands initiation because, unlike natural philosophy, it
cannot be studied by observation. But, again unlike natural
philosophy, it can’t be studied from books either: words are made to
capture the regular and the shared; magical knowledge is inordinate
and personal.
This should seem paradoxical: isn’t magic all about words?
Doesn’t a witch like Walpurga enact her power by uttering
incantations? Doesn’t a wizard like Nicholas empower his talismans
by writing magical verses on them? Isn’t the main point of Sefer
Yetzirah that the world comprises a linguistic code? The atomists’
responses to Parmenides and Ptolemy’s subversion of Aristotle
exemplify how inconsistencies, tensions and compromises are
fruitful to the original thinkers (and telling to the historian) in all
branches of thought. Magical thought is of course no exception: the
magician is both superbly powerful and completely powerless; the
greatest magician is both a heathen priest and a prophet of Christ;
magical deeds are signs both of God’s omnipotence and of the
existence of rebellious demons; and so forth. But the paradoxical
import of language for the magician is especially interesting. Here is
an example, from a fifteenth-century household book, of how
magical words can be both meaningless and all-powerful:

Amara Tonta Tyra post hos firabis ficaliri Elypolis starras poly
polyque lique linarras buccabor uel barton vel Titram celi massis
Metumbor o priczoni Jordan Ciriacus Valentinus.
 Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, p. 4

This formulation, meant to drive away demonic possession, is a

mixture of confused Latin, quasi-Greek and complete gibberish.
“Rex, pax, nax in Cristo filio suo,” from the same manuscript, is a
more modest version: only the word ‘nax’ is meaningless. Clearly,
these words are not supposed to fulfill their powerful function by
representing things in the world the way ordinary words do; magical
knowledge, unlike natural philosophy, aspires to affect the world,
rather than represent or describe it. Famous magical words – like
abraxas or abracadabra – may have meant something once, in
Greek, Aramaic or Hebrew, but they no longer do, and their power
stems from the order and rhythm of their consonants and the
presumed antiquity of their source. The enchantment with the
alliteration of consonants is particularly apparent in magical
inscriptions like this one, from an Egyptian papyrus from the first
century BCE:

ablanathanablanamacharamaracharamarach
ablanathanablanamacharamaracharamara
ablanathanablanamacharamaracharamara
ablanathanablanamacharamaracharamara
Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, p. 20

The belief in the direct power of language is not unique to

magic: both the magical cosmogony of Sefer Yetzirah and the
common one in Genesis involve the use of language. But whereas in
Genesis God speaks clearly, in words and sentences, in Sefer
Yetzirah He only deals with letters. Fittingly, the magician looks for a
meaning hidden behind the literal text of the scriptures – not in what
the words signify, but in patterns of their arrangement.
The paradox, then, is that magic ascribes immense power to
language while depriving it of its usual force – to convey meaning.
Perhaps, however, it should not be looked at as a paradox, but as
another aspect of the idea that magic aims at the extraordinary, and
therefore can’t be constrained by our common paths to knowledge.
Observation and books, we said, don’t help. Reason, from this
perspective, is even worse: it is actively in the way of magical
knowledge. By forcing everything into general concepts and
categories – indeed, by using language – it prevents us from
perceiving the deep truth in particular things and from utilizing
unique, occult properties in order to achieve wondrous effects. The
great early modern physician and magician, Jan Baptist van Helmont
(1579–1644), had a particularly dim view of reason:

Reason … not onely feign perswasions, for the deceiving and

flattery of it self … but also … plainly yield it self for a Parasite,
and to the servitude of the desires … Reason being left with us,
came to us, as it were, a brand from a tormentor, for a
remembrance of Calamities, and of our fall. And that the
knowledge of good and evil, attained by eating of the Apple, was
Reason its very self, which is so greatly adored by mortal men.
Jan Baptist van Helmont, “The Hunting, or Searching Out of
Sciences” in Van Helmont’s Works Containing His Most
 Excellent Philosophy … J. C. (trans.) (London: Lodowick
Hoyd, 1664), pp. 16–17

For van Helmont, as for many witches over the centuries (whose
practices he aims to emulate and legitimize), this meant trying to
circumvent reason – to arrive at a mental state in which perception
was not hampered by reason’s judgment. This could be achieved
through fasting, dancing, avoiding sleep, alcohol or drugs – like the
famous unguent produced from toads and smeared on the witch’s
skin. It could also be achieved by reciting, repetitively, words and
formulas – since ‘enchantment’ comes from ‘chanting,’ this repetitive
intonation is a fundamental magical practice.
Magical Cosmologies
 The Symbolic World
Language, in the magical tradition, is not an aid and a tool of reason,
but a means to avoid it, and magical words are powerful not for the
meaning they carry, but for their direct, vocal effect. But while magic
takes meaning away from language, it ascribes it to everything else
in the world. For the natural philosopher, we saw, the substances in
the world are related to one another in causal and deterministic
ways. For the magician, their relations are symbolic – they have
meaning.
Things in the magical cosmos resemble, reflect and express one
another, and these similarities are potent. Mars is red like an angry
face, so it causes war. Mercury is a name for both a planet and a
metal, so they must be somehow related – and indeed, they are both
quick (hence the metal’s other name: quicksilver). Mercury is also
the name of a god – who is fleet-footed and therefore the messenger
god – and his priest by the same name (or in Greek – Hermes) is the
messenger of the great magical secrets. Wine mixed with water
resembles blood, so it can be used by the necromancer (and indeed,
by a priest conducting the Eucharist); and the tongue of a frog, put
on a sleeping woman’s heart, will untie her tongue. Some symbolic
relations are sympathetic: a walnut is folded like the brain, so it can
cure headaches; draconium, whose leaves look like dragons, cures
snakebites; the eye of the keen-sighted vulture, wrapped in wolf skin
and hung around the neck, cures eye ailments. Some relations are
antipathetic: the antipathy between the sheep and the wolf is such
that a drum made from wolf skin will mute one made out of
sheepskin; and because the shrew-mouse is afraid of the wheel rut,
dirt from the rut will cure its bite.
The most important and general symbolic relation for the
magician is that between the human body – the ‘microcosmos’ – and
the world as a whole – the macrocosmos (or ‘megacosmos’). The
terms seem to have been coined in an influential twelfth-century
manuscript, Cosmographia, by Bernard Silvester – another example
of those who dabbled in both practical and learned magic – and we
also find a version of this idea in the Kabbalistic concept of Adam
Kadmon (primordial man). John Dee (1527–1608/9), who succeeded
in combining life as an extraordinary practical mathematician –
Elizabeth’s most cherished and busiest expert on land surveying and
navigation – with an active magical career ranging from astrology to
communicating with angels, provided a particularly poetic version of
this grand analogy:

The entire universe is like a lyre tuned by some excellent

artificer, whose strings are separate species of the universal
whole. Anyone who knew how to touch these and make them
vibrate would draw forth marvelous harmonies. In himself, man
is wholly analogous to the universal lyre.
John Dee, Aphorism, XI; cited by Szønyi, in Hanegraaff,
Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, p. 304

Dee’s fascination with the mathematical harmonies of the cosmos

places him simultaneously within the Platonic tradition and within the
new mathematical natural philosophy of his time (we’ll return to this
convergence below). It is in Plato’s Timaeus that one finds the first
canonical version of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, when Plato
asks, “in the likeness of what animal did the Creator make the
world?” and answers that “the Deity, intending to make this world like
the fairest and most perfect of intelligible beings, framed one visible
animal comprehending within itself all other animals of a kindred
nature.” He goes on to detail how this “intelligent creature” which is
“by nature fairest and best” is made:

First, then, the gods, imitating the spherical shape of the

universe, enclosed the two divine courses in a spherical body,
that … we now term the head, being the most divine part of us
and the lord of all that is in us: to this the gods, when they put
together the body, gave all the other members to be servants,
considering that it partook of every sort of motion. In order then
that it might not tumble about among the high and deep places
of the earth … they provided the body to be its vehicle and
means of locomotion; which consequently had length and was
furnished with four limbs extended and flexible … Such was the
origin of legs and hands, which for this reason were attached to
every man; and the gods, deeming the front part of man to be
more honourable and more fit to command than the hinder part,
made us to move mostly in a forward direction. Wherefore man
must have his front part unlike and distinguished from the rest of
his body.
Plato, Timaeus, XVI
 The Organic World
What one can notice in the Timaeus is that the microcosm-
macrocosm analogy was tied, from early on, to another fundamental
assumption of magical thought: that the world is an organism – an
“animal.” Not only is “[t]he world a living creature truly endowed with
soul and intelligence by the providence of God,” explains Plato, but it
grows and changes like a living creature: “the elements severally
grow up, and appear, and decay”:

… water, by condensation … becomes stone and earth; and …

when melted and dispersed, passes into vapour and air. Air,
again, when inflamed, becomes fire; and again fire, when
condensed and extinguished, passes once more into the form of
air; and once more, air, when collected and condensed,
produces cloud and mist; and from these, when still more
compressed, comes flowing water, and from water comes earth
and stones once more; and thus generation appears to be
transmitted from one to the other in a circle.
Plato, Timaeus, XVIII

The magical world is thus not the causal system that science
inherited from Aristotelian natural philosophy; this is why this world is
opaque and resists both reason and the senses. But magical nature
is not completely obscure and capricious – even if the powers that
magic aspires to harness and manipulate are occult. It has a
structure that can be deciphered: an organic network of signs and
representations whose symbolic heart is the human body. These
assumptions gave learned and practical magicians common
grounds: they were embedded into the talismans, amulets and
incantations of the practitioner, and analyzed and elaborated upon
by the scholar. They are also the core beliefs of the most academic
of magical pursuits: alchemy and astrology.
 Scientific Magic
It is far from clear that alchemy and astrology belong in this chapter,
because they lack many of the fundamental properties by which we
distinguished magic. They are hardly secretive: astrology was taught
in universities well into the seventeenth century (primarily in relation
to medicine), and alchemy, although never established as part of the
curriculum and quite guarded about its substances and operations,
was a respectable subject matter of learned texts and encyclopedias
throughout the Middle Ages. Although alchemists and astrologists
shared their veneration of antiquity with all mediaeval scholars, they
were much less averse to innovation than the magicians whom we
discussed above. Alchemy was an empirical discipline, whose
practitioners were proud of new means and new effects, and
astrology went through a series of reforms intended to improve its
empirical accuracy and philosophical foundations. Neither had much
use for demons or difficult cosmogonies – indeed, they fit well within
the Aristotelian framework and the fundamental source for astrology,
the Tetrabiblos (simply ‘Four Books’), was authored by the great
father of medieval astronomy – Claudius Ptolemy. But no discussion
of magic can be complete without considering these two disciplines,
because within them are crystalized, in theory and practice, the two
fundamental beliefs that distinguished the magical tradition from
mainstream, institutionalized, natural philosophy: the belief in the
symbolic make-up of the cosmos and the belief in the vital,
hierarchical order of its elements. Things in the world reflected,
expressed and signified one another; they grew and transformed into
one another, evolving from base to noble; they related to one
another passionately and intently and influenced one another in
ways reminiscent of human language. The world was full of
meanings and intentions that the alchemist and the astrologer
deciphered and manipulated with great skill and erudition.
 Alchemy
Alchemy took its name from the Arabic al-kimiya, a term whose
origin could have been the Coptic word for pouring and mixing or the
ancient Egyptian word for black earth. Both meanings are based on
good reasoning: the alchemist attempted to untangle the weave of
meanings within the realm of matter; to unlock matter’s powers of
transformation and assist and hasten the process by which
substances ennobled themselves. The goal was itself noble, even
heroic: to uncover the all-transforming Philosopher’s Stone and the
all-curing Panacea. The process made good Aristotelian sense: all
things in the world strive to actualize their potential – acorns to oaks
and children to adults – and so did matter. Base metals were formed
inside the earth, from dry earthy and moist watery evaporations, and
evolved into the most perfect of metals – gold. This evolution,
explained Aristotle (as discussed in Chapter 2), was driven and
directed by the form – matter itself was passive – so the alchemist
trod on solid theoretical grounds in trying to strip the base metal
down to primal matter – materia prima – and grafting onto it new
forms. This process – “The Great Work” (Opus Magnum) – began
with calcination by slow heating; continued with solution in sharp
liquids; putrefaction in warm compost; and reduction in
“philosopher’s milk” (perhaps lime water of some concentration).
This produced the materia prima, which after sublimation in spiritual
substances, coagulation and fermentation with yeast of gold, was
elevated into superior matter (materia ultima) or Philosopher’s Stone
– lapis philosophorum: “this stone which isn’t a stone, this precious
thing which has no value, this polymorphous thing which has no
form, this unknown thing which is known to all” (cited in Hanegraaff,
Dictionary, p. 25), as it’s described by Zosimos of Panopolis, whose
fourth-century fragments represent the earliest alchemical texts in
existence. The Philosopher’s Stone could then be multiplied and
spread onto the base metal to produce gold.
Many of the processes and materials employed in this process
are shrouded in mystery, including the substance with which The
Great Work (and “The Lesser Work” – producing silver) begins, and
the language the alchemists used is often purposefully coded: “red
rose” for an elixir; “eagle” for evaporation; and “raven” for black. But
there are many hints, such as the colors matter takes, after which
the stages are called: nigerdo (black); albedo (white); rubedo (red)
and so forth. Some of the remaining alchemical notebooks from
periods far apart, like those of the Persian Rhazes (Abu Bakr al-
Razi, 865–925) or the Bermuda-born, Harvard-educated George
Starkey (1628–1665), are orderly enough to be deciphered, and with
an impressive combination of chemical and textual skills historians
have recently replicated some of those stages and effects (although
not the production of gold, regrettably), like the Philosophical Tree in
Figure 6.6, made of mercury and “a seed of gold.” The modern
replication may tempt us to think of alchemical knowledge as nothing
more than practical chemistry couched in strange terms, but this
would be a mistake. We may translate ‘calcination’ into ‘metallic
oxidation,’ for example, and from this translation we do gain some
understanding of how we can comprehend and perform the process.
But by the same token we lose some of our understanding of the
way the alchemist comprehended and performed it. The organic
connotations of ‘putrefaction,’ for example, are not empty: the
alchemist sees all matter – metal, wood or human flesh – as
decomposing and decaying in similar ways. Similarly, the moral
connotations of ‘sublimation’ are crucial for the alchemist: he expects
to be elevated by the process no less than the material he works on,
and knows that the success of the material transformation depends
on his own capacity for spiritual transformation. Here is how this
close affinity between the alchemist and his subject matter is
expressed by a very cool-headed and forward-looking thinker –
Francis Bacon:
Figure 6.6 The ‘Philosophical Tree’ produced by Lawrence
Principe in his laboratory. Following directions deciphered from
cryptic instructions given by George Starkey, Principe sealed a
pasty mixture of gold and a specially prepared mercury in a long-
necked flask (the “philosopher’s egg”) and heated it. After several
days, the enclosed mass that initially occupied less than a fifth of
the flask suddenly ‘grew’ upwards into a tree-like structure that
filled the flask. For Starkey and his fellow alchemists, this striking
phenomenon proved that they could cause the ‘seed of gold’ to
vegetate – a significant step towards producing the transmutatory
Philosopher’s Stone.
 But certain it is, whether it be believed or no, that as the most
excellent of metals, gold, is of all other the most pliant and most
enduring to be wrought; so of all living and breathing
substances, the perfectest (Man) is the most susceptible of help,
improvement, impression, and alteration. And not only in his
body, but in his mind and spirit. And there again not only in his
appetite and affection, but in his power of wit and reason.
Francis Bacon, “A Discourse Touching Helps for the
Intellectual Powers,” The Works of Lord Bacon (London:
Henry Bohn, 1854), Vol. II, p. 46

These reflections are not just after-the-fact musings: they guide

alchemical practice and empirical exploration. For example, the
alchemist manipulates matter with potent organic substances –
snake’s poison, lion’s urine, wolf’s bane, blood and sperm – because
self-perfection is natural to the base metal, and if it does not happen
– if lead remained lead, and didn’t evolve into gold on its own – it
means the metal is ailing, and needs to be healed. And he trusts this
understanding because it does produce many marvelous effects,
though perhaps not yet the most desired ones – gold and the
panacea.
 Astrology
If alchemy studied and practiced the ennoblement of base matter
(mostly in monasteries), astrology (often in the court) deliberated and
analyzed the influence of the noble – the heavenly bodies – on the
base material world. What this influence consisted of remained an
open question – one would find one answer in Plato, another in
Aristotle and yet another in Christianity, and from the thirteenth
century this astral influence was commonly understood with light as
an analogy. But for the practicing astrologer these questions made
little difference: influences, for him, had symbolic underpinning and
weren’t reducible to physical causes. And even if there were causes
underlying the heavenly phenomena, he had little use for them: his
working material was the positions and geometrical configurations of
the stars and the planets. Indeed, it was the astronomer who
provided the astrologer with orderly tables of these phenomena, but
the two (who may just be the same person, wearing different hats at
different times of the day) perceived them in very different ways.
Where the astronomer saw featureless dots of light whose changing
positions needed to be reduced to impassionate, simple motions, the
astrologer saw a splendid theater, whose scenes he aspired to
comprehend in their full complexity. The main characters in this
theater were the planets, which – far from being indistinguishable
and unknowable light spots – had rich and distinct personalities. The
Sun was the ruler, wise and trustworthy; the Moon his mistress –
luxurious and wandering. Mars was the warrior – angry and violent,
brave and obstinate; Venus was beautiful and desirable. They
controlled human life accordingly: the Sun ruled the head and
indicated courage and leadership; the Moon governed marriage and
travel; Mars caused wars, murder and plunder and was responsible
for the genitals; Venus brought erotic love and sweet music. There is
an internal coherence to this cosmic astro-psychology, and some of
these personality traits make good astronomical sense: the Sun is in
the middle of the heaven and his light rules the cycle of life; Mercury
is the fastest moving planet (its period around us – or the Sun – is
the shortest), so fits being the messenger, hence the patron of letters
and logic. But most other features had no inherent reason – they
were just so: for the astrologer, the heavens were as intrinsically
complex as human life and times.
Indeed, like human life, the complexity didn’t come only from the
characters and gender of these individual personalities, but from the
relations between them. The Sun, Saturn and Jupiter belong to the
diurnal sect, and are in tense relations with the nocturnal sect
comprising the Moon, Venus and Mars (Mercury is a hermaphrodite,
and belongs to both). But this does not mean that the relations within
the sect were necessarily warm: Venus and Mars are nemeses,
perhaps because the former (like Jupiter) is ‘benefic,’ or benevolent,
and the latter (like Saturn) is ‘malefic,’ or an evil-doer. Relating
astrology to alchemy and through it to medicine, planets also had
their counterparts in metals: the perfection and color of the Sun
related it to gold and the Moon to silver; the swiftness of Mercury is
captured by quicksilver and the malevolence of Saturn by the
baseness of lead. Mars was red, hence angry and violent, so it
naturally related to iron, also red and the metal of swords.
These attributes and attitudes of the planets seem to mostly
originate in myth and imagination, but to fully grasp the complexity of
the heavens’ influence the astrologer needs the astronomer’s tables:
the ‘ephemerides.’ This is because the planets’ powers and relations
depend on their position – in the heavens and relative to each other.
The ecliptic – the Sun’s path around the Earth – and the 10° band
about it, in which the planets travel, are turned by the astrologer, as
noted in Chapter 3, into the Zodiac: divided into twelve ‘signs’ of 30°,
each ‘ruled’ by a constellation. Each planet rules a sign (or two) and
is ‘exalted’ – that is, its power is heightened – in another: the Sun in
Aries; Venus in Pisces. Each is also ‘humiliated’ – its power
diminished – in some signs: Mars in Capricorn, the Moon in Scorpio.
Some signs belong to light, like Virgo; some to darkness, like Libra;
some are male, like Aries; some female, like Taurus (the complexity
does produce paradoxes. The planet’s influence is enhanced by
signs compatible with its properties and vice versa. The angles, or
‘aspects,’ between the heavenly bodies are also crucial: two planets,
or a planet and a star, could be in conjunction – namely at the same
angle from us; or in opposition – 180° from each other. Some of
these aspects, like trine (120°) or sextile (60°), are favorable – they
enhance the stars’ influence. Others, like squared (90°), are
unfavorable. Finally, their daily motion is also crucial: the celestial
sphere rises and falls as a whole, and with it the signs of the Zodiac.
The great circle through which the signs move through the day –
they ‘ascend’ in the east and ‘descend’ in the west – is also divided
into twelve segments. Known as ‘places,’ or ‘houses’, each one is
relevant to a different part of one’s life: the first, just under the
horizon to the east – to life; the seventh, just above the horizon to
the west – to marriage; and so forth. The angle between this circle
and the horizon is of course different for every location on Earth (on
the equator they’re perpendicular), giving astrological analysis yet
another level of complexity, relating to time and place of Earth.
The astrologer’s main tool, then, is a map – what we call a
‘horoscope’ – of the planetary positions on the Zodiac and the
Zodiac’s position in the heavens, as viewed from a particular place,
at a particular time. This time is either in the past – if it is a nativity
for someone already born – or in the future, if the astrologer is asked
to advise on taking some action, such as going to war or signing a
treaty. The map, plotted from the astronomer’s ephemerides, is finite
and can be as accurate as allowed by the empirical data and the
astrologer’s skills. The interpretation of this map, however – what it
signifies about the qualities of the person whose nativity it represents
and what the future holds for them; what will be an auspicious time
to assault or retreat – this interpretation remains open-ended. The
countless intricacies in which the properties, places and groupings of
the celestial bodies may relate to and transform one another
produces a tapestry of inexhaustible complexity. One can keep
probing the map deeper and find contradictory answers, or return to
it after the fact and find reasons why the original forecast had failed.
Aware and weary of this fact, honest astrologers like Johannes
Kepler tried to veer away from predicting particular events, but to no
avail: these predictions were, understandably, what their powerful
patrons and wealthy customers were mostly willing to pay for.
 Magic and the New Science
What happened to magic? Where did it go? Although Tarot readers,
talisman writers and weekend magazine astrologers still abound,
magic clearly no longer holds the same cultural role it used to: a
viable claim to knowledge, a serious resource and even an
alternative to mainstream natural philosophy.
At this stage of the book the reader will hopefully not fall for the
simplistic answer that magic’s fortress of superstition fell to the
progressing rationality of science. Pointing out the magical interests
of many of the heroes of the so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’ is
equally futile: Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Galileo Galilei
(1564–1585) made much of their livings as astrologers; Robert Boyle
(1627–1691) and Isaac Newton (1643–1727) were active alchemists,
to mention just the biggest names.
Of historical interest, rather, is what made early modern thinkers
– in their time, for their reasons and motivations – lose their trust in
the magical alternative, and what they retained of it. Or from a
slightly different perspective: which of the magical beliefs and
practices were incorporated into the New Science – which of the
stones comprising the cathedral of science were carved by magic –
and which were rejected. The answers are as complex as the
questions.
 Natural Magic
It is not difficult to see how attractive this wealth of empirical and
practical knowledge was to curious intellectuals, even if they could
not fully endorse the complex system of beliefs that came with
magical practices, whether for religious or intellectual reasons. And
indeed, even at times when either those beliefs or those practices
were condemned or persecuted (as we saw – persecuting the
practices necessitated adopting at least some of the beliefs), many
mainstream scholars found ways to engage with magic. Many of the
texts concerning learned magic arrived in Europe with the great
translation projects described in Chapter 4, and to many scholars
magic represented an integral part of an ancient, mysteriously
coherent corpus of wisdom. The challenge facing Christian natural
philosophers in accommodating magic into their work resembled the
challenge that they faced with pagan science in general and the
Aristotelian corpus in particular. This knowledge was exciting, but it
was also based on clearly heretical assumptions: how could these
assumptions be excused or bypassed? One common solution, as
mentioned above, was to revert to the concept of ‘natural magic.’
Carefully avoiding, and usually making a point to admonish, all
demonic influences, university-educated and often university-
employed scholars gave themselves license to tread these difficult
grounds with relative impunity.
The great Franciscan scholar Roger Bacon (c. 1215–c. 1292) is
a good example. A student and then a teacher in Oxford and Paris,
he composed, by commission of the pope, a major educational
reform, at the center of which lay astrology and alchemy. Bacon was
as impressed with a book named The Secret of Secrets (Secretum
Secretorum), which he believed was Aristotle’s, as he was by the
core Aristotelian texts, and was moved to write at length on the
power of words to cause action. However, he was anything but a
backward-looking believer in superstitions. In fact, he developed a
combination of the empirical dimensions of practical magic and the
concepts of similarity and mutual representation that are explored in
learned magic. This enabled him to formulate great novelties,
especially in optics. Theoretically, he turned Muslim optics into a
theory of vision; practically, he is credited with the invention of the
spectacles. For Bacon, the magical ability to really see – into things,
to see them as they really are – had far-reaching theological
implications. But while the looking glasses were very popular among
his scholarly peers (as Figure 6.7 nicely captures), his magical-
theological “novelties” were anything but. Bacon was condemned in
1277 – apparently for providing astrological analysis of Christ’s birth
– and perhaps even spent some time imprisoned.
Figure 6.7 A great achievement of practical magic – Bacon’s
spectacles. The image is of Hugues de Provence (Hugh of Saint-
Cher), part of Tommaso da Modena’s 1342 fresco series of “Forty
Illustrious Members of the Dominican Order” in the Chapter House
of the Seminario attached to the Basilica San Nicolo in Treviso,
Northern Italy. The other illustrious Dominicans apparently had
better eyesight or less tolerance to natural magic, because one of
them is holding a magnifying glass.
 The Magical Renaissance
Natural Magic is thus a category that allowed scholars to meld magic
with mainstream Aristotelian natural philosophy into Scientia Prisca,
and it was used similarly 200 years later by that great emblem of the
Renaissance Man – the Italian scholar, rhetorician, free thinker and
nobleman, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). Like Bacon,
Pico was greatly impressed by the influx of ancient knowledge; not
just of Aristotle and Plato but also Jewish learning and especially
Kabbalah, all of which he ventured to unify. Like Bacon, he was only
partially protected by his strong admonition of demonic magic; his
over-enthusiasm for the occult – which for him related not only to
controversial theology (like Bacon) but also to radical political
thought – landed him in house arrest. Rather than Bacon’s medieval
monastery and university, Pico’s milieu was that of the Renaissance
court – he was a member of Ficino’s circle – and as befitted a
humanist, he was more interested in language that in technical
natural philosophy. Pico’s responsibility for bringing Jewish learned
magic into Christianity and his criticism of divinatory astrology are
crucial landmarks of early modern magical thought – but there is a
more important, though subtle, way in which his work served as a
conduit for magical values into mainstream knowledge. With his
magical fascination with antiquity, Ficino, Pico’s mentor, turned to
look for the origins of Plato’s philosophy in ancient Babylon and
Egypt, in the Hermetic Corpus in particular. Pico took this idea even
further, finding in Kabbalah the foundations of Christian theology. To
support these bold speculations, Pico taught himself not only ‘proper’
classical Latin and Greek, but also Hebrew and Aramaic, laying the
foundations for empirical philology. These, paradoxically, were the
skills that Isaac Casaubon would use half a century later to dismiss
the antiquity of the Hermetic Corpus.
The main themes of Pico’s magical work and life – the antiquity
of magic; the authenticity and venerability of its sources, especially
Jewish ones; the strict distinction between evil demonic magic and
benevolent natural magic (which still could not protect against a
brush with authorities) – were picked up again a generation later, by
Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535/6): a German itinerant scholar,
academic, spy and feminist (his Declamation on the Nobility and Pre-
eminence of the Female Sex wasn’t finished, but was still published
in 1529). Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia became the main source
for Renaissance and early modern thinkers interested in magic. It
was learned magic: Agrippa didn’t provide incantations or recipes,
but an attempt at an elevated systematization of the pagan, Jewish
and Christian concepts and narratives discussed above: a
cosmogony with Man at its center; a metaphysics with hierarchy
between matter and spirit; an epistemology of symbols and secrets.
For Renaissance and early modern thinkers, this amalgamation of
learned magic provided an alternative to the highly formalized
discourse of medieval Christianized Aristotelianism, with its strict
rationalism on the one hand and strict limitations of human
knowledge on the other.
 Knowledge Is Power
The most influential adaptation of this alternative came from the
English courtier, lawyer, politician and philosopher Francis Bacon
(1561–1626). Being the sophisticated practical man that he was,
Bacon was unimpressed by magic’s claims to antiquity and had little
respect for Agrippa’s eclectic scholarship, but he wholeheartedly
adopted the main principle that always distinguished magical thought
from mainstream natural philosophy, the idea of knowledge with
which we started this chapter; in his formulation: “knowledge is
power” (scientia potestas est – power here in the sense of potency;
capacity to do). Bacon gave a compelling illustration of what he had
in mind in an unfinished piece of science fiction – New Atlantis. A
ship is wrecked on the shores of an unknown island, ruled by an
order of philosophers tellingly titled ‘Salomon’s House,’ and the awed
travelers are taken to observe its achievement:

We have also perspective-houses, where we make

demonstrations of all lights and radiations; and of all colours;
and out of things uncoloured and transparent, we can represent
unto you all several colours; not in rain-bows, as it is in gems
and prisms, but themselves single …
We have also sound-houses, where we practice and
demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have
harmonies which you have not, of quarter-sounds, and lesser
slides of sounds …
 We have also perfume-houses; wherewith we join also
practices of taste. We multiply smells, which may seem strange.
We imitate smells, making all smells to breathe out of other
mixtures than those that give them. We make divers imitations
of taste likewise, so that they will deceive any man’s taste …
We have also engine houses …
We have also a mathematical house, where are represented
all instruments, as well of geometry and astronomy, exquisitely
made …
Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (London: Tho. Newcomb, 1659),
pp. 33–35

These great deeds are all natural; the members of Salomon’s House
don’t call upon any demons or angels to assist them or try to bypass
the order of nature. But the deeds are magical, in the sense
discussed at the beginning of the chapter: they are not simply
spectacular but aspire to manipulate nature at its very foundations.
Bacon was not alone among his contemporaries, the advocates
and virtuosi of the New Science (whom we’ll consider in detail in the
following chapters), in adopting this magical confidence in the power
of human knowledge to mimic and even compete with the divine.
Galileo boasted such confidence unabashedly: “with regard to those
few [things] which the human intellect does understand, I believe that
its knowledge equals the divine in objective certainty” (Galileo
Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Stillman
Drake (trans.) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), p.
103). This was the type of epistemological pride that the Bible
powerfully rebuffed with the story of the Tower of Babel, and it may
well have been the main reason for Galileo’s difficulties with the
Church. Yet Kepler, whose piety is unquestioned, puts it as strongly:
“geometry is coeternal with God” (Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of
the World, A. J. Aiton et al. (trans and ann.) (Philadelphia, PA:
American Philosophical Society, 1997 [1619]), p. 146).
Bacon’s science is magical, and so is his world: it’s full of many
particular facts, not clearly related to one another. He tried to collect
as many instances as possible in his Sylva Sylvarum (Forest of
Forests, in ten parts, titled “Centuries”) – whose name, again,
reveals Bacon’s clear and explicit indebtedness to the magical
tradition. Some of the facts are quite inane, like: “It is observed by
some, that all Herbs wax sweeter, both in smell and, if after they be
grown up some reasonable time, they be cut, and so you take the
latter Sprout” (Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London: William Lee,
1670), Cent. V, p. 99). Some of them are a little more practical and
esoteric:

Take a Glasse with a Belly and a long Nebb, fill the Belly (in
part) with Water: Take also another Glasse, whereinto put Claret
Wine and water mingled, Reverse the first Glasse, with the Belly
upwards, Stopping the Nebb with your Finger; then dipp the
Mouth of it within the Second Glasse, and remove your Finger:
Continue it in that posture for a time; And it will unmingle the
wine from the Water: the wine ascending and setling in the topp
of the upper Glasse, and the water descending and setling in
the bottom of the lower Glasse. The passage is apparent to the
Eye; for you will see the wine, as it were, in small veine, rising
 through the Water. For handsomnesse sake … it were good you
hang the upper Glass upon a Naile.
Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. I, pp. 3–4 (I left the spelling,
capitals, italics and punctuation as they are in the original, but
in the following, for ease of reading, I’ll use the modern
transcription.)

This combination of useful tidbits and domestic spectacles

demonstrates that Bacon was assimilating into the New Science not
only the learned magic of Agrippa’s type, but also the practical
natural magic of which the most famous book, at the time and since,
was Magia Naturalis, by the Neapolitan polymath Giambattista della
Porta (1535–1615; like many of the heroes of this chapter, della
Porta’s nobility didn’t save him from an uncomfortable brush with the
Inquisition). Della Porta’s cheerful table of contents (Figure 6.8) is
the best explication of this tradition: “Of the Causes of Wonderful
Things; Of the Generation of Animals; … Of the Wonder of the Load-
Stone; … Of Beautifying Women …” Natural magic was a treasure
trove of empirical facts that the harbingers of the New Science were
eager to probe, and it also offered much by way of “experiments” to
be emulated, but in the attitude towards these experiments one can
discern a crucial difference between the two traditions. For della
Porta, the experiments have to be spectacular and entertaining:

For what could be invented more ingeniously, then that certain

experiments should follow the imaginary conceits of the mind,
and the truth of Mathematical Demonstrations should be made
good by Ocular experiments? What could seem more wonderful,
 then that by reciprocal strokes of reflexion, Images should
appear outwardly, hanging in the air, and yet neither the visible
object nor the Glass seen? That they may seem not to be the
repercussions of the Glasses, but Spirits of vain Phantasms?
Giambattista della Porta, Natural Magick (London: John
Wright, 1669), p. 355

This is not to say that della Porta doesn’t take his experiments
seriously, only that he does not expect them to tell him something
new about the nature of things: they are performances;
“demonstrations” of known “truths” and of his skills as a magician.
For Bacon, on the other hand, the experiments are ways to examine
the validity of the magical claims, which he takes with many grains of
salt, and find order in the phenomena that they produce:

I heard it affirmed by a Man, that was a great Dealer in Secrets,

but he was but vain; That there was a Conspiracy (which himself
hindred) to have killed Queen Mary … by a Burning-Glass,
when she walked in St. James Park … But thus much (no
doubt) is true; that if Burning Glasses could be brought to a
great strength, (as they talk generally of Burning-Glasses, that
are able to burn a Navy) the Percussion of the Air alone, by
such a Burning Glass, would make no Noise; No more than is
found in Coruscations, and Lightnings, without Thunders.

Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. I, p. 34

Bacon was very much setting the tone for the way in which the new
natural philosophers would approach magic: adopt the practical
knowledge while attempting to maintain a distance from all of its
suspect baggage. A particularly important version of this approach
was the assimilation of alchemical knowledge and magical remedies
into medicine, especially by Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus
Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus (1493–
1541), and Jan Baptist van Helmont whose words we saw above.
We will discuss the place of magic in their medical work in detail in
Chapter 8. For our discussion here it’s more significant to stress how
important it was for Paracelsus and van Helmont to naturalize these
magical means and practices, and, for all the obvious reasons,
detach themselves sharply from any association with demonic
magic. In similar ways, Kepler could incorporate astrology’s
fascination with mathematical harmonies into his new astronomy,
and Newton could find in astrology’s ‘influences’ a way to
conceptualize celestial forces in his new celestial mechanics, while
both steered carefully clear from any problematic association with
the supernatural.
 Figure 6.8 The frontispiece of Natural Magick, the best-selling
1658 English translation of della Porta’s Magia Naturalis. Note the
alchemical symbols on the left: the many-breasted Nature, the
Salamander in Fire and so on; and the mixture of mundane and
occult topics in the Table of Contents on the right: from “Of the
Causes of Wonderful things,” through the “Production of new
Plants” and “Cookery” to “Invisible Writing,” “Pneumatic
Experiments” and “Chaos.”

Alchemy provides a particularly telling example of this way in

which magic was adopted and adapted into the new ways of doing
natural philosophy, especially from the second half of the sixteenth
century. Even when they began calling themselves ‘chymists’ and
then ‘chemists,’ practitioners kept the procedures and processes of
the alchemists that we discussed above – calcination, sublimation,
putrefaction, etc. – as well as the alchemists’ equipment – mortars,
crucibles, scales, cucurbits, alembics, retorts, etc. Nor did they
relinquish the hope of producing gold. What the new chemists
refused to accept was the way the alchemists explained to
themselves what it was that they were doing:

The world hath been much abused by the Opinion of Making of

Gold. The work itself I judge to be possible but the means
(hitherto propounded) to effect it, are in Practice, full of Error
and imposture and in the Theory, full of unfound Imaginations.
For to say, that Nature hath an intention to make all Metals
Gold; and that if she were delivered from Impediments, she
would perform her own work; and that, if the Crudities,
Impurities and Leprosies of Metal were cured, they would
become Gold, and that a little quantity of the Medicine in the
Work of Projection, will turn a Sea of the baser Metal into Gold
by multiplying: All these are but dreams, and so are many other
Grounds of Alchymy.
Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. IV, p. 71

Bacon has every intention of keeping all the practical knowledge

amassed by alchemists, and indeed of improving upon it – he
dedicates many pages to “Means to enduce and accelerate
Putrefaction” (Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. IV, p. 73) and other
alchemical procedures. But he has no place for the antiquity of
knowledge, for the symbolic infrastructure of the cosmos, or for the
personal elevation of the magician.
 Conclusion
This, then, is what happened to magic as natural philosophy began
shaping itself into what we recognize as our own science. The New
Science adopted many magical practices and ways of thinking
without the theoretical framework in which they thrived. Some of the
rift between the natural philosophy and learned magic had clear
intellectual reasons: with the decline of trust in Aristotle and Galen,
the idea of ‘occult properties’ lost its philosophical legitimation.
Indeed, the reference to such mysterious, irreducible qualities of
substances became a symbol of ignorance masquerading behind
fancy language – the ‘virtus dormitiva’ in Le Malade Imaginaire of the
great French playwright of the time, Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin,
1622–1673), is an excellent example of such ridicule: the crook
doctor explains to the gullible patient that poppy will make him sleep
because it has (in gibberish Latin) ‘the power of sleepiness.’ But
there were other fundamental reasons for the rift.
Most crucial, perhaps, was that natural philosophy was no
longer willing to entertain the belief that was at the core of all strands
of the magical tradition – practical and theoretical; marginalized and
mainstream: that the world is an organic, symbolic whole, full of
hidden meanings. With it disappeared the related idea that
knowledge is a secret code for deciphering these meanings, handed
down from a divine and ancient origin, degenerating with time. The
craving for antiquity was giving way to a great belief in novelty, and
little place was left for the great secret inscribed into things and
accessible only to a selected few. “We may … well hope that many
excellent and useful matters are yet treasured up in the bosom of
nature … still undiscovered,” said Bacon, but these “undiscovered …
matters” were not really secrets.4 They “will doubtless,” he promised,
“be brought to light in the course and lapse of years, as the others
have been before them” (Novum Organum (London: Pickering,
1844), Aphorism 109, pp. 91–92). Without the secret there was also
little point in the deeply personal and enigmatic practices of the
magus and his initiates. The new ideal (though of course not always
the reality) became that of open, public, cooperative knowledge.
But while rejecting the theoretical and philosophical
assumptions underlying magic, the emerging New Science of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries picked up and bequeathed
magic’s fundamental ambition: to know and manipulate nature at its
most fundamental level, almost as if we were its maker.
 Discussion Questions
1. Have we lost an important resource of knowledge with the relative
decline of the place of magic in our lives? Is there indeed some
ancient fountain of knowledge which requires a different approach
than that of science?

2. Secrecy plays an important role in the modern culture of

knowledge – from state secrets, through trade secrets, to scientists’
data, withheld until publication. Is this the same secrecy as that of
the magical tradition? What is similar? What is different?

3. Some astrology is still practiced today – there are still experts who
can have one’s nativity drawn and interpreted. Can it therefore be
argued that the tradition has survived? If not – what has been
irretrievably lost?

4. Is the replication of alchemical experiments an interesting

undertaking? What can be learned from it? What cannot be
recovered?

5. Is it useful to think of some of the inquiries and achievements of

current science – genetic engineering, nano-technology, cloning – as
‘magical’? In what sense is it enlightening? What does it obscure?
Suggested Readings
 Primary Texts

Herms Trismegistus, Poimander I in Copenhaver, Hermetica, pp. 1–

7.

Plato, Timaeus (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html: from “All

men, Socrates, who have any degree of right feeling” to “visible gods
have an end”).

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book II 30–36; 45.

Giambatista della Porta, Natural Magick, Book 1, chapters I–III; Book

5, chapter I; Book 9, chapter I.
 Secondary Sources

General history of magical thought and practice:

Briggs, Robin, Witches & Neighbors: The Social and Cultural

Context of European Witchcraft (London: Penguin, 1998).

Copenhaver, Brian, Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the

Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Eamon, William, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of

Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton University
Press, 1994).

Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis & Western

Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2006).

Kieckhefer, Richard, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge

University Press, 2000).

On the Hermetic Corpus:

Copenhaver, Brian, Hermetica (Cambridge University Press, 1992),

Introduction.

On alchemy:

Newman, William R., Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the

Quest to Perfect Nature. (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Principe, Lawrence M., The Secrets of Alchemy (University of
Chicago Press, 2015).

On astrology:

Beck, Roger, A Brief History of Ancient Astrology (Blackwell, 2007).

The magician:

Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a

Sixteenth-Century Miller, 2nd edn. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2013).

Grafton, Anthony, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a

Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001).

Yourcenar, Marguerite, The Abyss, Grace Frick (trans.) (London:

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976).

Magic and science:

Bono, James J., The Word of God and the Languages of Man:
Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

Webster, Charles, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the

Making of Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Yates, Frances A., Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

(University of Chicago Press, 1964).
 On theories behind the witch hunt:

Stephens, Walter, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of

Belief (University of Chicago Press, 2002).

1 Broomsticks were added by later imagination, apparently

inspired by ways of applying hallucinogens through rubbing an
anointed staff. The original imagery of riding a broom has its brush
pointing forward – the aerodynamic version is a modern (and
modernist) bias.

2 ‘Neo-Platonism’ is not a term that Plotinus or his disciples would

have used – from their point of view, they were simply continuing
the great tradition initiated by Plato. There are many good reasons
as to why we should stick to the categories used by the heroes of
our story, but since this is a very common term in the literature,
especially in relation to magical thought, we will not be pedantic in
this case.

3 It is not clear if the Hebrew term comes from the Greek ‘sphaira’
(σφαίρα – sphere), relating to the Hellenic cosmology, or from the
Hebrew ‘sappir’ (‫ – ספיר‬sapphire), which connotes radiance.

4Some translations do use “secrets” here, but the original Latin

does not: “esse in naturae sinu multa excellentis usus recondita.”
 7
The Moving Earth
◈
 Introduction
The movable press was both a product and a harbinger of a new age
of knowledge in Europe: commercial, expansive, urban,
adventurous. It befitted a new world which was both much larger and
much smaller: its horizons extended well beyond what could be
imagined just decades earlier, but what lay beyond those horizons
was now reachable and negotiable. Yet perhaps the most
resounding impact of the press was close to home: it shook the
foundations of the European institution of knowledge, the Catholic
Church.
 Press and Reformation
Here are some measures of the change brought about by the press:
by the beginning of the sixteenth century, there were approximately
240 printing shops in Europe; producing a printed title was an
estimated 300 times cheaper than the equivalent handwritten
version; European libraries today hold more than twice as many
books from the half-century after the invention of the press (known
as incunabula – Figures 3.14 and 5.8 are a good example) than
manuscripts from the whole of the Middle Ages and Antiquity.
And the most important title, the first and most popular book
printed by Gutenberg in 1455 and his competitors immediately after,
was the Bible. The movable press made a physical copy of the
scriptures available to almost anyone, and one can hardly overstate
the cultural importance of this material fact. When the fifteenth
century rolled in, it became a religious maxim: if everyone can have
a Bible, Martin Luther decreed, everyone should have one. Everyone
should be able to read the Bible in their own language (Luther’s own
German translation of both Testaments and Apocrypha was
published in 1534), take personal responsibility for understanding it,
and, added Luther, be granted authority to interpret it.
Luther (1483–1546) was a German Augustinian friar who taught
theo-logy at the newly founded University of Wittenberg and
entertained strong views on the corruption of the Church and its
failure, as an earthly institution, to properly embody the divine lore it
was supposed to represent. These were not new complaints. Many
had expressed them over the centuries, and they would occasionally
develop into real malcontent and even uprising. Usually, these
revolts could be suppressed by violence or be redirected towards
establishing another order devoted to poverty and the true teaching
of Christ, but the press created a dramatically different option.
Luther (and many others) found one Church practice particularly
offensive: the pope granting sinners reduction of their time of
posthumous punishment in exchange for a donation. When the costs
of building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome pushed the Church to
greatly expand the selling of these so-called indulgences, Luther’s
willingness to compromise was exhausted. On October 31, 1517, he
formulated an angry and polemical Disputation on the Power of
Indulgences which he sent to the archbishop, and – much more
effectively – printed and posted as Ninety-Five Theses on the doors
of the churches of Wittenberg. The printed Theses spread like
wildfire, first in Germany and then, translated and edited, throughout
the rest of Europe, causing a schism of a depth and magnitude the
like of which the Church had never experienced before and has
never recovered from since – the Reformation.
There are many important aspects to the Reformation –
theological, political, cultural and ethical – but for us here, its
epistemological significance is crucial. First, let us stress again that
Luther’s revolution was predicated on the movable press: all
attempts to suppress his original theses and subsequent prolific
writing by both the Church and secular authorities completely failed
against the new power of printed publication. Within three years of
the posting of the Theses, thirty-two of Luther’s tracts were published
in more than 500 editions, with some 3 million copies by the time of
his death in 1546. These numbers do not include his translation of
the Bible, which was to become an indispensable part of every
Protestant household. Let’s further stress the significance of Luther’s
Bible. The practical and theological personalization of the reading of
the scriptures, which this book represented, was a direct assault on
the foundation on which the Catholic Church established its
authority: its expertise in interpreting God’s word.
This authority, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 4, was not limited
to questions of worship or abstract theology: “a Christian,” as we saw
Augustine claim, “is a person who thinks in believing and believes in
thinking.” The Church had worldly ambitions and responsibilities. Its
claim to knowledge of the divine – since the time of Augustine and
definitely since the establishment of its education system and the
university – was closely related to its search for and ability to
demonstrate knowledge of this world. Astonished by its inability to
subdue the new heresy, the Church convened a conference of high
officials and expert theologians – the extremely long Council of
Trent, lasting from 1545 to 1563 – which resulted in many decrees
and doctrines of faith uncompromisingly re-affirming orthodoxy.
These comprised the theological core of what came to be called the
Counter-Reformation, but more crucial to the development of
science were some practical steps taken by the Church to re-
establish its authority on earthly knowledge.
 Counter-Reformation and the Calendar Reform
We already discussed (Chapter 5) one of the measures: the
establishment of the Society of Jesus and its reform of education.
The Jesuits, as we‘ve pointed out, turned from the strict logicism of
traditional Church education to disciplines aimed at moving and
persuading: rhetoric, theater and dance. Even mathematics was
taught (at least to the missionaries-to-be) for its persuasive power.
The Jesuits were embracing the Humanist call for vita activa and the
earthly disciplines required by it, but they were also reacting in a very
telling way to the challenges of the Reformation. Luther and his
disciples stressed belief based on the simplicity of heart and a
personal understanding of the revealed word (reminiscent of the
teaching of early Church Fathers like Tertullian we encountered in
Chapter 1). The Protestant Church was therefore more interested in
affecting the passions than persuading reason. The Jesuits’ reform
was thus doing more than just succumbing to the fads of Humanism;
it was quietly acknowledging the powers of the new version of
Christianity and adopting its means. The spectacular nature of the
visual art sponsored and commissioned by the Catholic Church
following the Council of Trent – which came to be known as
‘Baroque Art’ – represents a similar insight: the flock needed to be
awed into belief rather than convinced by argument. The Catholic
Church was losing confidence in its centuries-old synthesis of
knowledge and belief – the one sketched by Augustine and
formalized by Aquinas.
 A little more than a century after Luther’s Theses this synthesis
would indeed collapse, unable to carry the burden of its own
inconsistencies, exasperated by attempts at compromise and
shaken by the pressures of a quickly changing science. The most
crucial of these changes was, in its turn, closely related to another
measure the Church adopted in order to face the challenge of the
Reformation: the drive to reform the calendar.
For the Church to reclaim its centralizing, knowledge-based role
– the very role that Luther had defied – it needed to demonstrate that
it could still provide its believers with the wherewithal for worship.
First and foremost was the need to regain control of time. An
accurate, standardized measure of time was required, so the Holy
Days could be planned confidently and well enough in advance to be
celebrated with the proper pomp and circumstance befitting the
Church’s authority as God’s representative on Earth. In other words:
the Church needed an accurate calendar.
It no longer had one. The Julian calendar it had inherited, along
with so much else, from Roman administrative law (the calendar took
its name from Julius Caesar, who had enforced it) was fundamentally
the Hellenistic calendar of the last century before the Christian Era.
Built into it was a cumulative error of about a quarter of an hour a
year – a result of what you may remember from Chapter 3 as
Hipparchus’ 1° a century ‘precession of the equinoxes.’ This is the
difference between the year calculated as the period the Sun
requires to return to a given position among the fixed stars versus
the year calculated as the period it requires to return to the equinox.
For Hipparchus, the precession was a very minute change that he
was proud to account for with a very slow cyclical change. But the
Church’s interest in astronomy was practical and linear. It wasn’t
satisfied with the knowledge that in 26,000 years the heavenly pole
would return to its same position above the terrestrial pole; it needed
to know a specific number of years, representing the exact time that
had passed from one particular event: the birth of Christ. An extra
quarter hour a year amounted to a day in a century, and over a
millennium and a half this had become a fortnight – so by the time
they had to deal with the Reformation, Church authorities also had to
worry if they were even celebrating the great rites within the
appropriate month, let alone accurately.
The most important of these rites – Easter – was also the most
difficult to calculate. The Gospels tell that Jesus rose from the dead
on the third day after his crucifixion; which happened on the day of
Passover (the last supper was the Jewish Seder), that is celebrated
on the fifteenth day, or the full Moon, of the spring month; which
occurred on a Friday. So Easter had to be celebrated on the first
Sunday after the first Monday after the full Moon following the spring
equinox – a complex triangulation of annual, monthly and weekly
calculations.
Let’s emphasize: it’s not obvious that the problem had to be
delegated to science – namely, to astronomy and its theoretically
driven calculations. The equinox, and even more so the full Moon,
could be determined locally, from straightforward observation, the
way Passover and other holidays were determined in the Jewish
tradition. But local initiative and authority were the very challenges
set by the Reformation that the Church was trying to stave off. This
is a fine example of the cultural import of science that we discussed
in Chapter 3: astronomy is only of use in a complex, centralized
political system. It thrives as a tool for a regime with claims to
heavenly patronage; with customs of grand ceremonies to
underscore this patronage; and with a need to coordinate these
ceremonies centrally, over large distances. The Church was not
unique in these demands: the Chinese court of the Late Ming and
Early Qing Dynasties that we encountered in Chapter 5 shared them.
The Church and the Chinese imperial court also shared, we saw, the
reliance on Hellenistic-based astronomy and the calendar crisis that
it was causing at that particular point in time.
So in its very first year – 1545 – the Council of Trent authorized
the pope to effect a reform of the calendar, which concluded in 1582
with Pope Gregorius' institution of a new calendar, named after him,
that is still in use. But the problem with the Julian calendar was clear
for centuries – Bede, in the ninth century, had already mentioned
Easter being three days later than the date officially set for it by the
first ecumenical council, the Council of Nicaea, in 325. Moreover, the
fact that the error now amounted to two whole weeks, meaning that
Easter might be celebrated in the wrong month, created a sense of
crisis shared by astronomers for decades. With the complete Greek
original version of Ptolemy’s Almagest finally making it to Europe in
the fifteenth century – translated into Latin and then printed –
astronomers were already putting forward bold suggestions very
actively attempting to reform Ptolemaic astronomy in general and the
calendar in particular. The boldest proposal came in 1514, in a short
manuscript fittingly called Commentariolus (Little Commentary),
which a Polish friar, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), circulated
among astronomers and knowledgeable acquaintances. Many of the
observational discrepancies in existing astronomy, Copernicus
claimed, and even more so the unconvincing compromises built into
Ptolemaic theory, would disappear if the Earth and the Sun would
change places. Instead of resting at the center of the cosmos with all
the planets and the sphere of the fixed stars moving around it, so
Copernicus suggested, the Earth moves around the Sun, together
with the other planets.
 The Copernican Revolution
A close contemporary of Luther (who found Copernicus' theory
bizarre), Copernicus was a product of these changing times; his
education and livelihood straddling both a fading era and the new
era that was just being ushered in. He was born in Northern Poland,
then under Prussian rule, to a family of new merchant wealth and old
Church connections. He first received traditional, Aristotelian
education at the University of Krakow, followed by studies of Church
law in Bologna, but in trying Medicine in Padua and receiving an LLD
from Ferrara (in 1501) he actively took to the Humanist fads of the
time. Yet Copernicus had no interest in vita activa: throughout his life
he made his living as a canon in Frombork (then Frauenburg), a
medieval privilegium (a personally conferred status) with few
obligations, which he received thanks to the very Renaissance-style
nepotism of his uncle, the Bishop of Warmia. He was a skilled
astronomer, versed in the newest theories and techniques, but never
a professional one: his activities were supported by the patronage of
his uncle, in whose Warmia house he set up his observatory.
 Conservatism
Copernicus’ famous ‘hypothesis’ is a product of this combination of
novelty and conservatism. From a purely astronomical perspective,
his hypothesis changed little: the Sun moved to the Earth’s place as
the reference point for all planetary motions, and the Earth
correspondingly moved to the Sun’s place, carrying the Moon with it.
The Sun wasn’t exactly at the center of each orbit, just as in
Ptolemaic astronomy the Earth had not been. It was presumed to be
at the center of the cosmos as a whole, but this assumption had no
immediate implications for the astronomer. All other planets kept
their order, and Copernicus fully embraced the fundamental
requirements of Hellenistic astronomy – circular, concentric, uniform
motions. He also maintained most of the theoretical means used to
meet these requirements, established by Ptolemy and refined in the
medieval tradition (though importantly not all, as we’ll see):
independent circular orbs, eccentricity, deferents and epicycles.
As Figure 7.1 shows, Copernicus’ astronomy looks and feels
well within the Ptolemaic tradition. And against common lore, neither
he nor his contemporaries saw in the motion of the Earth a cause for
religious worry – this would take another century. In fact, when he
eventually came to print and publish his hypothesis as a book,
Copernicus actually dedicated it to the pope. More importantly, in the
opening paragraphs of the Commentariolus, Copernicus does not
display his system as a great innovation at all. Quite the opposite: it
is a return to the “principle of regularity” of “our ancestors,” which
“the planetary theories of Ptolemy and most other astronomers,
although consistent with the numerical data,” abused. The
compromises through which this empirical consistency was
achieved, he claims, left a system that is “neither sufficiently
absolute nor sufficiently pleasing to the mind” (Copernicus,
Commentariolus, p. 57).

Figure 7.1 A couple of pages from Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus

of 1543. On the left: the planets, now with the Sun at the center
and the Earth, together with the Moon, as the third planet.
Compare to Figure 3.10 and note how this is, in a sense, just a
straight change of place between the Sun and the Earth. On the
right: one of the many diagrams in the book. Again: note how
traditional it seems, similar to the diagram in Figure 3.14.
 Revolutions
Copernicus’ hypothesis was perhaps a minor transformation from a
purely astronomical perspective – a mere exchange of places
between the Sun and the Earth. But from physical and cosmological
points of view it was revolutionary: it put the Earth in three different
motions. In his book, Copernicus put the idea quite poetically:

It is the earth … from which the celestial ballet is beheld in its

repeated performances before our eyes. Therefore, if any
motion is ascribed to the earth, in all things outside it the same
motion will appear, but in the opposite direction, as though they
were moving past it.

Copernicus, On the Revolutions II, Edward Rosen (trans.),

(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992
[1543]), p. 12

The heavenly bodies seem to rise and fall and move with the
seasons, but all this “celestial ballet” is but an appearance:

Such in particular is the daily rotation, since it seems to involve

the entire universe except the earth and what is around it.
However, if you grant that the heavens have no part in this
motion but that the earth rotates from west to east, upon earnest
consideration you will find that this is the actual situation
concerning the apparent rising and setting of Sun, moon, stars
and planets.

Copernicus, On the Revolutions II, p. 12

The Sun and the stars don’t move daily from east to west – it’s the
Earth that rotates around its poles from west to east. Similarly, it is
not the Sun that moves yearly on the ecliptic from west to east – it’s
the Earth that moves from east to west, like any other planet. Finally,
since the poles of the daily rotation always point in the same
direction (the north pole at the North Star), the axis itself must rotate
in the opposite direction to the annual motion and at the same
velocity. This is because the axis of the Earth’s daily rotation is
oblique to the ecliptic (the 23½° that were the difference between the
ecliptic and the celestial equator), and the physics available to
Copernicus could only conceive of the Earth as if held solidly in its
position in the orb of its annual revolution. It meant that the oblique
pole must constantly change the point at which it’s directed – unless
you assume that the pole keeps rotating backwards, towards its
original inclination. Think of a straw in a tilted can of drink that you
hold while turning on your heels1 – it’ll change the point on the
ceiling at which it is directed, unless you constantly twist your hand
in the opposite direction to your rotation. In our physics this problem
is solved, more simply, by the assumption of the conservation of
angular momentum, which means that the axis of rotation maintains
its orientation in space, always remaining parallel to itself, but for
Copernicus the assumption of backward rotation also had a side
advantage. Instead of assigning an independent (and very slow)
motion to account for the precession of the equinoxes (see Chapter
3), he explained it as a slight difference between the angular velocity
of the Earth around the Sun and the angular velocity of the axis
around the pole (in the opposite direction).
 Whether one finds these technical details exhilarating or
excruciating, they should not obscure the enormous intellectual price
Copernicus had to pay for putting the Earth in all of these motions.
From the point of view of both science and common sense, these
motions were hardly believable. As we saw in Chapter 3, this was
not the first time that the motion of the Earth had been suggested –
Aristarchus of Samos was its most famous ancient champion,
already in the third century BCE. But the arguments that led to its
rejection in antiquity had only become more powerful with time.
To begin with, there were excellent physical reasons why the
Earth should be at the center of the cosmos. It was clearly at the
center of the realm of elements, with heavy bodies moving naturally
towards it and light ones moving away. If it keeps on moving, how
are the earthly bodies supposed to know where to go to, and where
from? Moreover: if the Earth isn’t at the center of the cosmos, why
don't these bodies move towards and away from the cosmos’ real
center?
To these scientific queries Copernicus had quite a good answer,
well rooted in Aristotelian cosmology: the Earth is not only the soil
under our feet. It’s the whole realm of elements, and it all moves
together. The elements move towards and away from this center, but
in order to do so, the Earth doesn’t also need to be at the center of
the whole cosmos. After all, as we said, it is not at the center of any
orbit in the Ptolemaic system (no more than the Sun is at the center
of any of the orbits in Copernicus’ own system). Ptolemy said that
the Earth is at the common center of all orbits, and now the Sun is at
that center, but the very concept of a common center has little
astronomical significance, and Copernicus reminds his readers of
this in the first of the Assumptions (Petitiones) opening the
Commentariolus: “1. There is no one center to all the celestial circles
or spheres.” With no common center, he feels secure to add as his
second Assumption: “2. The Center of the earth is not the center of
the universe, but only of gravity and of the lunar sphere.” The Sun
can thus be “the center of the world (mondus)” in the same way that
the Earth used to be the center of the Ptolemaic cosmos, as the
“mid-point” of all orbits, and Copernicus adds this idea as his third
Assumption.
An even more severe challenge is the main reason why the
motion of the Earth was rejected when originally offered by
Aristarchus (Chapter 3): because we observe no parallax among the
fixed stars, the cosmos would have to be enormous for the Earth to
be moving; much bigger than is reasonable. To the necessary
enormity of the cosmos Copernicus’ answer is simpler, and even
more astonishing: it is simply so. This is his fourth Assumption: the
world is indeed so huge that the motion of the Earth around the Sun
doesn’t change the angles of the stars in a detectable way. If
required by science, he implies, what counts as reasonable will have
to change.
But the most difficult objection to Copernicus’ theory was
completely straightforward: if we move, how come we don’t feel it? If
the Earth rotates from west to east, how come things not attached to
it don’t drift in the opposite direction? Why don’t we feel a constant
and extremely fast easterly wind? Why don’t clouds and birds
disappear to the west? Why don’t cannon balls shot to the west,
against our rotation, travel much further than those shot to the east?
Why don’t stones dropped from towers fall to the west of them?
These questions didn’t require much natural philosophy or
cosmology to understand, but they could also be formulated in a
sophisticated, technical way: nature is change, and change is
motion. If the motion of the Earth is wholly imperceptible, if it creates
no change in our world, in what sense is it motion? Moreover: the
motion that Copernicus’ hypothesis claimed was very fast, and it
wasn’t difficult to calculate just how fast. The circumference of the
terrestrial globe, you’ll remember, had already been measured by the
ancient astronomers, and to traverse such a distance in 24 hours
would mean that Europe had to travel at about 1,500 kilometers per
hour. In a world in which the fastest motion that anyone could have
experienced was a horse galloping at around 30 kilometers per hour,
the idea that we may be traveling so fast without an inkling of our
doing so was absurd.
Copernicus answered this challenge with the second
Assumption we quoted above: that Aristotelian claim that the Earth is
not only the soil under our feet, but the whole realm of elements
under the Moon, and this terrestrial globe moves together. There is
no wind and the clouds don’t drift because the air also rotates
around the Earth’s axis.
To us, who have learned the physics that was developed in the
seventeenth century (we will discuss this project in the coming
chapters), this solution may sound very reasonable. We are used to
the idea that when whole physical systems move together in uniform
velocity, this motion cannot be noticed from within the system. But
it’s crucial to stress that Copernicus did not have such physics – it
was in fact developed in response to the challenges of his moving
Earth. Moreover, suggesting that the elements move together
begged the question: why did they move at all? Again, the only
physics Copernicus knew did not allow for such motion. Aristotle
explained why within the terrestrial realm the four elements moved
towards or away from the center while the heavens, made of the fifth
element, moved around this center. But what could make all the
elements move together around the center? What was the cause of
this motion? Was it natural or forced?
As he did with his answer to the question of the lack of parallax,
Copernicus demanded of his readers to submit their common sense
to whatever was implied by reasons and arguments internal to one
science – astronomy – even though these considerations also
militated against the rest of science; they departed from natural
philosophy and cosmology. Recalling that the ruling Aristotelian
natural philosophy put a particular stress on good reason and good
sense, the difficulties with the idea that the Earth moves seemed
overwhelming.
 Motivations
Copernicus was himself well aware of the unreasonableness of his
hypothesis. It took him almost thirty years to turn his
Commentariolus into a complete book – On the Revolutions – whose
final proofs he reviewed on his death bed, never to see it actually in
print. In the very first paragraph of the book's dedication to the pope,
he says specifically:

To be sure, there is general agreement among the authorities

that the earth is at rest in the middle of the universe. They hold
the contrary view to be inconceivable or downright silly.

Copernicus, On the Revolutions II, p. 11

What, then, was so attractive in this “downright silly” (ridiculum)

hypothesis that made him cling to it and accept all its “inconceivable”
implications? The reasons for Copernicus’ preference couldn’t have
been empirical. As we pointed out, he remained intensely loyal to the
assumption of circular motions and incorporated the fundamental
Ptolemaic tools of eccentricity and epicycles, and under these
conditions the heliostatic and geostatic systems were strictly
equivalent. We should insist on ‘static’ here rather than ‘centric’ in
order to stress exactly this point of equivalence of the Copernican
and Ptolemaic systems: both applied eccentricity, and the Sun was
not at the center of the Copernican orbits anymore than the Earth
was at the center of Ptolemy’s orbits. Copernicus was well versed in
the geometrical transformation between the systems, which was
worked out by an astronomer of the previous generation – Johannes
Müller von Königsberg (1436–1476), known as Regiomontanus. The
commonly held idea that Copernicus’ system was simpler than the
Ptolemaic also needs a careful modification. Copernicus left in place
not only eccentricity, but also the epicycles which Ibn al-Haytham
found so deplorable (Chapter 4), using as many of them as Ptolemy
did. The heliostatic system did allow, for example, for a simpler lunar
theory, and in the context of the search for Easter’s accurate date it
was not a negligible achievement. In other respects, however, like
the cumbersome explanation for the constant direction of the Earth’s
pole, it was actually more complex than the geostatic system.
Copernicus himself tells his readers on the first page of the
Commentariolus what it was that made traditional astronomy “neither
sufficiently absolute nor sufficiently pleasing to the mind”: the equant
point. There’s no doubt that the equant was the most embarrassing
of all the compromises built into Ptolemaic astronomy: if the planet
moved in uniform angular velocity around some other point, it clearly
did not move in circular, concentric uniform motion around either the
Earth or the geometrical center of its orbit. And Copernicus indeed
made good on his word and provided an equant-free model, but his
model had little to do with the question of the Earth’s motion. It was a
double-epicycle model – basically a version of the Tusi couple
discussed in Chapter 4 – and it worked equally well with a reference
to an immobile Earth as it did to the Sun. Whether he was familiar
with the Muslim work or developed the double-epicycle technique on
his own is a subject of much debate among historians of astronomy
but of little consequence to us here, exactly because it has nothing
to do with the motion of the Earth.
So it wasn’t one particular theoretical issue either that motivated
Copernicus’ dramatic revision of astronomy. However, the
concentration on the equant does tells us something. It was crucial
for Copernicus to compromise as little as absolutely necessary on
the fundamental ancient criteria of order: concentric circular motion
of uniform velocity. He didn’t see himself as demolishing traditional
astronomy, but as returning it to its former glory. None of the
theoretical advantages that he gained from the motion of the Earth
was, in itself, important enough to justify the dramatic change they
necessitated. But together they provided what Copernicus called
“symmetry”: a coherence which replaced the troubling arbitrariness
of the Ptolemaic system. This coherence suggested that the
mathematical-geometrical theories of the astronomer didn’t just ‘save
the phenomena’ through clever trickery, but reflected real order in
nature. It was a paradoxical order, because, as we saw, it
contradicted the order ascribed by physics and cosmology, but for
Copernicus, a mathematician – and recall that astronomy was a
branch of mathematics – this paradox was apparently not too
daunting, and perhaps even exciting. In fact, the quote we started
with suggests that this physics impressed him little: why assign
motion to the enormous “entire universe” if the “rising and setting of
Sun, moon, stars and planets” could be explained by the much more
modest rotation of “the earth and what is around it”?

Planet Copernicus value Modern value (AU)

 (AU)

Mercury 0.38 0.387

Venus 0.72 0.723

Earth 1.00 1.000

Mars 1.52 1.52

Jupiter 5.22 5.20

Saturn 9.17 9.54

First of all, revolving around the Sun made sense of the

sequential order of the planets. Traditional astronomy simply
assumed that the length of the planet’s period indicates its distance
– the longer the period, the further is the planet. Rotating around the
Sun, there were now two groups of planets: Mercury and Venus are
the ‘inferior planets’ – between the Earth and the Sun; Mars, Jupiter
and Saturn the ‘superior planets’ – further away from the Sun than
the Earth. Some facts about their periods and distances, which were
previously just contingent facts, followed directly from this new order.
For example, Mercury’s angle to the Sun is always the smallest and
its period the shortest; now these two facts followed from the same
reason: it is the closest planet to the Sun, not to the Earth. Even
more interestingly, the fact that neither Mercury nor Venus are ever
in opposition to the Sun – the greatest ‘elongation’ (angle to the Sun)
of Mercury is 28° and of Venus 47° – reflects that same order: since
we observe these planets from outside their orbit, their maximum
elongation is the angle by which we perceive the radius of their orbit
(Figure 7.2, left and center). It is not that the Ptolemaic system could
not account for either fact – all it took was calibrating the velocity and
size of the corresponding deferents and epicycles and synchronizing
those of Venus and Mercury with the Sun’s. The point was that in
Copernicus’ system all these facts had one real cause: the true order
of the planets.
Figure 7.2 The explanatory innovations of the Copernican
Hypothesis. Right: Copernicus’ explanation to retrograde motion:
when the Earth moves past a planet (here Mars) it appears as if
this planet is moving backwards. Left and center: Copernicus’
explanation for the fact that the angles we observe between
Mercury and Venus and the Sun are limited (maximum 28° for
Mercury and 47° for Venus). Had we been observing them from
the center, it should have been possible for those planets to be ‘in
opposition’ – namely, 180° away from the Sun. The Ptolemaic
system has to forcibly synchronize the motions of these planets
and the Sun, but if the Earth is moving around the Sun then this is
no longer required. Since our orbit is further from the Sun than the
orbits of Venus and Mercury, it means that we always observe
them from ‘outside’: the angle we observe between either of them
and the Sun is never larger than the angle by which we perceive
the radius of their orbit. From this follows a way to calculate the
radii of the interior planets in astronomical units (AU, the radius of
the Earth’s orbit or its mean distance from the Sun) according to
the Copernican Hypothesis. When we observe the planet (take
Venus) at its ‘maximum elongation’ – the largest angle from the
Sun (in this case 47°) – the angle between the Sun and the Earth
observed from the planet has to be 90°. The largest distance
between Venus and the Sun is thus AUcos47°=0.72AU. The radii
of the exterior planets are marginally harder to calculate. Here are
 the planets’ radii according to Copernicus’ calculations, compared
with the modern values.

Even more interesting was how the motion of the Earth

accounted for the phenomenon which most engaged Hellenistic
astronomy: retrograde motion. Again: it was not that traditional
astronomy couldn’t explain this phenomenon; the epicycle did so
quite satisfactorily. But Copernicus’ hypothesis ‘saved’ this
apparently disorderly motion in the most elegant way: by showing
that it’s merely apparent. The planets always move in the same
direction; they only appear to slow down and reverse when the Earth
bypasses them in its own motion, the way the shore seems to be
moving backwards from a departing ship (Figure 7.2, right).
Moreover, this explanation creates another “symmetry” where
coincidence used to rule: the retrograde intervals of the planets
nearer the Earth appear larger and more frequently than those of the
planets further away (regardless of their distance from the Sun);
Venus more than Mercury; Mars more than Jupiter; Jupiter more
than Saturn. In the Ptolemaic system, each was an independent fact,
accounted for by an independent set of epicycles. With the Earth set
in motion, all these facts follow from one simple principle: the closer
a planet is to the Earth, the more often the two planets (the Earth
now a planet) pass each other by.
After Copernicus
 Andreas Osiander and the Timid Interpretation
Copernicus didn’t see a religious scandal brewing in his work – he
was more worried that his astronomer peers would find his
hypothesis “ridiculous” – but the following decades proved him
wrong on both counts. The reception of his hypothesis among
astronomers was quite favorable. His Commentariolus, in spite of its
limited distribution as a manuscript, became well known enough that
a young Lutheran admirer, Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–1574),
left his duties as professor of mathematics in Wittenberg to come
and study with him in 1538. In 1540, Rheticus published an excitedly
supportive Narratio Prima – ‘first exposition’ – of Copernicus’
hypothesis, paving the way for the 1543 publication of De
Revolutionibus. The title of the book is quite telling: for Copernicus
and his contemporaries, ‘revolutions’ meant the continuous, circular,
cyclical motion of the planets. When it came to mean the exact
opposite: a drastic change from one situation – social, political or
intellectual – to another, it was quickly applied to the change brought
about by Copernicus’ hypothesis. But the drama of this change
would take some time to develop. One reason may have been that
the person charged with bringing the book to print upon Copernicus’
death and Rheticus’ departure – another Lutheran scholar by the
name of Andreas Osiander (1498–1552) – added an unsigned
preface that could easily be read as Copernicus’:

There have already been widespread reports about the novel

hypotheses of this work, which declares that the earth moves
whereas the sun is at rest in the center of the universe. Hence
 certain scholars, I have no doubt, are deeply offended and
believe that the liberal arts, which were established long ago on
a sound basis, should not be thrown into confusion. But if these
men are willing to examine the matter closely, they will find that
the author of this work has done nothing blameworthy. For it is
the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial
motions through careful and expert study. Then he must
conceive and devise the causes of these motions … Since he
cannot in any way attain to the true causes, he will adopt
whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed
correctly from the principles of geometry for the future as well as
for the past. The present author has performed both these
duties excellently. For these hypotheses need not be true nor
even probable … if they provide a calculus consistent with the
observations, that alone is enough.
Osiander, Preface to Copernicus, On the Revolutions, p. xvi

Osiander’s preface does little justice to the great ambition and self-
confidence embedded in Copernicus’ project and expressed in his
dedication to the pope, but is worth quoting at length for a number of
reasons. First, because the question of whether such
epistemological humility befits scientists, or is reasonable to expect
of them, still engages philosophers. Secondly, because it reminds us
that this complex distinction between what is to be accepted within
philosophical discussion and what is to be ‘truly’ believed was an old
technique that allowed the Church to ignore the contradictions
between naturalistic philosophy and monotheistic belief and retain its
position as the leading European institution of knowledge. Osiander,
though protestant at the time, was a Catholic convert for whom this
difficult intellectual maneuver made perfect sense when facing such
an unsettling challenge to “the sound basis of the liberal arts.” Lastly,
this strange constellation demonstrates well the upheaval of the
times: a Protestant priest using a medieval Catholic ploy to protect
an astronomical doctrine created by a Catholic friar in the context of
the Counter-Reformation; moreover, a doctrine Luther was
apprehensive about.
 Giordano Bruno and the Radical Interpretation
What Osiander seems to have feared – a true religious scandal –
took some forty years to materialize – but it finally did. Claims with
deep cosmological implications, such as those advanced by
Copernicus, are bound to have religious implications. The scandal
came in the hands of a known rascal, Giordano Bruno (1548–1600),
who reasoned as follows: since Copernicus’ theory demands that the
world be so enormous, we may as well consider it infinite. And an
infinite world is no longer a cosmos; it is a universe: it has neither
center nor periphery, nor any privileged points. It can, and therefore
should (because God is omnipotent), contain infinitely many suns
and, around them, infinitely many planets. Most crucially: this implies
infinitely many earths, and on them, presumably, infinitely many
human races. It is easy to see how different this image of the
universe – and the place of humans in it – is to the traditional one,
represented so emblematically in Figure 1.12. In that convincing and
reassuring marriage of Aristotelian cosmology and Christian
cosmogony, deeply rooted for many centuries, humans were nestled
at the center of the cosmos, with God’s loving eye resting on them.
In its stead Bruno was suggesting an infinite universe scattered with
infinite humans – how could one God attend to them all? How could
He reveal himself to them? And how could He do it in the flesh?
In 1593, Bruno found himself in the hands of the Inquisition, and
in 1600 he was burned at the stake for heresy in Campo di Fiori in
Rome. The exact nature of the allegations against him remains
uncertain, as the protocols were lost, in sloppiness not characteristic
of the Inquisition – but there were many good reasons for the
authorities to consider him an unrelenting heretic. Born in Nola, in
southern Italy (he subsequently called himself “the Nolan” in many of
his writings), he became a Dominican friar in Naples in 1575, and
already in 1576 was accused of Arian heresy (a doctrine
distinguishing between Jesus and God), which pushed him to flee to
the more tolerant north and commence a life of wandering. In 1579
Bruno was in Geneva, where he converted to Calvinism, only to be
excommunicated later on charges of disrespect. He moved on to
France, where he published works on the nature of memory and on
Neo-Platonic philosophy, as well as anti-Church satires. He made his
way to England and wrote extensively and brilliantly enough that by
1583 he became very popular in the court and in Oxford, but when
he turned his satire against his new benefactors he was forced to
return to the continent and to Catholicism. He then made the mistake
of returning to Italy in 1591, where a Venetian patron, disappointed
with him as a tutor, denounced him to the Inquisition. It’s hardly
likely, then, that Bruno was burned strictly for his support of
Copernicanism, but the pattern is clear: in a climate of religious
volatility, with the radical ambitions of astronomers and natural
philosophers, and with enthusiasts adopting new scientific ideas to
support deviant theological doctrines, the delicate balance on which
Church-sponsored science depended was quickly eroding.
 Tycho Brahe and the New Empirical Astronomy
For astronomers in the second half of the sixteenth century, the
hypothesis of the recently departed Copernicus brought enthusiasm
of a different sort. As long as the Earth was assumed static and at
the mean center of all orbits, the changing positions of the planets
against the backdrop of the fixed stars meant only that: changing
angular positions. Even the notion that they were moving was in a
sense an interpolation: all that could be observed was that a planet
was in one place one day and in another the next. From an off-
center vantage point, these changing angles could be translated into
real motions, over real distances – not just theoretically, as we saw
in Copernicus’ reasoning above, but empirically. Figure 7.2, center
and left, demonstrate how, with simple trigonometric calculation,
Copernicus could infer the real distances of the planets from the
Sun: the radii of their orbits, expressed in Astronomical Units (the
caption explains the procedure).
After millennia in which they were concerned almost exclusively
with theoria – with constructing geometrical models – European
astronomers found new excitement in observations, an excitement
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) would poetically express a couple of
generations later:

… if the earth, our home, did not measure out its annual circuit
in the midst of the other spheres, changing place for place,
position for position, human reasoning would never struggle to
the absolutely true distances of the planets, and to the other
 things which depend on them, and would never establish
astronomy.
Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World, A. J. Aiton et al.
(trans. and ann.) (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical
Society, 1997 [1619]), p. 496

The person most responsible for the empirical surge was Kepler’s
short-term employer, Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). Tycho was a Danish
nobleman who had received his education in German, Protestant
universities (where he famously lost his nose in a duel, to be
replaced with a metal one). Returning to Denmark in 1567, he
secured the support of King Friedrich for a project the like of which
Europe had never seen: a very large, purpose-built astronomical
observatory, which he had constructed on the Island of Hven, in the
straits between Denmark and Sweden.
We can borrow the term ‘Big Science’ to describe Tycho’s
Uranienborg, or ‘The Castle of Urania’ (astronomy’s muse – Figure
7.3, left). It was financed by the court and employed some 100
people at any given time, from servants, through instrument-builders,
apprentices, calculators and expert astronomers, to Tycho himself.
Most crucially: it featured large, expensive, purpose-built instruments
(note how much bigger they are than the astronomers operating
them in Figure 7.3, center). The largest was a building-sized mural
quadrant, reminiscent enough of Maraˉgha observatory (see
Chapters 4 and 5), that historians have speculated about there being
a direct relation between the structures. These instruments were the
same angle-measuring, naked-eye instruments described in Chapter
3, if expertly built and more accurate. What made them unique was
their sheer size, which allowed minute division, and hence a much
higher resolution than their traditional, hand-held versions (Figure
3.7), enabling Tycho to make observations many orders of
magnitude more accurate than those of his predecessors (Figure
7.3, right).

Figure 7.3 Tycho's observatory, his instruments and his

observations. On the left: a map of the island of Hven with
Uranienborg at its center. The large proportion of the island taken
by the observatory is telling of the court power supporting it: the
land was confiscated from the locals and they were forced to
assist in its construction and maintenance, much to their
resentment. At the center: the working of the Observatory
according to Tycho’s Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (1598).
Observers on the roof, dwarfed by the huge instruments;
‘computers’ on the ground floor; and alchemical workshop in the
basement. Tycho himself acts as the manager and master-
observer, siting by his giant mural quadrant. On the right: the
products of the observations – an entry from Tycho’s notebooks
from the period 1587–1596.
 This accuracy emboldened Tycho to make some audacious
empirical claims. Already in 1572 – before moving into Uranienborg
– Tycho observed an extremely radiant object that had suddenly
appeared in the sky, dazzling enough to be seen even in daytime.
Confident in the new accuracy of his instruments, Tycho concluded
that the fact that the parallax of the new object was smaller than the
Moon’s meant that it was indeed further away than the Moon –
outside the terrestrial sphere, in the heavens. It was a Stella Nova,
as the title of his publication asserts – a New Star. In 1577, he added
a similar claim about a comet: this fleeting, ephemeral object was
also above the Moon, outside the realm of elements and in the
heavenly sphere.
Tellingly, Tycho was not exactly a Copernican. He appreciated
the empirical advantages of having the Sun, rather than the Earth, as
the reference point of the planets’ orbits, but the idea that the Earth
moved seemed to him just too outlandish. Instead he offered a
compromise: the planets orbited the Sun – that was all that was
necessary for the new calculations of motions and distances – but
the Sun orbited the Earth. It may seem cumbersome to us, but for
the best part of the century to follow, this became the preferred
option for European scholars, as beautifully demonstrated by the
frontispiece of the 1651 Almagestum Novum of the Italian Jesuit
Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671; Figure 7.4). In fact, through
Jesuit teaching, Tycho’s system also came to represent European
astronomy in China throughout the seventeenth century.
Figure 7.4 The frontispiece of Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s
Almagestum Novum (Bologna, 1651). Riccioli’s version of Tycho’s
system outweighs the Copernican by the balance of theory –
represented by Urania, the Muse of Astronomy. Riccioli’s system
is slightly different to Tycho’s in that the comet’s orbit, still outside
the atmosphere, is very eccentric, so it passes on the other side of
the Sun. Observational evidence is represented by the 100-eyed
Argus, who holds in his hand a telescope – by then a fully
respectable instrument. The Ptolemaic traditional, geostatic model
 is completely cast to the floor, but Urania assures the
motionlessness of the Earth (which Tycho’s system preserved) by
reciting Psalm 104:5: “thou didst fix the Earth on its foundation that
it never can be shaken.”

But Tycho’s theoretical caution could not mask how unsettling

his empirical findings were to cosmology and to common sense. The
distinction between heaven and Earth was the most basic for
common sense, science and religion. It was shared by pagan and
monotheistic thinkers; it allowed Christians to adopt Hellenistic
science; and made good sense to Muslim and Chinese scholars
alike: changes belonged under the Moon, while above it, all was
eternal and unchanging. This was also why the heavenly bodies
moved in simple and perfect motions – concentric circular orbits with
uniform angular velocity. As we saw, even Copernicus strictly
maintained this distinction: the idea that the sphere under the Moon,
the terrestrial sphere comprising the realm of the elements, was
sharply distinct from the celestial sphere and moved together as a
whole, was his explanation as to why we don’t feel this motion.
Tycho’s findings – the celestial position of the new star and the
comet – meant that the heavens were changing.
Kepler and the Physicalization of the
Heavens
 The Marvelous Order of the Copernican Heavens
Whether Copernicus and Tycho were willing to admit it, or even fully
grasped it, the literally world-changing implications of their work
didn’t need a reckless religious radical like Bruno to notice. If the
Earth were a planet, then the planets must be like Earth, subject to
the same vicissitudes; if the heavens were changing like things on
Earth, they needed to be studied in the same way we study changing
things on Earth: by discovering their real motions and assigning
these motions real causes. This forceful idea underlies the quote
from Kepler above, and it would drive him throughout his long and
productive life: the causes would have to be mathematical, as is
appropriate for the perfect orderliness of God’s creation that he firmly
believed in, and as was suitable for his own expertise as a
mathematician. But these causes also needed to be physical. This,
for Kepler, was the most important lesson from the theoretical
speculations of Copernicus and the empirical work of Tycho:
astronomy needed to become what he termed physica coelestis – a
physics of the heavens.
When he first introduced himself to Tycho in 1597, Kepler had
already demonstrated his way of inferring real physical properties of
the heavenly bodies from the mathematical data provided by
astronomical observations. In the Mysterium Cosmographicum he'd
published a year earlier, aged only 25, he'd calculated that the
distances between the planets (from Mercury to Saturn) stood in
relation to each other like the five perfect solids (Figure 7.5, left): it
was as if one could place a cube between the orb of Saturn and that
of Jupiter; a triangular pyramid between Jupiter and Mars; and so on.

Figure 7.5 Kepler’s evolving ways of realizing the idea of

mathematical physics of the heavens. On the left: his diagram of
the nested perfect solids from his Mysterium Cosmographicum of
1596 (probably in his own hand). The physical distances between
the planets stand in the ratios of the five Platonic solids, from the
dodecahedron between Saturn and Jupiter to the cube between
Venus and Mercury. On the right: the “accurate depiction of the
motions of the star Mars” according to his 1609 Astronomia Nova.
This is the trajectory that Mars would have followed between 1580
and 1596 if either Ptolemy’s theory or Tycho’s was correct, and the
reader is expected to see that such an orbit simply makes no
physical sense. Whereas the youthful diagram resembles images
from the magical tradition, the mature one is the first of its kind to
appear in an astronomical text.
 Kepler was very proud of this discovery throughout his life. It
was a certain mathematical truth, proven already by Plato in his
Timaeus, that there are exactly five perfect solids; five kinds of three-
dimensional bodies whose angles, sides and surfaces are all equal:
the triangular, four-faced pyramid (tetrahedron), the six-faced cube
(the hexahedron), the octahedron (eight-), the dodecahedron
(twelve-) and the icosahedron (twenty-faced). Kepler’s claim was
purely about mathematical proportions: one of the implications of
Tycho’s claim that the comet was above the Moon was that the
heavens were empty – if there were things like heavenly spheres or
real material orbs, the comet would have to crash through them. But
this suited Kepler just fine, because the ability to demonstrate these
proportions meant two very exciting things. First, that one could
indeed infer physical facts – real distances – from mathematical
data. The second was that, as he saw it, he had proven Copernicus’
hypothesis with mathematical certainty: since there were only five
Platonic solids, hence five spaces between orbits, there could only
be exactly six planets. Traditional astronomy had seven planets
(count them!); in Copernicus, since the Earth and the Moon counted
as one (and the Sun was no longer a planet), there were only six.
It’s easy to see in Kepler’s fantasy of cosmic mathematical
harmony remnants of mathematical-magical thinking, of the sort we
discussed in Chapter 6 – like Platonism or Neo-Platonism – which
was gaining much popularity during the Renaissance. Kepler was
keenly aware of the magical resonance of his ideas and bitterly
denied it, and his letter to Tycho demonstrates that he had a point.
Unlike the mathematical magicians among whom he didn’t want to
be counted and whose claims remained suggestive and speculative,
he was offering a hypothesis with clear empirical content. In the
letter he was asking for the specific, up-to-date, empirical figures for
the planets’ eccentricities. He was searching for those because
some leeway was required when mathematical idealizations were
applied to the world of matter. For the hypothesis of the Mysterium to
work, he needed to know how thick the shells circumscribing the
actual orbits should be (see Figure 7.5, right, again), so they could
contain the eccentric orbits between their innermost part on the one
side and outermost on the other. For the rest of his life, Kepler would
argue that the Mysterium remained the foundation of all his work,
even though within a decade he would no longer believe in
concentric circular orbits. What he may have really referred to,
therefore, is this invaluable contribution to the cathedral of science:
the combination of reckless mathematical speculation and
meticulous empirical investigation.
 Kepler’s Life and Times
Writing to Tycho, perhaps the most venerable astronomer of his
time, was no trivial matter for Kepler. He was a high-school
mathematics teacher in Graz, now Austria, of very humble origins.
He had lost his mercenary father in his childhood, and his mother
Katharina, a daughter of an innkeeper, was one of those wise-
women whom we discussed in Chapter 6, and whom Kepler
inadvertently implicated in a witch trial. Kepler took a student
exercise in Copernican astronomy – imagining and calculating how
the heavenly motions would appear from the Sun – and dressed it as
a story about a trip to the Moon, in which the narrator is delivered
there by a demon summoned by his witch mother. To Kepler’s
dismay, the manuscript of this piece of science fiction, which he
would end up publishing as The Dream (Somnium), was used as
evidence for Katharina’s witchery. He knew her as a loving mother,
keen on his education: she took him to watch the 1577 comet and a
1580 lunar eclipse, and sent him through the Protestants’ version of
a Church education – grammar school, seminary and the University
of Tübingen. It was there that he became a devoted student of
Michael Maestlin (1550–1631), one of the very first mainstream
astronomers to teach Copernicus’ system as the centerpiece of
astronomy.
Tycho wasn’t taken with Kepler’s speculations, but was
impressed enough by his mathematical skills to try and recruit him as
a ‘calculator.’ This wouldn’t happen in Hven: Tycho soon lost his
favor with the Danish court and was forced to abandon his island. He
accepted the role of Imperial Astronomer to the Holy Roman
Emperor Rudolph II in Prague, with a promised new observatory to
be built in Benatky castle, about 40 kilometers north of the city, and
Kepler was happy to join his astronomical entourage there. He
arrived in Benatky in early 1600, only to find himself, within six
months and just removed from his obscure provincial post, taking
Tycho’s position: a beer-drinking bout with the emperor resulted in
Tycho’s sudden and painful death from kidney failure.
The position was not as illustrious as it may sound – Rudolf
surrounded himself with alchemists, necromancers and magicians,
exactly the intellectual milieu Kepler had always tried to distance
himself from. He was mostly engaged as a court astrologer, and
although he had no qualms about the discipline and was happy to
draw nativities (including his and his dear ones’), he was deeply
unhappy with his obligation to provide astrological prognostications
and the political intrigues that this forced him into. By 1611, Rudolf’s
colorful court brought about his demise, as Rudolf was forced off the
throne by his brother Mathias, meaning that Kepler had to leave
Prague. The last two decades of his life were sad: his financial and
intellectual standing deteriorating, he moved back to the German-
speaking lands – first to Linz, then Ulm, then Regensburg, and when
his applications to university posts declined, he took increasingly
lower positions as a provincial mathematician. In 1613, his wife
Barbara and son Friedrich died of small pox and from 1615 to 1621
his means and energy were exhausted by his mother’s trial and
imprisonment (although she was ultimately saved). In 1618, his
daughter Susanna, his favorite, died as well. Throughout these sad
wanderings he continued to work; when Susanna died, he tells, he
could no longer work on his ambitious Harmonies of the World, and
instead moved to work on the Rudolphine Tables, published in 1627.
He died in poverty in Regensburg, in 1630, and his self-authored
epitaph, which survived even though his grave didn’t, is telling of his
mood: Mensus eram coelos, nunc Terrae metior umbras. Mens
coelestis erat, corporis umbra jacet (“I used to measure the
Heavens, now I measure the shadows of Earth. The mind belonged
to Heaven, the body’s shadow lies here.”).
 The New Physical Optics
Yet in the relatively blissful decade he'd had in Prague, Kepler
reshaped the mathematical sciences. Even Aristotle, with all his
suspicion of mathematics (see Chapter 2), agreed that there were
some entities in the world – things like planets, musical consonants
and visual rays – that were by their very nature mathematical. The
mathematical disciplines of the quadrivium, together with optics and
mechanics, were therefore appropriate for dealing with these
entities, and in the Middle Ages they received the title ‘middle
sciences’ or ‘mixed sciences,’ because they studied mathematically
things within the world of matter. But because the world of matter
was complex and changing while mathematics was simple and
perfect, it was clear to medieval mathematicians that they could only
handle idealizations, and – unlike natural philosophers – offer no
causes. The subject matter of optics were lines of vision and angles
of reflection and refraction; of mechanics – diagrams representing
dimensionless bodies; of music – the proportions of an abstract
monochord.
This was a limitation Kepler was no longer willing to accept. The
disciplines of his expertise – optics and astronomy – were to offer
real causes for real physical entities, and to do so without
relinquishing any of their mathematical prowess. The Mysterium
hypothesis was his first attempt at this project. When, in 1600, he
found himself entrusted with Tycho’s observations (for the right of
which he had to struggle with Tycho’s family) and the task to develop
a theory on Mars, he set about doing it in his own physical way. In
1603, he took a break from the astronomical project and turned to
reshape optics.
Traditional optics was the mathematical theory of vision. It
studied visual rays: straight lines, which could only change direction:
refracted by changing media or reflected by polished surfaces.
Whether these visual rays were physical entities or just mathematical
representations of the process of vision, and what this process
consisted of, was much debated. Aristotle taught that the mind is
literally in-formed: it receives the form of the object, separated from
its matter. The Platonists argued that the object multiplies itself as
species through the medium (mainly air). The Atomists claimed that
the object constantly releases simulacra – films of atoms retaining
their order (and constantly replaced by atoms from the medium) –
which flowed through the medium. But there was no debate that
vision is a direct, cognitive relation between the object and the mind,
through the eye. Light, in all of these theories, had an important, but
secondary role: it was a state and a property of the medium; it was
the transparency of substances like air or water, which allowed the
visual rays to pass through. What optics dealt with was these rays,
representing that authentic relation between object and mind.
Kepler abolished this assumption. Nothing of the object, he
claimed, comes to and through the eye. The subject matter of his
optics was no longer vision but light: flowing from the Sun (or any
other luminous source), bouncing off objects and falling on screens,
causally producing images. If the screen happens to be the retina of
the eye, we could call it ‘vision,’ although how the mind deciphers
those images, he admitted, became a complete mystery. The eye
was a flesh-and-blood optical instrument – like a camera obscura
(which he was using to observe the Sun), it had, in front of the retina-
screen, a hole (the pupil) and a lens (the ‘crystalline humor’). The
images on the retina were therefore not reliable missives from the
objects, but two-dimensional, inverted, fuzzy collections of stains of
light shaped like the pupil. If this turned vision into a mystery, so be
it: what was important to Kepler was that if the eye was but an
instrument, then instruments were no worse than the eye. That
meant that there was nothing particularly suspect in Tycho’s great
project of instrumental observation.
This was very important to Kepler: the far-reaching cosmological
implications of Tycho’s claims that the comet and the new star were
in the heavens didn’t escape his contemporaries, and their validity
was fiercely questioned. The heavens, his rivals claimed, were too
far and too different from the terrestrial realm for us to be able to
observe their working, and the use of instruments in the observations
made them doubly suspect: if proper vision is a direct relation of
object through the eye, then any mediation is a distortion. But if the
eye is just one kind of instrument, Kepler reasoned – flesh and
blood, but instrument nonetheless – then what is observed through
the instruments is as reliable as what is observed through the eye. If
vision is mediation – a physical motion of light rather than cognitive
connection between object and reason – then there isn’t any
fundamental difficulty about observing the planets. With Kepler’s new
optics, what could be claimed about the heavenly bodies could be as
causal and physical as what could be claimed about the things we
see around us.
 The New Physical Astronomy
Making optics physical meant introducing a physical agent – light –
that physically moved and physically produced images on the retina,
although light did remain, for Kepler, a peculiar agent: both physical
and mathematical, terrestrial and heavenly. Changing light from a
property of the medium (for the Aristotelians, recall, it was the
actualization of potential transparency) into an independent physical
entity also allowed Kepler to come up with a mathematical-physical
law for light’s decline with distance. Light, he reasoned in his Optics,
expands as the surface of a sphere and there is the same ‘amount’
of light at the source, the center of that sphere, as on the surface of
the sphere. Since the surface of a sphere is proportional to the
square of its radius (A=4πr2 in our terms), the power of light must be
declining by the same proportion: the intensity of light is inversely
proportional to the square of its distance from its source.
Making astronomy physical meant dealing purely with physical
objects – real bodies, real distances and real motions – and
establishing mathematical physical laws similar to this inverse
square law of light. In 1609, Kepler published the results of this
project in a book proudly titled Astronomia Nova, and introduced the
idea with the spectacular diagram in Figure 7.5, right. This was a first
of its kind: as we saw in previous chapters, astronomical diagrams
always displayed the perfect circles to which the changing positions
of the planets were reduced. Like no astronomer before him, Kepler
was introducing a real, physical trajectory: the path that a planet was
actually supposed to travel in the heavens. But it wasn’t an actual
trajectory: he calculated and plotted on paper the path Mars would
have taken if Tycho or Ptolemy were correct – if the Earth was
stationary – and asked his readers: does this make any sense to
you? What seems exceedingly orderly as a set of lines, angles,
deferents and epicycles turns out to be unbearably complex – “a
pretzel,” Kepler calls it – when thought of as real motion. No
mechanism can produce such a convoluted motion (remember that
Tycho showed that there could be no real spheres in the heavens);
even if the planets were smart enough to navigate on their own,
there is no point of reference for them (remember that the real center
is empty); and there’s no space left for any other planet under the
fixed stars (represented in Kepler’s diagram by the outer circle of the
signs).
From a practicing astronomer’s point of view, a physically sound
astronomy meant that all calculations should have the real Sun as
their point of reference. This wasn’t how it used to be done:
astronomers from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Tycho would calculate
where the Earth (and later the Sun) would have been had it been
properly stationary in the heavens, and relate the planetary positions
to this fictional point – the ‘mean earth’ (or ‘mean sun’ for the
Copernicans). Kepler would have none of this: whatever it was in the
Sun that caused the planets to move around it, it was the real Sun
that caused it, not a calculated one. All angles and motions should
therefore refer to the real position of the Sun, as established from
observations. This was a difficult demand. There was no precedent
for such practice, and when he tried to convert Tycho’s model to a
straightforward Copernican model (rejecting Tycho’s compromise)
with the real Sun, Kepler could not make the data fit. Yet one small,
unexpected benefit of this way of calculation convinced Kepler that
he was on the right track: Mars was known for its ‘libration’; a 2°
oscillation around the ecliptic. When his orbit was calculated around
the real Sun, the libration disappeared – it turned out to be an
artefact of the fact that Mars’ orbit was oblique to the Earth’s.
Kepler then did something that for a committed Copernican may
seem very strange: he calculated the equant point of Mars’ orbit.
Copernicus, you may remember, rejected equants vehemently: they
were meaningless points introduced only for convenience. But
Kepler was already asking of astronomy a different question: not to
assume and produce perfect circular order, but to establish a
mathematical order that would make physical sense. With this
question in mind, the equant became very significant – a point
around which a real physical process was happening. Kepler’s next
move demonstrates this line of thought: he tried to put the Sun at this
very point. He didn’t know, he admitted, what exactly caused the
planets to move (he had some speculations, to which we’ll return
below), but since they moved around the Sun, it was almost certain
that the Sun was the main cause of their motion. And if the Sun was
what moved the planets, it was reasonable to assume that they
moved uniformly around it. Still – the data didn’t fit.
But Kepler again made an unexpected discovery: when Mars
was closest to the Sun (in its perihelion – remember that the orbits
were eccentric), its velocity was highest, and when farthest
(aphelion) – slowest. This suggested to him what he called “the
vicarious hypothesis”: that the planets’ velocity is inversely
proportional to their distance from the Sun. It made good sense
when thinking about the Sun as moving the planets – the closer they
were to the Sun, the more powerful was its influence and vice versa.
But again, the hypothesis didn’t fit the data and, again, an
unexpected discovery suggested itself: although a straight inverse
proportion didn’t work, a somewhat more complex proportion did.
The line between the Sun and the planet (the ‘radius vector’)
covered equal areas in equal times (Figure 7.6).
Figure 7.6 Kepler’s two ‘laws’ formulated in his 1609 Astronomia
Nova. The first in order of discovery – the Area Law (known as the
Second Law): The Radius Vector sweeps areas proportional to
time. That is: if the times by which the planet travels from N to P, P
to Q, Q to R, etc. are equal, the areas of the curved triangles SNP,
SPQ and SQR will be equal. When he first formulated it, Kepler
was still thinking in terms of a circular orbit with the Sun just off-
center. His failure to make the data fit well enough into the Area
Law convinced him that the orbit must be ‘squeezed’ – an oval.
This led to the so-called First Law: The planet moves in an ellipse
with the Sun in one focus. The ellipse is the curve created by a
point moving around two foci, with the sum of its distances from
both being constant. The circle, then, can be thought of as a
special case of an ellipse, in which the distance between the two
foci is zero. In 1619, in the Harmonices Mundi, Kepler would add
the ‘Harmonic Law’: The squares of the planets’ Periods are
Proportional to the Cubes of their Radii. On the right is Kepler’s
illustration of his physical hypothesis of the motion of the planets
and the reason why they converge to and rescind from the Sun,
creating the ellipse (which he draws quite exaggerated). The
arrows designate the magnetic polarity of the planets, which
 causes them to be intermittently attracted and repelled from the
Sun.

This is what came to be called ‘Kepler’s Second Law’ – the law

of areas – though he had established it first. We are bound by
traditional historians’ titles, but for Kepler it wasn’t really a law of
nature, but a way to approximate orderly planetary motion, similar to
the approximations used by traditional astronomers. Yet he was
clearly abandoning their ancient rules: it was no longer simple
uniformity of angular velocity that he was seeking, but uniformity in a
physical relation to the Sun. And from the Area Law, an even more
spectacular break with those rules followed. Near the aphelion and
perihelion (the apsides), the law indeed worked very well, but away
from them, it was as if the orbit needed to be ‘squeezed’ for the
areas to fit. Kepler later narrated that he stared at his calculations for
years until it dawned on him what he was seeing: the orbit was not
circular! It was oval! Maybe an ellipse? For a skilled seventeenth-
century mathematician, the ellipse was a clear ‘second best’ after the
circle in terms of simplicity and orderliness. He would know well the
geometry of conic sections: the circle is the result of slicing a cone
parallel to its base; an ellipse – of slicing it obliquely (if the section
was parallel to the side, the result is a parabola; still more oblique –
hyperbola).
So Kepler tried to construct a model of an elliptical orbit with the
Sun at its center, and the fit was still not satisfactory. He moved the
Sun to the ellipse’s focus – the next point of significance – and here
it was, Kepler’s (so-called) First Law: The planet moves in ellipse
with the Sun in one of its foci (Figure 7.6). Some ten years after the
Astronomia Nova, in his Harmonices Mundi (Harmonies of the
World) of 1619, Kepler would add his Third Law – again, a
mathematical law relating physical motions and distances: The
squares of the planets’ Periods are Proportional to the Cubes of their
Radii.
It’s hard to overstate the novelty of Kepler’s law of ellipse. We
saw in Chapter 3 that the idea that the Earth moves had been
entertained – albeit rejected – in the past, but no astronomer ever
thought that the heavenly bodies moved any other way but circularly
(or spherically). This circularity reflected the eternal and unchanging
character of the heavens and their strict distinction from Earth and
the terrestrial realm, a distinction assumed by pagans and Christians
alike; it was ingrained in cosmological, natural-philosophical and
theological beliefs; and it was embedded in all astronomical
practices. Kepler’s account of how difficult it was for him to recognize
that his model called for an oval orbit demonstrates that: although he
was consciously and explicitly searching for a new astronomy, it was
nearly impossible for him to turn away from the most fundamental
assumption of the old one.
With his laws, and especially the Law of the Ellipse, Kepler
reshaped astronomy. The heavens were now no longer exempt from
physical laws and mathematics was no longer shunned from dealing
with real physical bodies. Kepler willingly admitted that he didn’t
know how this physics worked. What was the virtus motrix – the
force from the Sun moving the planets? Could it simply be light?
Mathematical considerations led him to reject this idea: light expands
three-dimensionally and declines (we saw) by the square of the
radius, whereas all the planets are on one plane, so the motive force
seems to expand only two-dimensionally and decreases by some
other law. A book published in 1600 – De Magnete (On the Magnet)
– provided another hypothesis. In it, the English physician William
Gilbert (1544–1603) suggested that the Earth was a loadstone, a
huge magnet, an idea he supported with many experiments and
explanations of curious phenomena. If the Sun can also be thought
of as a magnet, it could be that as it rotates it pulls the planets along.
When the poles of the two grand magnets are opposite (north
pointing to south and vice versa), the planet is drawn nearer the Sun;
when they align (north to north), it is repelled (Figure 7.6, right). This
hypothesis proved a dead end, but the way to a physics of the
heavens was paved.
Galileo and the Telescope
 The Telescope
In the May of 1609, as Kepler was completing his Astronomia Nova,
a mathematics lecturer at the University of Padua (then belonging to
the Republic of Venice) by the name of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
heard that one Hans Lipperhey had applied for a patent for a so-
called ‘spyglass.’ It was an instrument comprising a cardboard tube
with a convex lens on one side and a concave one on the other,
which, when put to the eye, magnified the image seen through it
three times. The application, in the Netherlands the previous
October, was rejected. By June, Galileo had managed to copy the
invention. By October, he had an eight-factor instrument, and
towards the winter a twenty-factor, which he proceeded to aim at the
Moon. He didn’t know that in England Thomas Harriot (1560–1621)
was doing exactly the same thing, but he must have guessed that he
was not the only one thinking along these lines, because he worked
obsessively, and in June 1610 published the Sidereus Nuncius (the
title’s meaning is purposefully ambiguous, between Starry
Messenger and Message).
Copernicus suggested that the Earth moved; Tycho claimed that
the heavens changed; Kepler reshaped optics as the physics of light
and astronomy as the physics of planets – but they all did so in
esoteric publications, aimed at scholars and experts. Galileo’s book
was marvelously different: one didn’t need to know any natural
philosophy or mathematics to understand it; all one needed was to
look and see (Figure 7.7): the Moon was just like the Earth. It was a
whole sphere, had mountains and seas, and – as both Galileo and
Kepler assumed – inhabitants. There were also very many more
stars in the heavens – the Milky Way comprised such stars – and
one more world-changing discovery that the book announced, to
which we’ll return momentarily.

Figure 7.7 Galileo’s drawing of the Moon as seen through his

telescope during the winter of 1609. On the left: an aquatint
engraving of his drafts. On the right: the images published in the
Sidereus Nuncius. Note his sophisticated use of black-and-white
shading (chiaroscuro) to create a sense of three-dimensionality.
 Climbing the Walks of Life
Sidereus Nuncius delivered the instant success that Galileo was
craving. That a 45-year-old professor would spend his days grinding
lenses and his nights observing stars seeking such fame and fortune
testifies again to the Renaissance culture of knowledge, in which a
skilled, talented, ambitious, brazen individual could dramatically
improve his social and economic status, especially if he could bridge
the social and epistemological gap between knowing-how and
knowing-that. Brunelleschi and Tartaglia were our examples in
Chapter 5; Galileo’s father Vincenzo (c. 1520–1591) is another
excellent one. A lute player of humble origins, he taught himself
musical theory and acquired a name and enough fortune to marry
into minor (and penniless) nobility with a book on musical theory, in
which he relentlessly and venomously assaulted the canonical
theory as detached from real musical practices.
Galileo thus inherited a better starting point in life than his father,
but also his ambitions, drive and artisanal skills (and a considerable
musical talent). Born near Pisa before his father’s career moved the
family to Florence, he returned to the University of Pisa to study
medicine, but stayed in the lower faculties and taught mathematics
there from 1589. Two years later, he moved to Padua, his salary
rising slightly from 160 Scudi to 160 Ducats a year. In 1599, he
invented a military compass and dedicated it to the Venetian Senate
to have his salary doubled and his contract extended for six years.
When Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), Galileo’s friend and minor patron,
arranged for the spyglass to be presented and dedicated to the
Senate in 1609, Galileo’s salary was doubled again and he was
tenured for life.
This was not the last step in Galileo’s climb up the walks of life,
using his technical skills, academic knowledge and a smart
maneuvering of the cultural structures sanctioning them: his next
move would take him out of the university. Through all of his
promotions, his academic position remained in Padua as it was in his
early days in Pisa: a lecturer in astronomy and mathematics; bound
to the lower faculties, prohibited from voicing ideas about the
structure of the cosmos. This was the institutional side of the
Thomistic compromise (see Chapter 5) that allowed the Church to
continue sponsoring natural philosophy and the university: as long
as the disciplines and faculties were kept apart – cosmology and
theology untouched by what was discussed in astronomy and natural
philosophy – all could continue uninterrupted. But Galileo was much
too ambitious to accept these limitations – like Kepler, he had in
mind a new understanding of the world, commensurate with his
mathematical skills and talents, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 9. To
realize that vision, to become a philosopher, he needed someone to
support him, financially and politically; someone who would provide
the intellectual freedom that the university did with its universitas
status and the institutions of disputatio and ex hypothesi, but without
the boundaries by which the university protected them (Chapter 4).
In late Renaissance terms, he had to find a powerful patron.
The exchange between the patron-prince and his (more rarely,
her) client – humanist, artist or natural philosopher – was quite
straightforward: the former provided protection and support and the
latter – glorification. But these mercenary relations were clothed in
many rituals and careful gestures; the client had to submit himself to
the patron and offer some gift; but what can one offer the prince
who, by his very station, has everything? A moonless period during
his arduous observations provided Galileo with a solution. Not
wanting to waste the clear nights, he started watching Jupiter, then in
retrograde, hence bright and full (it is a good exercise in traditional
astronomy to work out why this has to be the case). He reports how
he delightedly saw three fixed stars – only observable through his
telescope – nicely aligned to Jupiter’s east (Figure 7.8 – the diagram
on the top left under the second line). Observing the little
constellation the following day, he found that Jupiter had moved to
their east, and four stars were now visible (the diagram to the left of
the first one). But this was strange – in retrograde Jupiter should
have been moving west. After convincing himself that neither he nor
his ephemerides were wrong, he continued watching, until it dawned
on him: it was not Jupiter moving against the backdrop of faraway
fixed stars, but small bodies moving around Jupiter – Jupiter had
moons!
Figure 7.8 At the bottom of the page, under the line, are Galileo’s
notes from around the turn of 1609, documenting his discovery of
the moons of Jupiter. Note how they begin (third row on the left)
with an attractively simple pattern – a line – that draws Galileo’s
attention, become confusing over the following night, and then
regain order as he understands that it is these bodies that move in
relation to Jupiter, not the other way around. As is very rarely the
case, the writings above the line are almost as momentous: they
comprise Galileo’s draft for a letter he sent on August 24, 1609,
presenting his ‘occhiale’ to the Doge of Venice. There is no
mention of astronomical observations in the letter:“most Serene
Prince, Galileo Galilei most humbly prostrates himself before Your
Highness, watching carefully, and with all spirit of willingness, not
only to satisfy what concerns the reading of mathematics in the
study of Padua, but to write of having decided to present to Your
Highness a telescope that will be a great help in maritime and land
enterprises. I assure you I shall keep this new invention a great
secret and show it only to Your Highness. The telescope was
made for the most accurate study of distances. This telescope has
the advantage of discovering the ships of the enemy two hours
before they can be seen with the natural vision and to distinguish
the number and quality of the ships and to judge their strength and
be ready to chase them, to fight them, or to flee from them; or, in
the open country to see all details and to distinguish every
movement and preparation.”
 The Copernican Tribute
Moons were a proper present for a prince. These moons were a
particularly apt present for Cosimo de’ Medici, who had Jupiter
written into his family myth, who enjoyed the cosmic connotations of
his own name, and who had four brothers whom he very much liked
to imagine as orbiting him. Sarpi negotiated the dedication of the
Sidereus to Cosimo and the naming of the moons of Jupiter the
Medici Stars. In turn, Galileo received his wish: a position for life as
the Medici court philosopher – not merely astronomer or
mathematician – and a very hefty salary. With the confidence and
authority that came with his new position, Galileo embarked on a
journey of professional success. Kepler, still imperial astronomer and
before actually looking through the telescope, published his
enthusiastic support in the form of a short book – Conversations with
the Sidereus Nuncius – embracing the telescope as an invaluable
addition to the project of establishing physical astronomy supported
by instrumental observations:

Therefore let Galileo take his stand by Kepler’s side. Let the
former observe the moon with his face turned skyward, while the
latter studies the sun [with his camera obscura] by looking down
at a screen (lest the lens injure his eye). Let each employ his
own device, and from this partnership may there some day arise
an absolutely perfect theory of the distances.
Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger,
Edward Rosen (trans. and ann.) (New York: Johnson Reprint
 Corporation, 1965 [1610]), p. 22

Galileo’s triumphal moment continued with a trip to Rome in the

summer of 1610 to visit the Collegio Romano, where he gained the
full support of its illustrious leading astronomer, Christopher Clavius
(see Chapter 5). He was then received by Prince Federico Cesi
(1585–1630) and elected a member of his Accademia dei Lincei
(more about academies in Chapter 9), which from then on dedicated
itself to promoting Galileo’s work.
No one could observe the Earth move, but the Sidereus
provided, for the first time, powerful empirical evidence – which
anyone could see with their own eyes – that it was a planet like any
other. The Moon looked like the Earth, and there was at least one
more planet sporting moons; the Earth clearly wasn’t the only
possible center of motion in the cosmos. And the telescope would
soon provide more evidence. Later in 1610, Galileo observed that
Saturn had moons as well (in 1616, he would decide it was a ring)
and in December – that Venus exhibited the whole range of phases,
like the Moon, and as Copernicanism predicted (see Figure 7.9 for
an explanation of why). In 1612, it turned out that even the purported
new center of the world – the Sun – was neither perfect nor static:
turning the telescope “down at a screen (lest the lens injure his
eye),” Galileo observed the Sun’s moving spots. The Jesuit
Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650), who had already observed them,
boldly claimed the spots were small planets orbiting close to the Sun.
Galileo, however, convincingly argued that they were on the Sun:
they changed their shape and moved slower when near the edges.
This suggested that they were moving with the spherical surface of
the Sun, traveling in a near-straight line when close to the center but
approaching or receding from us when closer to the sides. Even the
Sun was a purely physical body, best understood when looked at
with an artisan’s eye: three-dimensional, spotted and rotating around
its poles.
Figure 7.9 The phases of Venus. On the left: Galileo’s drawing of
the planets as observed through the telescope – among them
Saturn with its ring – from his 1623 Il Saggiatore (The Assayer), a
polemical text in which Galileo argues for the complete superiority
of telescopic observation to the naked eye, despite the additional
mediation that it presents between observer and object. Venus, at
the bottom, is shown in a full set of phases, like the Moon, and the
diagram on the right explains the importance of this observation as
evidence for Copernicanism: if the Sun and Venus orbit the Earth,
as in the top diagram, and their orbits just happen to synchronize,
Venus should always appear as a crescent, because the Sun
should always light it from behind (at most slightly obliquely). If,
however, the Earth and Venus orbit the Sun and Venus always
appears close to the Sun because our orbit is further away, as in
Figure 7.2, Venus should present the whole spectrum of phases:
from the new crescent, when it’s between us and the Sun; through
half spherical, when we see it at 90° to the Sun; to full, when it’s
on the other side of the Sun.
 The Galileo Affair: The Church Divorces
Science
Yet as Galileo’s fame – and that of the type of science he
represented – was growing, well beyond the bounds of the scholarly
world, trouble was looming. In 1611, gossip and allegations began
that he was teaching that the Earth moves, against the word of the
scriptures; in 1614, he was denounced from the pulpit in Florence;
and in 1615 the Inquisition initiated an inquiry into the question.
Copernicus’ hypothesis had been public knowledge for a
century; it was formulated by a devout clergyman, dedicated to the
pope, and had been a matter of respectable debate within Church-
sponsored universities: what changed to make it a cause for
theological anxiety?
The answer is complex. We've discussed the reasons as to why
monotheistic believers were comfortable with the notion that the
Earth is static in the middle of the cosmos, even as it came from a
pagan like Aristotle. The Bible, though containing no astronomy,
does present a handful of verses that could easily be read this way
(Genesis 1:14–18; Psalm 104:5; Job 26:7; Isaiah 40:22; Joshua 10,
where Joshua makes the Sun stand still, was popular sermon
material). Copernicans were happy to offer interpretations of these
verses which allowed for the motion of the Earth – primarily
suggesting that they were written to suit the human perspective, and
in a different era this may have been acceptable, because Catholic
scholars always took pride in their capacity for inspired
interpretation. But the defensive orthodoxy instigated by the
Reformation made this difficult: the Council of Trent, which had
concluded fifty years earlier, specifically prohibited “distorting the
Scriptures in accordance with [one’s] own conceptions …
interpreting them contrary to that sense which the Holy Mother
Church … has held or holds.” Moreover, enthusiasts like Bruno
certainly alarmed the Church, suggesting that Copernicanism might
develop into a new heresy. It also must have registered with Church
authorities that Galileo, by nature and new status, was not restricted
by scholarly humility. As a courtier, he was expected to be boisterous
and seek attention with controversy and spectacular claims. These
he increasingly made in Italian rather than Latin, making them
available to the common folk, whose hesitations about issues of
cosmology, Biblical interpretation and religious authority the Church
could ill-afford. But perhaps what was making Copernicanism
unacceptable when presented by Galileo was the tremendous power
of the visual. With the telescope, the motion of the Earth and the
earthliness of the planets were no longer issues solely for
astronomers and enthusiasts like Bruno: they were there for
everyone to see.
 The First Procedure: Reason vs. Revolution
The investigation of the Galileo affair was charged to Cardinal
Roberto Bellarmine (1542–1621) – a Jesuit, an important theologian
and the person who had condemned Bruno to the stake some fifteen
years earlier. Perhaps still traumatized by the outcome of that
procedure – the Church was loath to execute its clergy – he handled
it delicately. When it was completed, some eighteen months later,
Galileo requested and received an official declaration that he was
neither suspected nor indicted of any wrongdoings, but the (indirect)
correspondence between him and Bellarmine demonstrates how far
the New Science had veered away from traditional scholarship.
“It seems to me that Your Paternity and Mr. Galileo,” Bellarmine
wrote to Paolo Foscarini, Galileo’s ally,

Are proceeding prudently by limiting [yourself] to speaking

suppositionally and not absolutely, as I have always believed
Copernicus spoke. For there is no danger in saying that, by
assuming the earth moves and the sun stands still, one saves
all the appearances better … and that is sufficient for the
mathematician.

Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, p. 67

We can recognize what Bellarmine had in mind: the institution of

arguing ex suppositione and Osiander’s preface to De
Revolutionibus. But whether he was genuinely commending Galileo
and Foscarini or gently threatening them, Bellarmine was wrong: the
Copernicans of Kepler and Galileo’s generation were no longer
willing to limit themselves to the traditional role of the mere
mathematician, and Galileo’s answer was that of a physicist:

… since we are dealing with the motion or stability of the earth

or of the sun, we are in a dilemma of contradictory propositions
(one of which has to be true), and we cannot in any way resort
to saying that perhaps it is neither this way nor that way. Now, if
the earth’s stability and the sun’s motion are de facto physically
true and the contrary is absurd, how can one reasonably say
that a false view agrees better than the true one with the
phenomena?
Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, p. 75

For Galileo, the Earth either moved or did not, and if the evidence
was for the former possibility, it made no sense to hold the latter.
Bellarmine and Galileo agreed that the scriptures were beyond
doubt and that “it is not the same to show that one can save the
appearances with the earth’s motion … and to demonstrate that
these hypotheses are really true in nature” (this is the way Galileo
put it! – Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, p. 85). Their conclusions,
however, differed in a way that would turn out dangerously, despite
the inquisitor’s goodwill.
Bellarmine didn’t force Galileo to give up Copernicanism or to
adopt a literal interpretation of the relevant verses. He even carefully
considered the Copernican arguments for the possibility that we
move without experiencing it, although he found them unconvincing.
What Bellarmine demanded of Galileo was to take into consideration
what “a dangerous thing” it would be to play around with scriptural
interpretations, and “whether The Church can tolerate giving
Scripture a meaning contrary to [that of] the Holy Fathers and to all
the Greek and Latin commentators,” who are “all agreeing in the
literal interpretation that the sun is in heaven and turns around the
earth with great speed, and that the earth is very far from heaven
and sits motionless at the center of the world” (Finocchiaro, The
Galileo Affair, p. 67). A good scholar, in Bellarmine’s view, would
take it all into account – the theological and political implications as
well as the intellectual price: to refute 1,500 years of arguments
would require an extremely powerful counter-argument. Still,
Bellarmine added:

If there were a true demonstration that … the earth circles the

sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in
explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather
that we do not understand than that what is demonstrated is
false.
Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, p. 67

If Copernicanism can be demonstrated powerfully enough,

Bellarmine stressed, the Church would have to reinterpret the
scriptures after all.
This is the most telling of Bellarmine’s notes. He was the
inquisitor, and had no need to cater to Galileo or offer any kind of
concession to Copernicanism. That he did, shows that for him – and
the Church – the affair was neither about defending dogma nor
enforcing authority, as the common myth has it. Rather, Bellarmine
was defending reason. From his point of view, Galileo was another
Bruno: an enthusiast in a time of many heresies, unwilling or
incapable to consider reasoned arguments, completely unwavering
in his conviction that his is the only way to Truth. This was what
Bellarmine emphasized: the scriptures are divine, but interpretation
is human, so if reason truly and forcefully points that way, the Church
would reinterpret the problematic verses to align with the new
scientific claims. What it wouldn’t do, is “say … that what is
demonstrated is false,” because, as Augustine put it, “in [reason] we
are made unto the image of God.”
Bellarmine was no wide-eyed champion of humanist values. He
was a powerful emissary of a domineering institution, and he wasn’t
defending only human reason, but also the Church’s privilege to
represent it. He wasn’t only stressing that the Church would abide by
a “true demonstration,” but also that it retained the right to decide
what the criteria for such a demonstration were, and when they’re
met. But neither was Bellarmine completely wrong in his assessment
of Galileo, who had only this terse retort about truth:

Nor can one or should one seek any greater truth in a position
than that it corresponds with all particular appearances.
Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, p. 85

“Appearances,” for Galileo, meant quite simply what could be

observed through his telescope: the Truth, for him, was what he saw.
And what about those verses? “The motion of the earth and stability
of the sun could never be against Faith or Holy Scripture,” Galileo
says, “if this proposition were correctly proved to be physically true
by philosophers, astronomers and mathematicians.” The significance
of Galileo’s claim is clear and outrageous: it is him and his allies, the
“philosophers, astronomers and mathematicians,” and they alone,
who will decide the truth of Copernicanism, and then,

If some passages of Scripture were to sound contrary, we would

have to say that this is due to the weakness of our mind, which
is unable to grasp the true meaning of The Scripture in this
particular case.
Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, p. 81

Bellarmine’s worries were very well-founded: there was no reasoning

with Galileo. He was a revolutionary.
 Galileo’s Trial
Although Galileo received the clearance he requested, the relations
between the Church and Copernicanism – and by extension, the
New Science – didn’t emerge from the 1615–1616 investigation
unscathed. The mounting pressure from below forced the Inquisition
to set, in February 1616, a committee of theologians who deliberated
for less than a week before unanimously concluding that the motion
of the Earth is “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally
heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of
Holy Scripture.” The unrest was disturbing enough that the pope
himself instructed Bellarmine to summon Galileo and instruct him “to
abandon completely the … opinion that the sun stands still at the
center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold,
teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing”
(Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, p. 146). All books concerning
Copernicanism were banned, and De Revolutionibus, too practically
valuable for this harsh treatment, was sent to be ‘corrected,’ while its
uncorrected version remained on the index of prohibited books until
1758.
One would have thought the message was as clear as could be,
but fifteen years later, Galileo, now in his late 60s and by far the
most famous scientist in Europe, decided to invest all his reputation
and authority into an unmitigated support of the Copernican
hypothesis. In 1630, he completed, in Italian, The Dialogue
concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and
Copernican, in which his own Copernican views were presented by
the character of the wise Salviati; the intelligent challenges and
evidence provided by the clever and attentive Sagredo (both names
were tributes to real friends); and the Aristotelian counter-arguments,
including those favored by the pope, were delegated to the mouth of
Simplicio, whose name suggests the level of sophistication that
Galileo allotted him.
What could have made Galileo blatantly defy an unequivocal
episcopal ruling? He may have become entangled in – or thought he
could maneuver – the delicate legal distinctions between the
prohibition to believe, to argue for and to teach a position. He would
later claim that he understood the 1616 decree as disallowing only
the former but not the latter, that he forgot the original formulation
and that he intended to give all sides their due, none of which is
convincing – nor was to his prosecutors. Or he may have thought
that his fame, the Medicis’ patronage and his friendliness with the
Florentine cardinal Mafeo Barberini, now Pope Urban VIII, made him
untouchable. If that were the case, he was politically naïve. The
Medicis didn’t, and couldn’t have been expected to, take on the Holy
See to save one client, venerable as he was, and the pope’s
friendship couldn’t have survived Galileo’s mockery. As a supreme
political leader, he simply couldn’t afford it. Most pertinent to our
interests, Galileo may have thought that he found the “positive
demonstration” Bellarmine was demanding: his ‘theory of the tides’;
the idea that it is the rotation of the Earth that makes the oceans rise
and fall by (what would be called later) centrifugal force. This idea
would remain popular with Copernicans for a generation, until the
advent of gravitation theories, but never made much impression on
anti-Copernicans.
Whatever the reasons for Galileo’s confidence, it was clearly ill-
founded; indeed, many of his long-time patrons and advisors –
Bellarmine, Sarpi, Cesi, Cosimo – were no longer alive. The
publication of the Dialogue immediately met with great difficulty – it
could not be published in Rome, under the auspices of the Lincei,
and it took declarations of questionable veracity to enable it to pass
the Inquisition censor in Florence. When it was finally published, in
February 1632, it was enthusiastically received by philosophical
peers and disciples, but complaints immediately started piling in.
Within months its sale was banned – first temporarily, as a special
committee of experts was set again and the case was transferred to
the Inquisition. In September it met, presided over by the pope, and
decided to summon Galileo to Rome to stand a real trial. He tried to
evade the summons, but was finally forced down in January 1633.
After the first interrogation, he reached a deal which didn’t satisfy the
pope and was interrogated again – this time with torture instruments
presented to him (the second stage of torture use, the first being
mentioning them, the third – using). Unsurprisingly, he agreed to
confess, and on this basis was found “vehemently suspected of
heresy” – strong enough to sentence him to lifetime imprisonment,
soon to be mitigated to house arrest – but not, as full heresy would
have mandated, to send him to the stake.
 Conclusion
The story of Galileo’s trial plays an extremely important role in the
way modern science presents itself to itself as well as to wider
culture. For centuries, the image of the brave scientist wielding
reason against dogmatic political power has served to initiate
students and to argue the cause of many modern values. As such, it
has raised great curiosity among more sophisticated historians, keen
to reveal the actual story behind the myth and unearth the making of
this crucial moment in the history of science in particular and
modernity in general. Let’s quickly recount some of their insights.
The trial was a series of miscalculations on both sides. Galileo
forced a substantial inquiry into the content of the book – which was
doomed since it had to be handed over to the theologians – when it
could have been resolved as a procedural lapse by obtaining proper
authorization from the censor. Indeed, it perhaps should not be
looked at primarily through a legal lens: once he left the university to
join the court, Galileo subjected himself to its rituals and theatrics,
and ‘the fall of the favorite’ was a script he was bound to be
subjected to, especially at the pinnacle of his fame. This does not
mean that the issues were not serious: Galileo’s challenges to
orthodoxy were much wider and more complex than the motion of
the Earth. His matter theory made the Eucharist difficult to conceive
of, and worse: the idea of the maculate Moon interfered with the
worship of Mary. In this popular cult, the perfection of the Moon was
allegorically identified with Mary’s immaculate virginity, and Galileo’s
allies weren’t shy of flaunting the discrepancy anymore than he was
hesitant in arguing over Biblical interpretation with Church
theologians. See (Figure 7.10) how Lodovico Cardi (known as Cigoli,
1559–1613), the friend who first warned Galileo of the gathering
discontent, installed the spotted Moon of the Sidereus drawings (see
especially ‘1’ in Figure 7.7, left), where every viewer at the time
would have expected the brilliant, silvery white befitting Mary’s
flawless divinity.
 Figure 7.10 The Assumption of the Virgin; a 1612 fresco at the
Cappella Paolina at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome
by Galileo’s friend Lodovico Cardi (commonly known as Cigoli).
Note the Moon under Mary’s feet: not only is it “maculate,” but it’s
a defiant copy of Galileo’s Moon’s drawing from the Sidereus
Nuncius. Cigoli, a fellow Tuscan, was an important ally to Galileo
in the following year, during the early stages of the affair that
would culminate in his trial two decades later, reporting to him
about the dangerous opposition to his Copernicanism developing
in their home region and the people and intrigues involved.

Finally, historians have shown that Galileo found himself

embroiled in a political, educational and theological struggle in which
he was far from the main actor. Truly at stake was the enormous
popularity of the Jesuit Order and the price it was willing to pay for
this popularity. In the eyes of the older, more orthodox orders,
especially the Dominicans, the Jesuits were compromising core
Christian beliefs and practices. Their adoption of the New Science
was in line with their adoption of Mandarin attire in China or shaman
rituals in the Amazon, all much too close to outright heresy. Being
wrapped up in a powerful educational program (see Chapter 5)
made these habits particularly dangerous. Galileo’s relations with the
Jesuits saw ups and many downs, but at that moment what
determined his personal (mis-)fortune was his affiliation with the
losing side in the grand struggle within the Catholic Church of the
Counter-Reformation.
Galileo’s personal lot ended up less than horrendous. He spent
the last decade of his long life in the Medicis’ Villa Arcetri near
Florence, playing the lute as he gradually lost his eyesight. He still
worked, and in 1638 published – in Leiden this time – his
enormously impactful Discourses Relating to Two New Sciences
(whose main teachings will be discussed in Chapter 9). In the story
of the construction of the cathedral which is science, however, his
trial was as dramatic a chapter as any: it signaled the final collapse
of the Thomistic synthesis. For centuries, the Catholic Church
maintained its position as the leading European institution of
knowledge through that delicate intellectual and institutional
compromise between monotheism and pagan science. This
compromise allowed it to sponsor the study of the scriptures on the
one hand and the Book of Nature on the other as complementary
parts of one grand project. Already put on the defensive by the
Reformation, the tensions built into this compromise could not
withstand the pressure of the great novelties of the New Science and
the radical, uncompromising approach of its practitioners. There
would still be Christian scientists and science would still be used for
(and against) Christian belief, but by prosecuting the most famous
philosopher of its time, the Church determined and declared that
there would no longer be Christian science.
 Discussion Questions
1. Where do you think the most dramatic departure from traditional
astronomy occurs? With Copernicus declaring that the Earth moves?
With Tycho demonstrating that there is change in the heavens? With
Kepler calculating that the planetary orbits are not round? With
Galileo showing mountains of the Moon?

2. What can one make of the underlying Aristotelianism of

Copernicus or the theoretical conservatism of Tycho? Are they
agents of change or revivers of ancient traditions?

3. Compare the sketch of Galileo’s and Kepler’s lives to that of

people of earlier eras – from Chapters 4 or 2, for example. Is there
an interesting lesson to be learnt from the differences? Does the
difference in biographies have bearings on how we should look at
the knowledge they produced?

4. Astronomers always used instruments. Is there something unique

to Kepler’s camera obscura and Galileo’s telescope, or are they just
incremental improvements?

5. Looking at the details of Galileo’s trial – does it still seem like a

momentous event in the making of modern science or just a series of
miscalculations and political intrigues? Or are the two interpretations
contradictory?
Suggested Readings
 Primary Texts

Copernicus, Nicolaus, “Commentariolus,” in Edward Rosen (trans.

and ed.), Three Copernican Treatises (New York: Octagon Books,
1971), pp. 55–65.

Kepler, Johannes, Somnium (The Dream), Edward Rosen (trans.

and ed.) (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 11–
21 ff.

Galileo, Galilei and Roberto Bellarmine, “Correspondence” and

“Considerations Concerning the Copernican Hypothesis,” in Maurice
A. Finocchiaro (ed.), The Galileo Affair (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1999), pp. 67–86.
 Secondary Sources

Biographies:

Caspar, Max, Kepler, C. Doris Hellman (trans. and ed.) (New York:
Dover, 1993).

Heilbron, John L., Galileo (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Thoren, Victor E., The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho

Brahe (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

On the Copernican revolution:

Kuhn, Thomas S., The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy

in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1957).

On Tycho and his project:

Christianson, J. R., On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe and His

Assistants, 1570–1601 (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

On Rudolf’s court:

Evans, Richard J., Rudolf II and His World (Oxford: Thames &
Hudson, 1997).

On Kepler’s defense of Tycho’s project:

Jardine, Nicholas, Birth of History and Philosophy of Science
(Cambridge University Press, 1984).

On Kepler’s optics:

Chen-Morris, Raz, Measuring Shadows: Kepler’s Optics of Invisibility

(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016).

On Kepler’s cosmology:

Field, Judith V., Kepler’s Geometrical Cosmology (London: Athlone

Press, 1988).

Hallyn, Fernand, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and

Kepler, D. M. Leslie (trans.) (New York: ZONE BOOKS, 1993).

On Kepler’s astronomy:

Stephenson, Bruce, Kepler’s Physical Astronomy (Princeton

University Press, 1994).

On the Accademia dei Lincei:

Freedberg, David, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the
Beginnings of Modern Natural History (University of Chicago Press,
2002).

On Galileo’s telescope:

Van Helden, Albert, “The Telescope in the Seventeenth Century”

(1974) 65 Isis 38–58.
Reeves, Eileen, Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

On Galileo’s discoveries:

Reeves, Eileen, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of
Galileo (Princeton University Press, 1997).

On the cultural impact of the visual instruments:

Alpers, Svetlana, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the

Seventeenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1983).

Clark, Stuart, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European

Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Edgerton, Samuel Y., Jr., The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope:
How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the
Universe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

Panofsky, Erwin, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Hague: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1954).

On Galileo’s trial:

Biagioli, Mario, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Age

of Absolutism (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

Feldhay, Rivka, Galileo and the Church (Cambridge University

Press, 1995).
Redondi, Pietro, Galileo Heretic, R. Rosenthal (trans.) (Princeton
University Press, 1987).

1 I owe this explanation to Keith Hutchison.

 8
Medicine and the Body
◈
Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood
 Harvey in Padua and London
In 1599, when Galileo was starting to make a name for himself at the
University of Padua, a young Cambridge graduate, William Harvey
(1578–1657), arrived there to study medicine. Padua was one of the
two most prestigious medical faculties in Europe (the other being
Leiden), and known to admit non-Catholic students, providing them
with special colleges, so an Englishman aspiring to a medical career
in the metropolis was all but obliged to make the journey.
The eldest son of a yeoman and carter from Kent, Harvey
represents, much like his senior Tuscan contemporary, the new
opportunities for fame and fortune that Europe was now making
possible through education. Returning to England in 1602, Harvey
set up a successful practice, aided by his marriage to Elizabeth
Browne in 1604, daughter of a wealthy and well-connected
physician. In 1607, he was elected a fellow of the Royal College of
Physicians, by then an almost 100-year-old guild assembling and
accrediting mainstream, university-educated doctors; and, in 1615,
he was appointed the ‘Lumleian Lecturer,’ responsible for the annual
lecture on anatomy to the College fellows. He carried out the task for
the next forty years, until a year before his death, thus wielding
enormous influence. This influence extended beyond the medical
profession: most of the early members of the Royal Society were
physicians, so their concepts of careful, literally hands-on empirical
research – the Lumleian Lectures included not only dissections of
corpses, but also vivisections (live dissections) – were shaped by
Harvey’s teaching (in which he indeed profusely praised Bacon,
‘Lord Verulam’). In 1618, Harvey became James’ court physician,
and in 1625 – Charles’ (the latter’s gruesome death was beyond his
vaunted medical prowess). This position took him both around
England, on the king’s many hunting expeditions, and back for three
years through war-devastated Europe: Harvey was keenly aware of
death, having seen much of it in his lifetime. The civil war forced him
to retreat with the king to Oxford, again putting him in the mentoring
role of the would-be Royal Society founders, and with the fall of the
monarchy he retired and spent his last years in London. His impact
on anatomy and physiology paralleled the impact his senior Paduan,
Galileo, had on astronomy and mechanics.
 Harvey’s Heart and Blood
Harvey’s main interest was generation – the process through which
parents produce new living creatures or offspring – which he
investigated with an inordinate number of observations of eggs and
fetuses, though, unimpressed with the new stress on instruments, he
very rarely used the microscope. In Harvey’s account, the egg is an
essential stage in any organism’s development, whether plant, or
viviparous or oviparous animal. In all, the development of the
offspring begins as a shapeless mass in a small vessel – like the egg
or the seed – already independent of the parent, but lacking any
structure. There is no ‘little hen’ inside the egg; the evolution of the
chick (and any fetus) is a gradual process of structuring: first
appears a red point which will become the heart, then a red web
which will become the blood vessels and so on.
This was novel and interesting, but not something that Harvey’s
contemporaries found very difficult to accept: Harvey’s account of
generation incorporated much of the Aristotelian concept of form
operating on matter. Where Harvey found much more resistance and
ended up having a much deeper impact was in a little book titled On
the Motion of the Heart and the Blood (Exercitatio Anatomica de
Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, 1628). The heart, Harvey
claimed there, was but a pump, drawing the blood from the
extremities of the body into itself and pushing it outwards again.
According to the common – though contested – theory that
Harvey would have studied in Padua, the blood was produced in the
liver from ingested food in the form of ‘chyle.’ It was then propelled
through the veins by its pneuma – a term referring both to air and
‘vital spirits’ (not unlike what we mean by calling alcohol ‘spirit’). On
its way to deliver nutrition to the organs, the blood passed through
the right ventricle of the heart, to be heated and loaded with more
pneuma. A small portion of it was sent to support the lungs, through
which the heart released excess heat and harmful substances and
absorbed new pneuma from the outside. When the heart contracted,
these ‘sooty vapors’ were expelled to the lungs and could be
exhaled; when it expanded, air was drawn in. The remaining blood
passed to the left ventricle through invisible pores in the septum –
the fleshy wall separating the two sides of the heart – from which it
continued through the arteries to the body, again driven by the vital
spirits that also created the arteries’ throbbing motion. Although the
blood in the arteries was created in the heart enriching the blood
arriving through the veins with pneuma, the two kinds of blood were
fundamentally different: the venous blood provided nutrition, and the
arterial – vitality; and each was flowing from a different organ
towards the periphery.
Harvey painted a completely different picture. The blood
circulates, he claimed, and not by vital powers it carried, but by the
pulsating motion of the heart. When it contracts (systole), the heart
drives the blood from the right ventricle through the arteries; when it
expands (diastole), it draws it back through the veins to the left
ventricle. At the extremities, the ‘used’ blood moves from the arteries
to the veins through minute, invisible capillaries. These capillaries
were a bold hypothesis – they were first observed only in 1661, by
Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694), who was exploring frogs’ lungs
using a microscope. There were no pores in the septum, argued
Harvey: the blood in the left ventricle is sent through the pulmonary
artery to be refurbished in the lungs, returning to the right ventricle
through the pulmonary vein.
 Harvey’s Way into the Body
Harvey’s arguments are a fine example of the methods and
approaches of the New Science, particularly exciting in their
application to the human body. He begins with a quantitative
consideration:

First, the blood is incessantly transmitted by the action of the

heart from the vena cava to the arteries in such quantity that it
cannot be supplied from the ingesta.

William Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and the Blood,

Robert Willis and Alexander Bowie (trans.) (London:
GlobalGrey, 2018 [1618]), ch. 9, p. 46

Harvey actually calculates an estimation of how much blood goes

through the heart: he measures the volume of the left ventricle of a
cadaver and multiplies it by the number of heartbeats, and concludes
that the volume of blood the heart moves in one hour is larger than
the volume of the whole body.
To that Harvey adds a series of simple but powerful
experimental arguments that he encourages the reader to try at
home: “tie the arteries, [and] immediately the parts not only become
torpid, and frigid, and look pale, but at length cease even to be
nourished.” Partially release the knot, and the blood in the thicker
and deeper arteries returns to flow, and the veins under the ligature
swell: apparently, the blood in the periphery is struggling to make its
way up. Trying it on the arm as in Figure 8.1, one can see that the
blood in the veins is only allowed up: the “knots or elevations”
(Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and the Blood, p. 66) turn out to
be unidirectional valves (recognized but wrongly identified by
Harvey’s Padua mentor Fabricius, to whom we’ll return later). Such
valves are not needed in the arteries, through which the blood is
forcefully pushed away from the heart and towards the extremities,
but are necessary in the veins. First, to ensure that used blood
doesn’t return to the body, and secondly to ensure that blood doesn’t
flow from the bigger veins to the smaller ones, rupturing them.
Figure 8.1 Harvey’s ligature experiments from his De Motu Cordis.
The blood in the deeply set arteries continues to flow down (away
from the heart), but the blood in the shallower veins stops (Figura
1). The bumps on the veins are unidirectional valves, allowing only
an upward flow: if you force the blood down, towards H (Figura 2),
the vein under the valve O remains empty. If the blood is forced
up, towards O (Fig. 3), and the finger at H is removed, the blood
returns to fill the vein. The diagram, which is a clearer version of
Harvey’s original one but very loyal to the source, is after a
drawing by S. Gooden for the Nonesuch edition of De Motu Cordis
(London, 1928).
 Harvey supports these homespun experiments with many expert
observations: dissections of human cadavers and vivisections of
animals. He can report on the size, weight and motions of organs; on
regular blood flow in vessels and on squirts of blood when they’re
opened; on the regular pace of the heart and on its change as blood
is removed. The body, according to Harvey, is a wonderful natural
machine, which can be investigated like any other part of nature.
Concerning the role of the blood, Harvey can offer little beyond the
ancient concepts of vitality and nutrition, and it would take over two
centuries for his analysis of the motion of the heart and the blood to
make any impact on medical treatment. But neither fact should
obscure the radical novelty of his way of analysis and the type of
arguments and evidence he marshals in its support. To understand
this we need to look at what it was that Harvey studied in Padua.
 Harvey’s Curriculum
Modern physicians acquire their medical skills at universities, and so
did Harvey. But it is not self-evident that this is where such
knowledge should be obtained. Originally, the university was a
community of learners, committed to abstract learning (Chapter 4).
Taking on training professionals in practical disciplines like medicine
(and law), the university reshaped itself as an institution and
reshaped the relations between ‘knowing-how’ and ‘knowing-that’
(Chapter 1).
Medicine had always presented a challenge to the dichotomy
between these two types of knowledge. It comprised both the art of
healing and the theory of the body, so it was too practical for the
pretense of pristine knowledge befitting the free man, and too
important and interesting to leave in the hands of the bound: Figure
8.2 illustrates how entrenched yet complicated it was to maintain this
distinction. Once adopted by the university, medicine came to
express, at least partly, the institutional divisions and hierarchies
which we found in natural philosophy and magic. It is true that to be
taught, knowledge had to be standardized and written, and what
could not tended to disappear; texts incorporated into the curriculum
were canonized, and those which weren’t were lost more often than
not. Yet these texts – first as manuscripts and then as books – were
rich with material and practical knowledge that the physician required
but that we don’t usually associate with the university. Moreover,
Padua taught Harvey and his peers how to put their hands on the
body: how to open it and what to expect within. Medicine therefore
presents an opportunity to add nuance to the relations between
techne¯ and episteme (Chapter 2), whose investment into the
cathedral of science has interested us throughout the book.
Figure 8.2 John Banister delivers an anatomy lecture (The
Visceral Lecture) at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, London, 1581. The
Company of Barber-Surgeons was allowed by Henry VIII to
dissect the corpses of four executed criminals a year, and these
lectures became compulsory for its members. Banister himself
became a member in 1572, and a licensed physician a year later,
receiving a medical degree (MB) from Oxford. The painting, which
Banister commissioned for the frontispiece of his Anatomical
Tables, captures well the ambivalence towards the body that made
his position – both a practical surgeon and a learned physician –
rare and difficult. Standing at the center, he gestures towards the
cadaver, perhaps laying his hand on it, perhaps not. The
assistants, in contrast, definitely are touching the dead body: the
one in front of the operating table and the one to Banister’s left
(our right) are holding probes, and the next one to his left is
holding a scalpel. The bearded senior colleague on the far right of
the painting, on the other hand, definitely isn’t touching – he is only
pointing. Finally, Banister distances himself somewhat from the
gore of the body (note that he also has a bloody probe under his
right hand) and celebrates his erudition by directing his pointer at
the skeleton with Realdo Colombo’s De Re Anatomica on the
stand, opened at Book 11 – “de Visceralibus.”
The Learned Tradition
 Hippocrates and the Hippocratic Corpus
The core of the medical canon, like that of the other branches of the
learned tradition, lay in texts from the classical Greek period. The
fundamental concept of the body that Harvey learned in Padua – and
did much to dismantle – was formulated some two millennia earlier,
in a corpus of about sixty texts, written around 440–340 BCE and
ascribed to Hippocrates of Cos, who allegedly lived around 460–377
BCE. Hippocrates himself may have been only a legend, and the
texts – collated around 250 BCE – vary from very theoretical to very
practical. Together, however, they present a coherent naturalistic
tradition, with a clear conception of the human body, both healthy
and sick, of the medicine to sustain it, and of the physician deserving
to serve it.
The human body in the Hippocratic Corpus was fluid. It was
material, and in line with what the Greeks – especially Plato –
thought about matter; it was in constant flux, and disturbingly so:
constantly changing, unstable and unruly. The Hippocratic physician
had little interest in structures: organs and their distinct function; the
different kinds of blood vessels. He was apparently oblivious even to
muscles, despite the famous enchantment that their outer
appearance had on his contemporary sculptor. For him, the body
was made of liquid substances: humors. Their number and
descriptions varied from one Hippocratic text to another, but not the
fundamental understanding of their import. Life was the flow of these
humors: they related the parts of the body to one another and the
body to the cosmos – the food it provided, its seasons, its climates
and the influences of its celestial bodies. In the healthy body, the
flow was balanced, but rarely was it in such harmony. Not only
because of its material mutability, but also because, unlike that of
other animals, the human body wasn’t well suited to life on Earth. It
needed to be covered from the cold, its food to be cooked, and its
humors regimented; it needed constant medical care, as Plato
himself put it:

Suppose you asked me if it was enough for the body to be the

body, or whether it needed something else. I would reply: “It
certainly does need something else. That’s the reason why the
art of medicine has come to be invented, because the body is
defective, and therefore not self-sufficient. So the art of
medicine was developed to provide it with the things which were
good for it.”
Plato, The Republic, G. R. F. Ferrari (ed.), Tom Griffith (trans.)
(Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 17

Hippocratic medicine, then, was the reasoned, organized know-

how – the techne¯ (Chapter 2) – by which the “defective” body was
brought into balance: balance between its humors and between
them and the cosmos. This balance was always precarious,
dependent on a myriad of varied, personal factors; so the
Hippocratic physician, responsible for the physical and mental health
of each of his patients, relied much less on medical theory that on
information gathered from each one of them. Particular, personal
inquiry was necessary: what did the patient eat, how they slept, etc.
But the answers weren’t sufficient. Patients tended to misremember
or simply lie because they were embarrassed or didn’t follow the
prescribed regimen, and, moreover, they didn’t know what happened
inside their body. All outer signs of inner processes were therefore
crucial: the color of patients’ urine and the smell of their feces; the
pace and rhythm of their pulse.
The humors were ever flowing and balanced precariously, so
Hippocratic physicians would almost invariably take a mild approach
to treatment: careful diet; hydrating with mild solutions of barley,
honey, vinegar and the like. ‘Dietetics,’ however, comprised much
more than food: health was to be achieved by a regimen of exercise,
sleep and sex – balance and self-control befitted and benefitted the
body as well as the mind of the free man (Chapter 2). Physicians did
know how to invade the body if necessary: the Hippocratic texts
explain how to set a broken bone, open and clean a wound or
remove a stone with a fine catheter. But aggressive intervention
didn’t fit their understanding of the way the body worked nor their
notion of their role as healers – nicely captured by the epithet ‘first,
do no harm’ (which appears in the text On Epidemics, but is not, as
is usually believed, part of the famous Hippocratic oath). And
yielding a knife on a regular basis also didn’t cohere with their idea of
themselves as free, scholarly men – it was instead appropriate for
slaves or “practitioners,” as the oath calls them: “I will not cut
persons … but will leave this to be done by men who are
practitioners of this work.”
The one Hippocratic remedy that to the modern eye does
appear radical is bloodletting. We’ll return to this therapeutic
procedure below, as it became increasingly popular in the centuries
after the Hippocratic Corpus was assembled and remained so for
two millennia. What is worth stressing here is that this very popularity
– in both learned and folk western medicine and in Chinese and
Indian medicine as well (though with different historical trajectory) –
suggests how much sense it made. The blood was the only humor
that could be approached in a controlled way from outside, so
removing some of it from different parts of the body was the only way
in which the physician could directly manipulate the quantities of the
humors and their distribution throughout the body. This could rid the
body of excesses and defects and restore the balance between the
rest of the humors. Moreover, bleeding wasn’t haphazard: blood was
taken from particular points to affect particular parts of the body:
“One had to bleed the right elbow for liver pain, and the left for
spleen problems, because the vein in the right elbow ran to the liver,
whereas that in the left elbow led directly to the spleen” (Kuriayama,
The Expressiveness of the Body, p. 202).
There was some theory behind the localization: blood vessels
(the Hippocratic texts don’t differentiate between veins and arteries)
carried not only blood but also pneuma (the spirit or breath of life
mentioned above) through the body and to its organs. But the
locations of the bleeding points suggest that they were related less
to theory and more to practices of pain relief. A curious and telling
fact is that the Hippocratic maps of bleeding points are very similar to
Chinese maps of points of acupuncture from the same era (as
discussed in Chapter 1, Chinese medicine, like other systems of
non-Western knowledge, is regrettably out of our scope). It could be
that the relations between the Greek and the Chinese cultures at the
time was more intimate than we usually assume. But it’s much more
likely that the similarity reveals that acupuncture developed from
bleeding, while bleeding developed from practical, trial-and-error
attempts to relieve pain, a role acupuncture fulfills successfully to
this day.
 Galen and the Systematization of Medicine
The Hippocratic Corpus seems to have been consolidated in the
middle of the third century BCE, probably in the Library of
Alexandria, and our knowledge of medical thought and practice in
the last Hellenistic centuries before the Christian era is almost
exclusively mediated by the reports of later writers. One reason may
have been the burning and destruction of the library (Chapter 4).
Less dramatically, it was probably the towering figure of Galen
(Claudius Aelius Galenus, c. 130–c. 200/c. 216) who made his
predecessors appear obsolete to his successors, in much the same
way Aristotle, some five centuries earlier, shaped subsequent views
of his contemporaries and precursors. Otherwise, Galen can be
compared to his contemporary Ptolemy:1 much like Ptolemy’s in
astronomy, Galen’s work made his name synonymous with medicine
until the early modern era. This was partly the result of the sheer
volume of Galen’s writing – more manuscripts of his texts survive
than all other Greek medical writers put together. But the status of
Galen’s work also stemmed from his empirical and philosophical
innovations and from his ability to synthesize and systematize
traditional ideas into a coherent and explanatory framework.
Everything in medicine and physiology that came after him was read
through his eyes.
We sketched Galen’s biography in Chapter 4 as an example of
a life lived through the period in which the Hellenistic world was
giving way to the Roman one: born in Hellenistic Asia Minor, Galen
moved to Alexandria and then to Rome, worked in Latin and wrote in
Greek. Galen was a hybrid scholar in other respects as well: he
came from a wealthy family but worked hard for his living; he was
proficient in theory and practice alike and comfortable in emperors’
courts as well as in the stables of gladiators. Their open wounds,
which he was celebrated for healing, he treated as “windows into the
body.”
But if Galen’s prolific output obscured many of his
contemporaries, his own polemical mentions of them, despite being
often dismissive, reveal something about their thought which is
crucial to the history of science as a whole. That is: physicians of
Late Antiquity were engaged in a rich and sophisticated debate
about the very nature of their knowledge and the proper and efficient
way in which it should be pursued. It was not just a part of the
philosophical debate of the Greek golden age on the nature of Truth
and how to attain it (Chapter 2), but also a practical and well-
informed discussion couched in categories parallel to the ones we’ve
been using throughout the book.
Medical thinkers, according to Galen and Celsus – a medical
encyclopedist of a century earlier – belonged to one of three groups.
The Empiricists shunned theory. They distrusted the ability to know
the inner workings of the body, and preferred to work by analogy and
induction, prescribing for each malady a therapy that appeared to
have worked on similar symptoms in the past. The Dogmatists, or
Rationalists, did believe in theory, although they adopted different
theories, according to the school they chose and the type of
evidence they found convincing. But even if their theories differed,
they agreed that general claims about the nature and operations of
the body are not only possible to formulate and defend, but are also
very useful, as they enabled reasoning from the symptoms of a
disease to its causes and devise proper remedies to undo those
causes.
The third group were the Methodists, who took the name to
boast the medical ‘method’ they claimed they could teach anyone
within six months. They had a basic theory, founded on an atomistic
idea of the body rather than Hippocrates’ flow of humors, although
their concept of health as balance was similar: atoms stream around
the body through pores – in the healthy body, the stream is free and
smooth; disease is its obstruction. The training of the physician could
therefore be brief because he didn’t need to absorb a complex
theory of the body nor know much about the complex particularities
of the patient’s body, history, behavior and diet.
We’ve often discussed the relations between epistemological
values and social-political standings, so it shouldn’t be surprising that
Galen abhorred the last option. A person of his standing couldn’t
allow such a populist approach, rooted in rural healing, which
rendered moot the erudition and sophistication he stood for. For him,
the Methodists’ theory was simply wrong and their ‘method’ a sham.
This was an attitude towards folk practices that learned medicine
would maintain throughout history, with a few crucial exceptions
which we’ll discuss below (Harvey’s interests in the knowledge of
breeders and midwives is one such exception). Between the
Empiricists and the Dogmatists, Galen was somewhat conflicted. No
theory was preferable to a wrong one, leading, as in the Methodists’
case, to dangerous treatment, but Galen did believe in his ability to
attain real certainty in his own theoretical claims. This could be
achieved by using Aristotle’s logic, and in particular syllogism – the
fundamental mode of argument taught by Aristotle. Here is an
example of such use: Galen’s demonstration that the rational, ‘ruling’
soul – he¯gemonikon – is in the brain:

where the source of the nerves is, there is the he¯gemonikon;

but the source of the nerves is in the brain;
the he¯gemonikon, then, is in the brain.
Quoted from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/galen/

The reader might wonder how Galen could think that an argument
like this, clearly based on empirical observations and contestable
assumptions, may lead to certainty – perhaps he was using
‘certainty’ in a less restrictive way than we do. But his readers in the
next 1,500 years hardly perceived a problem, and in the universities
of the Middle Ages he was taught as the prime example of a brilliant
application of the Aristotelian tools in the acquisition of natural
knowledge.
The most influential aspect of this application was Galen’s
fundamental theory of the body. Galen adopted and canonized the
single text in the Hippocratic Corpus – On the Nature of Man – that
specifies exactly four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black
bile. This quartet allowed him to release the Hippocratic concept of
body from its bond to Platonic ideas about the constantly fluctuating
matter, and frame it instead in the symmetries of Aristotelian natural
philosophy. In this Aristotelian interpretation of the Hippocratic ideas,
the four humors correspond to the four elements and, like the
elements, Galen conceives them less as physical, flowing liquid
substances, and more as realizations of the fundamental properties
– cold and hot; dry and wet. Each humor he relates to an organ:
blood to the heart; phlegm to the brain; yellow bile to the liver; and
black bile – the spleen. Each is dominant in a different personality
type: the blood in the music- and fun-loving sanguine; the phlegm in
the slow and lazy phlegmatic; yellow bile in the ill-tempered and
querulous choleric; and black bile in the moody melancholic (Figure
8.3). Galen can then further map the humors and their corresponding
organs and personalities onto the seasons of the year and of human
life, onto climates and planets (whose astrological characters we
discussed in Chapter 6): the northerners living in a cold climate are
phlegmatic; teenagers are sanguine, etc.
Galen thus describes the healthy human body as varied and
changing yet stable and balanced – just like nature as a whole. Dis-
ease, as the English word still captures, is conceived as a loss of this
balance. For example: when the cold and wet winter enhances the
cold and wet phlegm (which was related to the element of water), it
could travel from the brain to the sinuses and the lungs, causing
those maladies characterized by coughing, like bronchitis and
pneumonia. Spring increases the amount and flow of blood (the
humor aligned with air, hence warmth and moistness), so one could
expect high fevers and nose bleeds. Choler (yellow bile) and black
bile are associated with harm, and are held culpable in more serious
diseases. Some fatal conditions (probably what we’d call hepatitis)
come with yellowed eyes and swollen liver – signs of excess of
yellow bile; the excrements and puss of people dying of the Black
Death (the Bubonic Plague) are indeed black, and the inner organs
of people dying of severe melancholy (likely malaria) are also badly
darkened – both clear signs of the effects of the black bile.

Figure 8.3 The four personalities, or temperaments, from an

undated and unsigned medieval manuscript. Top left: the sanguine
– fleshy, pinkish, optimistic and passionate; top right: the choleric –
hardy, ruddy, irritable and violent; bottom left: the phlegmatic – fat,
pale, slow and lazy; bottom right: the melancholic – lean, anxious,
stubborn and sensitive.
 Much of the power of Galen’s writing came from his ability to
produce a coherent, explanatory theory, tying all these aspects and
relating them to the teachings of the main philosophical schools.
Method, we saw, he drew from Aristotle and fundamental ideas
about the material body – from Plato via Hippocrates. His concept of
life was adopted from the Stoic school (Chapter 4): the body is alive,
moving and sensing because it comprises three types of psyche¯, all
created within it by transformations of the pneuma – the spirit or soul
of the world. Galen gives these philosophical conceptions concrete
physiological underpinning: the liver produces the vegetative or
desirous soul, responsible for basic living processes – nutrition and
generation – and distributes it through the veins. The heart creates
the spirited soul, responsible for motion and the passions, which is
carried through the body in the arteries. The brain, we saw, is the
site of the rational soul, which is transmitted through the nerves, and
here Galen manages to synthesize Plato’s idea of logistikon with the
competing Stoic concept of he¯gemonikon. The arguments Galen
provides to support his claims are varied. Some are common tropes
– for example, everyone knows that great emotions are felt at the
heart and may flush the face with blood. Some evidence was
gathered from careful anatomical observations of the bodies of pigs,
monkeys, sheep and goats (the human body was not to be
desecrated). Some was based on bold experiments – for example,
severing the nerves of a pig one by one, Galen showed that he could
stop the poor pig from struggling while it kept squealing and vice
versa.
 From a practical, medical point of view, Galen’s most lasting
legacy may have been bloodletting. He trusted this procedure much
more than the Hippocratic writers – enough to recommend
continuing it, sometimes, even after the patient fainted, and even in
cases of blood loss. This didn’t follow from an underestimation of the
crucial role of blood: Galen, we saw, assigned blood a crucial life-
carrying role. But since he had a convincing theory of how blood was
constantly produced in and consumed by the body, removing some
of it (and over a few treatments – quite a bit) didn’t appear to him as
dramatic as it seems to us. Moreover, Galen developed a
sophisticated method of diagnosis by pulse-taking and a careful
clinical manual of locations and quantities of blood to be let, and his
trust in bloodletting was well supported not only theoretically, but
empirically. He fiercely defended the Hippocratic localization of
bloodletting, which physicians of his time were for some reason
losing trust in, claiming to have confirmed it by “extensive research”
(quoted by Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body, p. 207). He
was also clearly impressed by the apparent healing powers of
menstruation – women seemed immune to many diseases afflicting
men, like epilepsy and gout. As we noted in discussing Hippocrates,
the millennia-long belief in bloodletting, and definitely Galen’s, wasn’t
based on negligence or superstition.
 Muslim Learned Medicine
Learned medicine resembled the other branches of the learned
tradition also in the subsequent fate of its Hellenistic canonical
corpus. As we discussed in Chapter 4, it was the prize purchase of
the great Abbasid translation project. Tellingly, the great Hunayn
(whom the Latins knew as Johannitius) not only translated almost all
of Galen’s work, including some texts which were lost in the original
Greek and survived only in his Arabic translation. He also compiled
an introduction to Galenic medicine (Medical Questions, to which
we’ll return below) and authored a book on the health of the eye:
Book of the Ten Treatises on the Eye.
The role assigned to Galen by Muslim learned physicians, as it
would be by the later Christians, was only comparable to that of
Aristotle. They found in Galen not only practical medical instructions
and a fundamental account of the body, but also an overall system of
sound thought, research and argumentation. Yet, as with Aristotle,
this is not to say that they followed his teaching blindly.
A good example of the sophisticated critical approach of these
Muslim Galenic philosophers is provided by one of the earliest and
most influential among them: the Persian Muhammad ibn Zakariya
al-Razi (865–925), known in Latin Europe as Rhazes. His biography
adds an example of their social and cultural place as people of
practical and theoretical knowledge. Al-Razi studied in Baghdad, the
imperial capital, and was apprenticed in a new kind of institution –
the charitable Islamic hospital or bimaristan. He was called back to
his hometown Ray (Rey in today’s Iran) by the Persian ruler Mansur
ibn Ishaq to run a similar institution, and later his reputation took him
back to Baghdad to establish a new bimaristan. Al-Razi chose its
location, so it’s told, by hanging slabs of meat in various parts of the
city to see which would take the longest to rot, indicating the freshest
air.
Al-Razi was a Galenist not only in accepting most of Galen’s
theories and incorporating many of Galen's case studies into his own
comprehensive manual of medicine (al-Hawifi’l-tibb or Continens
Liber, Latin translation). Following Galen’s example, he fashioned
himself a medical philosopher, committed to determining the proper
balance of theory and observation, as the story of the establishment
of the hospital conveys: whether the anecdote is true is less
important than the claim it makes about al-Razi’s commitment to a
careful and sophisticated empirical approach. At the same time, he
wasn’t shy of correcting Galen on empirical details. His most famous
correction is the distinction between measles and smallpox, which in
the Galenic tradition were categorized together as rashes:

The physical signs of measles are nearly the same as those of

smallpox, but nausea and inflammation are more severe, though
the pains in the back are less. The rash of measles usually
appears at once, but the rash of smallpox spot after spot.
Cited in Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 97

Nor was al-Razi shy of directly criticizing Galen on theoretical

principles, and he dedicated a treatise – one of some 200 he
composed – to such a critique: the very influential Doubts about
Galen (Shukuk ‘ala alinusor).
This persona of the physician-philosopher was emulated a
century later by an even more influential Persian – Abu Ali al-Husayn
ibn ‘Abdallah Ibn Sina (980–1037). We already mentioned Ibn Sina
in Chapter 4, when we touched on his role in the monotheistic
adoption of pagan science: his impact in Christian Europe, under the
Latinized name Avicenna, was rivaled only by Averroes and
Alhazen. The stories about Ibn Sina’s childhood and youth – again,
whether accurate or exaggerated – tell of the great admiration for
learnedness developed in Islamic culture under Abbasid rule. They
also demonstrate that this admiration didn’t come at the expense of
respect for practical knowledge. Ibn Sina was the son of a tax
collector from around Bukhara (in today’s Uzbekistan), and allegedly
taught himself the whole Qur’an (by heart) by the age of 10, and the
theory and practice of medicine by 16. While practicing medicine
from that tender age, he became an expert in every branch of all
available theoretical knowledge: Indian arithmetic, Islamic
jurisprudence, and all translated Hellenistic science and philosophy,
including Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy and the Platonists.
Ibn Sina led an itinerant life in the inner Asian regions of the
Muslim realm, carried by political upheaval and a quest for
knowledge, knowledge by which he made his living as a physician to
the Emir, a master of jurisprudence, a court philosopher and an
astronomer. He left 270 or so works, about forty on medicine, many
composed on horseback, in prison or in hiding, and many remaining
in active use for centuries – both in the original Arabic (a handful in
Persian) and in their Latin translations. Among all this, his Canon of
Medicine (Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb), completed in 1025, still stands out.
The Canon comprises about a million words, covering medical
knowledge ranging from Hippocratic antiquity, through Galen and his
disciples, to Ibn Sina’s own immediate predecessors and
contemporaries. It’s meticulously arranged in five books: the first
including fundamental humoral theory, anatomy, hygiene and
etiology; the second, materia medica, or plants and other substances
serving as remedies; the third and the fourth, diagnosis, prognosis
and treatment of specific diseases; the fifth, the preparation and use
of compound drugs. The Canon was still the most important book in
Harvey’s medical education in Padua at the turn of the seventeenth
century, and remained the core of the medical curriculum a century
later.
The human body portrayed in the Canon is that described by
Galen, with one important exception. For Ibn Sina, a devout Muslim
who adopted a Neo-Platonic interpretation to his monotheism (see
Chapters 1, 5 and 6), it was crucial to maintain a strict separation
between the material body and immaterial soul. But in the Canon the
body itself is not completely material. The idea that the body is
permeable to the influences of the immediate and remote
environment, we saw, can already be found in the Hippocratic
Corpus. But in Ibn Sina the four humors come to relate to the world
in a way we discussed in Chapter 6: they represent, symbolize and
echo the seasons, the planets and the configurations of objects. The
analogy between the microcosmos and the macrocosmos, as it
would come to be called in a couple of centuries, was crucial for the
function and temperaments (see Figure 8.2 again) of the Galenic
body as Ibn Sina analyzed it, as well as to health and disease. This
meant that the disciplines studying these symbolic relations –
alchemy, astrology, the interpretation of dreams and the art of
talismans (Chapter 6) – were essential for Ibn Sina’s medicine.
The theoretical medicine of the Canon is particularly interesting
because Ibn Sina carefully shaped it as a paradigmatic Aristotelian
natural philosophy. The philosopher aspired to scientia, which
Aquinas, after Ibn Rushd (Chapter 5), formulated as thus: “certitude
of knowledge which is gained by demonstration” (quoted by Charles
Lohr, The European Image of God and Man (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p.
260). Medicine was too complex and its subject matter too varied to
achieve this level of certainty, but Ibn Sina did his best to put it in
syllogisms, similar to Galen’s own which we saw above, and he
carefully structured his accounts of the bodily phenomena according
to the four causes (Chapter 2). The material causes were the body’s
humors, pneuma and vital spirits; the formal causes were the
temperaments, faculties and organs. All external agents, affecting
changes on the body, would count as efficient causes: food and
drink, exercise and sleep, medications and poisons; and the final
cause was the body’s healthy balance. The unique popularity of the
Canon was therefore based not only on its use as a compendium of
medicine, but also as a model of proper Aristotelian inquiry.
 Christian Learned Medicine
The learned role played in the Muslim realm by ‘professionals’ and
courtiers like Hunayn and Ibn Sina was fulfilled in Christian Europe,
as discussed in Chapter 4, by people of the clergy – first in the
monastery and then in the university – and medical knowledge was
no exception. It was also the clergy who saw to the collation of the
text of the Hellenistic-Muslim tradition and their translation to Latin,
and at the center of that project stood, as discussed in Chapter 4,
Gerard of Cremona and the Toledo College of Translators. Yet the
fundamental practical nature of medical knowledge, even that
delivered in books, did make for important differences in the ways
this knowledge was adopted, assimilated and taught.
The main portal for medical texts was the eleventh-century work
at the Benedictine monastery of Monte Casino, concentrated around
the intellectual skills and commercial connections of Constantinus
Africanus (c. 1020–1087), which we discussed in Chapter 4. It was
sponsored by Alphanus (d. 1085), the Bishop of Salerno (some 150
kilometers south-west of Monte Casino), who was one of its former
monks. Alphanus traveled to Constantinople in 1063, where he
acquainted himself with Galenism and summarized it to the Latin
scholars in his Premnon Physicon. Alphanus’ own approach was
philosophical, but the legacy of the Salerno school of medicine was a
true hybrid of learned and practical medicine.
Defining this legacy are two books. One is Constantinus’ Liber
Ysagogarum (or Isagoge – Book of Introductions) – his Latin version
of Hunayn’s Medical Questions – which concentrated on Galen’s
concept of the ‘six non-naturals.’ The non-naturals were those
factors of health that were not part of the body’s own nature: air, food
and drink, elimination and retention (which for Hunayn meant both
digestive and sexual), exercise and rest, sleep and wakefulness, and
states of mind. This was a very practical set of ideas for healthy
conduct – still easy to abide by. But it also powerfully relayed the
theoretical Galenic-Hippocratic conception of the body, mediated by
Ibn Sina, in which these ideas were embedded: a body permeable to
the cosmos and to its immediate environment, with the humors
expressing the seasons and the elements; the vital spirits relating
body and soul, etc.
The second book – The Salerno Health Regimen (Regimen
sanitatis salernitanum) – was composed anonymously some 200
years later and brought this hybrid of theory and practice even closer
to home. It was written in verse, so it made the Galenic stress on
hygiene, exercise, diet and temperance, as well as the theoretical
framework it embedded, available not only in the formal educational
context – to which we’ll presently turn – but also in the big
household, the manor and the parish.
In the thirteenth century, the newly established universities
began to incorporate medicine into their educational duties, and it
was this synthesis of medical know-how and knowing-that coming
out of Monte Casino and the Salerno School that they picked up as
their basic curriculum. It came encapsulated in six texts, known
together as the Articella – the little art (of medicine): the
aforementioned Isagoge; Galen’s Tegni (or Techne); Hippocrates’
Aphorisms and Prognostics; De Urinis (On Urines) of Theophilus
Protospatharius; and De Pulsibus (On Pulses) by Philaretus. The
latter two authors were seventh- to eighth-century Byzantine
physicians who had been translated by Alphanus; little is known
about them apart from that, which further demonstrates how
powerfully this knowledge transcended physical, cultural and
linguistic boundaries. Indeed, texts by Muslim and Jewish authors –
on diets, on fevers, etc. – were continuously translated from Arabic
and added to the Articella. The titles hint at the fundamentally
practical nature of these texts, although from the middle of the
twelfth century they came bound together and commentated upon by
the Salerno scholars – first Bartholomaeus (d. 1192), then Maurus
(1130–1214). These commentaries not only stressed the Galenic
theory of the body that made sense of the remedies and regimens,
but also how this theory was embedded in the Aristotelian natural-
philosophical framework. They became the basis for a thriving
commentary tradition adjoining the Articella in the following centuries
within which university scholars would discuss philosophical-
theoretical ideas about the human body and its place in the cosmos.
Yet despite very harsh criticism from physicians of Harvey’s era,
this literary and studious leaning didn’t define the output of the
Salerno school, as demonstrated by another corpus coming out of
the school in the twelfth century. It was a collection of three texts
about medicine for women, by a woman – On the Conditions of
Women; On Treatments for Women; and On Women’s Cosmetics –
called Trotula, namely Little Trota. ‘Trota’ was the name of the
woman who reportedly wrote the second of the three texts, and
about whom nothing else is known with certainty (although heroic
stories abound). Indeed, the essentially practical nature of medicine,
even in its learned form, allowed women to have a significant
presence in it throughout the Middle Ages. The abbess Hildegard
from Bingen (1098–1179) provides another good example. She is
famous for her religious visions and her music, but her medical
writings were no less copious and influential. The most famous of
them, the Book of Simple Medicine (Liber simplicis medicinae),
includes a vast array of healing techniques employing herbs,
tinctures and precious stones; instructions for diagnosis and
prognosis; and theoretical discussions of the human, in particular
female, body.
Nor did university medical education ever veer too far from
practical considerations. A medical degree was an arduous
undertaking, requiring seven years (including the basic education
discussed in Chapter 4) to achieve a Bachelor of Medicine (BM) and
ten to become a medical doctor (MD). Beyond absorbing the Canon
and the Articella, students striving towards the MD at the medical
faculties in places like Bologna and Paris had to serve some time as
apprentices to practicing doctors. From the beginning of the
fourteenth century they were also expected to attend a dissection.
The patients clearly appreciated this thorough education, with its
strong basis in the liberal arts and natural philosophy: MDs were
those who’d serve as physicians to lords and kings. Their duties
included overseeing the health, diet and regimen of the whole royal
household, as well as giving reasoned, learned explanations for their
advice. But MDs were all men: women (and non-Christians) were
prohibited from the university, so its appropriation of learned
medicine meant that they were now excluded from these more
prestigious and lucrative branches of practice.
The Healing Tradition
 The Leechbook
Of course, only a small portion of the population – in Europe or
anywhere else – had access to learned medicine. Most people relied
for their health on the advice of physicians whose knowledge
resembled the mason’s much more than the scholar’s. As we’ve
discussed throughout the book, this knowledge is a crucial ingredient
of science’s cathedral, but is by its very nature much more difficult to
recover. Yet it is not impossible: images, recipe books, instruments
and indirect accounts allow some glimpses into the medical concepts
and practices outside the institutions of knowledge. And just as the
learned medical tradition was quite practical, the practical, healing
tradition had access to and interest in knowledge delivered in writing.
Practical physicians were probably partly literate, especially if they
were members of the clergy who took up medicine as a religious
duty of benevolence. The Leechbook of Bald is both an example of
the practical, semi-learned medical tradition and a good source of
information concerning actual medical practices, especially in the
medieval Christian realm, but as we shall see – also well beyond.
Comprising three books, it is written in Old English (‘leech’ means
‘physician’ in Anglo-Saxon), and was compiled around the turn of the
tenth century for someone called Bald by someone called Cild: the
phrase “Bald owns this book, which he directed Cild to write”
appears towards the end of Book II, one of very few in Latin (Figure
8.4).
Figure 8.4 The Leechbook of Bald: “Bald habet hunc librum, Cild
quem conscribere iussit” (uppermost line). Note the beautiful
calligraphy in a language we hardly associate with learning,
suggesting that the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ knowledge
may be less pronounced than is assumed, especially for medicine.
 Practical Remedies
As a practical aid to treatment, the Leechbook has much more
interest in remedies – ‘leechdoms’ – for ailments than in theories of
the healthy body. For example, humors are mentioned, but not their
related organs and their balance – the fundamental concepts of the
Hippocratic-Galenic theory. Moreover, to be useful, the ailments
needed to be described specifically and the remedies needed to be
particular and local – they needed to be available. So, the
“leechdoms for all infirmities of the head,” with which the book
begins, contain, for example:

A wort has been named murra, rub it in a mortar as much as

may make a pennyweight, add to the ooze a stoup full of wine,
then smear the head with that and let the patient drink this at
night fasting …
For head ache, take willow and oil, reduce to ashes, work to a
viscid substance, add to this hemlock and carline and the red
nettle, pound them, put them then on the viscid stuff, bathe
therewith.

And among “Leechdoms for mistiness of the eyes” we find:

… take juice or blossoms of celandine, mingle with honey of

dumbledores, introduce it into a brazen vessel, half warm it
neatly on warm gledes, till it be sodden. This is a good
leechdom for dimness of eyes.
And so on.
Yet the locality of the remedies within the healing tradition
doesn’t mean that the knowledge represented by the Leechbook
extends only to headaches. In fact, the book offers “Leechcrafts and
wound salves and drinks for all wounds and all cleansings in every
wise, and for an old broken wound, and if there be bone breach on
the head, and for a tear by a dog; and a wound salve for disease of
the lungs, and a salve for an inward wound,” for example:

For broken head … take wallflower and attorlothe and pellitory

and wood marche and brownwort and betony, form all the worts
into a wort drink, and mix therewith the small cleaver and
centaury and waybroad … and if the brain be exposed, take the
yolk of an egg and mix a little with honey and fill the wound and
swathe up with tow, and so let it alone; and again after about
three days syringe the wound, and if the hale sound part will
have a red ring about the wound, know thou then that thou
mayest not heal it.

Like the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition, the Leechbook is wary of

wielding the knife – unsurprising, given how difficult it is to stop
bleeding – but when necessary it doesn’t hesitate:

… if the swarthened body be to that high degree deadened that

no feeling be thereon, then must thou soon cut away all the
dead and the unfeeling flesh, as far as the quick, so that there
be nought remaining of the dead flesh, which ere felt neither iron
nor fire … If thou wilt carve off or cut off a limb from a body, then
view thou of what sort the place be, and the strength of the
 place, since some or one of the places readily rotteth if one
carelessly tendeth it.

And it is even confident enough to provide instructions for cosmetic

surgery:

For hair lip, pound mastic very small, add the white of an egg,
and mingle as thou dost vermillion, cut with a knife the false
edges of the lip, sew fast with silk, then smear without and
within with the salve, ere the silk rot. If it draws together, arrange
it with the hand; anoint again soon.
 Learned Resources
The local and practical nature of the Leechbook’s remedies is hardly
surprising: the physician was supposed to heal rather than explain,
so his knowledge needed to be effective and his means readily
available. More surprising is that the healing tradition was in fact
quite attentive to the learned medical tradition, and showed interest
in both abstract ideas and remote, inaccessible remedies.
Some of the ideas did have immediate practical implications.
Bloodletting is recommended in the Leechbook – for example,
“against pocks, a man shall freely employ bloodletting and drink
melted butter.” It is not recommended as often as it is in Galenic
medicine, but the book does attempt (not in nearly as many details)
to follow Galen’s instructions regarding its proper application. It
considers, for example, “[o]n what season bloodletting is to be
foregone” and “how a man shall forego bloodletting on each of the
six fives in the month, and when it is best.” It’s not easy to say by
what route these Hellenistic teachings trickled into ninth-century
England – remember that the Leechbook dates before the
establishment of the universities and the great Christian translation
project. But many of the leechdoms are clearly translations from the
Greek, presumably through Latin, and names of teachers are
mentioned – Oxa and Dun, presumably learned physicians.
Perhaps most surprising and telling, though, is that the
Leechbook shows interest in remedies which are clearly impractical
because they are very far away and thus almost impossible to
obtain:

… scamony for constipation of the inwards, and ammoniac

drops for pain in the milt, and stitch, and spices for diarrhoea,
and gum dragon for foul disordered secretions on a man, and
aloes for infirmities, and galbanum for oppression in the chest
and balsam dressing for all infirmities, and petroleum to drink
simple for inward tenderness, and to smear outwardly, and a
tryacle, that is a good drink, for inwards tendernesses, and the
white stone, lapis Alabastrites, for all strange griefs.

None of these ingredients was available in England: “All this

Dominus Helias, patriarch at Jerusalem, ordered one to say to King
Alfred.” Arriving from Jerusalem, the knowledge dispatched by
Helias is a glimpse into an earlier global age: he is recommending
plants and minerals from the Syrian desert, Mesopotamia and
Persia; through the vast Eastern reaches of the Muslim realm.
 Practitioners
Bald the leech (assuming that his book was for his own perusal),
then, possessed medical knowledge concentrating on the local and
practical, but ranging also to the remote and esoteric. Other
practitioners of the healing traditions had different levels of interest
and use for abstract and theoretical knowledge.

Apothecaries
Closest to the learned physician in cultural and intellectual standing
was the apothecary, who gathered and dispensed materia medica
and prepared medications. Most of the apothecary’s knowledge was
local and particular: his ingredients came from the nearby paddock,
forest and quarry. Apothecaries affiliated with institutions –
monasteries or hospitals, and later faculties of medicine – often had
their own herbaria. There they would grow fragrant plants to drive
away miasmas – vapors carrying epidemics and recognized by their
foul smell – and medicinal herbs. These plants and minerals were
the ‘simples,’ which the apothecary could provide to be used as-is, or
mix to create compound remedies.
But as Bald’s exotic ingredients remind us, from very early on –
perhaps as far back as this book is concerned – knowledge and
goods traveled, if with difficulties, across Asia, North Africa and
Europe – especially materia medica. This was true even if the
medical theories making sense of the ingredients and procedures
were often lost when crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries. This
became particularly true with the dramatic globalization of commerce
from the fifteenth century onwards: from Malabar, European
apothecaries imported the calumba root; nutmeg, mace and cloves
from Moluccas; hell-oil from Madagascar; from Mexico, jojoba and
physic nut; guaiacum from the Bahamas and many, many more.
The distant and esoteric origins of many of the apothecary’s
ingredients meant that it was almost necessary for him to be literate,
at least to some degree and at least in the vernacular. This was
required in order to communicate with merchants of exotic materials
and to consult with learned physicians, and it also gave him access
to two definitive textual resources. The first was the book On Medical
Material of the first-century Greek physician Pedianos Dioscorides
(Figure 8.5). In it, the apothecary found the description of some
1,000 plants and minerals, almost exclusively from Dioscorides’
native Asia Minor, carefully arranged according to their medical
properties. On Medical Material remained available in the original
and in Arabic and Latin translations throughout the Middle Ages (the
Latin title – De materia medica – is the origin of the term we’ve been
using), finally finding its way to the vernacular and remaining in use
until the nineteenth century. Dioscorides’ book was the most popular,
but not the only one of its kind. Apothecaries in the Muslim realm, for
example, could also make use of the Compendium on Simple
Medicaments of the Andalusian physician Diyaˉʾ Al-Dıˉn Ibn al-
Baytaˉr (1197–1248), which contained three times the number of
medical substances as Dioscorides’ book. Surprisingly, neither Ibn
al-Baytaˉr’s Compendium nor his commentary on Dioscorides were
known in the Christian world, although his Treatise on the Lemon
was.
The other learned resource of importance to the apothecary was
Galen’s theory of simples, which he could find either in translations
of Galen’s own On the Powers of Simple Remedies or in its
elaborations by Ibn Sina and his Arabic- and Latin-writing disciples.
This was the theory of elementary substances and their medical
efficacies, which gave sense to the use of the simples and direction
to compounding them. The theory explained the properties of the
simples in terms of Aristotelian elements and their fundamental
properties, and also explained why the powers of some simples
could not be analyzed in this way. These powers were ‘occult’ in the
way we discussed in Chapter 6, namely: they arose from properties
that belonged to the unique natural essence of the substance and
couldn’t be further analyzed – they just were.
Figure 8.5 A drawing of a blackberry from Dioscorides’ On
Medical Material in the original Greek. Images like this were added
later, and can be found in various editions. This one is from the
Codex Medicus Graecus, which is a particularly interesting
manuscript for its longevity and its continuous use. It was created
in 515 in Constantinople for the Byzantine princess Anicia Juliana
and contains 435 (!) mostly naturalistic illustrations, including no
fewer than 383 of them full page, but it was used for centuries as a
textbook in Constantinople’s imperial hospital, and intensively so,
as the annotation in cursive Greek attests (including βάτος –
batos, or bramble – at the top). It was still in the hospital’s records
as a working text in 1406 (!) when it was restored, re-bound and
 augmented with a table of contents and scholia. After the fall of
Byzantium to the Ottomans, it came to the use of Moses Hamon,
the Jewish physician of the Sultan, and the knowledge was still
relevant enough that the name of each plant was added in Arabic
(which can be seen among the branches: ‫ﻋﻠﯾّﻖ‬ ُ ‫اﺗوش‬
ُ ‫ – ٰو‬wa’atoosh
ullaik) and Hebrew (written in very small Rashi script, bottom right:
‫ – בטוש‬batosh). The Codex Medicus was the basis for many
copies of Dioscorides, including one for the pope in the middle of
the fifteenth century, and only a century later did it take on its
apparent original intended use as an object of marvel, when
purchased for the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, where it has
been since, coming to be known as The Vienna Dioscorides.

Witches
Occult properties, you may recall, were important for magical
thought, and magic indeed provided another theoretical framework
for the practitioners of medicine. ‘Wise women’ like Matteuccia or
Walpurga (Chapter 6) may have been only marginally literate, but
what they did know about the magical ideas ingrained in their healing
made sense of their practices and related them to learned medicine.
The fundamental concepts of the learned medical tradition did
lend themselves to the magician’s approach. The Galenic body, we
saw, represented its environment, both immediate and remote, and
was open to its influences. These representations and influences
were the symbolic relations assumed and manipulated by magicians,
and the macrocosm-microcosm analogy we discussed above
captures these common grounds of magic and medicine. Bald,
practical in approach but familiar with learned sources, dedicates in
his Leechbook significant space to remedies for magically induced
harms, like “Leechdoms against every pagan charm and for a man
with elvish tricks; that is to say, an enchantment for a sort of fever,
and powder and drinks and salve.” He’s also keen on magical
remedies for natural maladies, for example:

For joint pain; sing nine times this incantation thereon, and spit
thy spittle on the joint: “Malignus obligavit; angelus curavit;
dominus salvavit.”

Surgeons and Barbers

Most independent of learned considerations were those who put
their hands directly on the body: drew blood, set bones, cleaned and
sutured wounds, pulled teeth, leeched, cupped and administered
enemas. Not all of them were illiterate: the guilds knew to
differentiate between educated surgeons, semi-educated barber-
surgeons, and simple barbers who learned by apprenticeship to
wield razor and scalpel, but not much more. Yet for all, knowledge of
the body was primarily practical (recall the porous boundaries
between the groups expressed in Figure 8.2).
Opening the body safely, we said, was difficult – it was hardly
possible to relieve pain or stop serious bleeding – and the traditional
hierarchy between know-how and knowing-that placed even erudite
surgeons below their more theoretically leaning learned physicians.
Yet despite the Hippocratic aversion to radical treatment, surgeons,
from Antiquity through Harvey’s time, didn’t lack ambition,
confidence or practical capacities. Tracing practitioners’ know-how is
difficult, as we noted about the mason and the witch, but the great
medical compendia (including the Leechbook, we saw) included
treatises on surgery, from which we can also construe some of their
skills and methods. The most influential of these treatises, both in its
original Arabic and in the Latin version, was Book 30 (the final one)
of al-Tasrif (The Recourse) by the Cordovan physician Abu’l-Qasim
Khalaf ibn Abbas al-Zahrawi (Albucasis, 936–1013). Al-Zahrawi,
providing some 200 illustrations of medical and dental instruments
(Figure 8.6), described not only cauterizing, suturing, draining
abscesses, setting fractures, etc., but also obstetrical and dental
procedures and operations for removing kidney stones. Particularly
representative are his unwavering instructions on how to remove a
cataract:
Figure 8.6 Surgical instruments from a manuscript of al-Zahrawi’s
(Albucasis) Al-Tasrif. As the variety of saws depicted serves as a
reminder that despite the precision of the optical procedure
quoted, much of the surgeon’s work was very brutal, especially
without pain relief or efficient means to stop bleeding. The
combination of skills as both medical scholar and hands-on
surgeon was thus rare, and al-Zahrawi is indeed aware and proud
of that.

Patient has to be seated directly in front of the sunshine, while

his normal eye is completely covered … Then put the needle to
the border of iris adjacent to the corneoschleral limit. Now push
and twist the needle until getting inside the eyeball then you feel
that it is gone into an empty space. You will see the needle in
the centre of the pupil because of corneal transparency. Now
hold the needle where cataractous lens has been formed and
push the needle down a few times. If all parts of the lens are
discharged, patient can see while the needle is still in his eye. If
not, push down the needle once more, then bring back the
 needle to its original place in the anterior chamber and then turn
the needle gently and pull it out. Now dissolve Turkish salt in
water and wash the eye then put a clean cotton pad coated with
white egg, rose water and oil on the eye and cover both eyes
with the pad.
Quoted from A. Zargara and A. Mehdizadeh, “Cataract
Surgery in Albucasis Manuscript” (2012) 24(1) Iranian Journal
of Ophthalmology 75

How many patients were willing to risk such a delicate operation?

How many surgeons dared to perform it? Did they gain their
knowledge from such manuals or only by apprenticeship? Questions
like this are very hard to answer, but for the cathedral of science this
quote adds an important course (layer of masonry). It is a concept of
the body quite different from the one we found in the Hippocratic-
Galenic tradition. It is a body with clear, independently operating
physical parts and with strict boundaries which can only be
penetrated by violence. This alternative concept would be an
essential resource for Harvey and the anatomical tradition he
embraced in Padua, as well as for new ideas about health and
disease, and we’ll return to it shortly.

Midwives
Of all who nursed and healed the human body, midwives deserve
special consideration. First, because in childbirth, they tended to a
healthy bodily process, if often difficult and dangerous. This meant
that they had physiological and functional knowledge of the body
shared by neither learned physicians nor other healers – who
attended to the body mostly in distress. Secondly, because midwifery
was the one discipline – not just of medicine but of knowledge in
general – dominated by women. As noted, women were relatively
welcomed in medicine, but men wrote almost all the books (Trota
and Hildegard are the exceptions that highlight the rule), including
books on women’s medicine. There were men-midwives, but when
men tried to gain control over the lucrative practice of midwifery,
women successfully defended their relative independence.
It was a partial independence. The medical guilds were closed
to women just as the university was, and midwives don’t seem to
have established one of their own. Moreover, being a mysterious,
feminine process, childbirth was an object of nervous attention by
city, court and especially the Church. This was because the child, not
yet baptized, was particularly susceptible to witchcraft (Sleeping
Beauty documents this fear well). So as the fascination with and
anxiety about witchcraft mounted in the late Middle Ages and
through the Renaissance, the authorities appropriated the licensing
and supervison of midwives.
But these restrictions also had a liberating effect on midwives:
they gave them a clear sense of professional identity and integrity,
as well as the legal means to protect them. The self-confidence that
this identity bred is nicely captured by Jane Sharp’s dedication of her
1671 The Midwives Book “to the midwives of England”:

Sisters.
 I Have often sate down sad in the Consideration of the many
Miseries Women endure in the Hands of unskilful Midwives;
many professing the Art (without any skill in Anatomy, which is
the Principal part effectually necessary for a Midwife) meerly for
Lucres sake. I have been at Great Cost in Translations for all
Books, either French, Dutch, or Italian of this kind. All which I
offer with my own Experience. Humbly begging the assistance
of Almighty God to aid you in this Great Work, and am
Your Affectionate Friend Jane Sharp.
Sharp, The Midwives Book, Forward

All that is known about Jane Sharp is what she tells her readers: that
she’s had thirty years of experience as a midwife. But we can
conclude, obviously, that she could read and write (in a free and
sure-handed style), and less obviously, that she indeed possessed
and made competent use of the library she brags about: she refers
to and quotes with great accuracy all the important (male)
authorities, both ancient and contemporary (many of these probably
came via the translations and compendia of Nicholas Culpeper from
the 1650s and 1660s). For Sharp, “[t]he Art of Midwifry is doubtless
one of the most useful and necessary of all Arts, for the being and
well-being of Mankind,” and

As for [midwives’] knowledge it must be two-fold, Speculative;

and Practical, she that wants the knowledge of Speculation, is
like to one that is blind or wants her sight: she that wants the
Practice, is like one that is lame and wants her legs.
Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 1
So Sharp establishes her own authority by demonstrating her deep
acquaintance with the writings of the “speculative” – learned –
physicians, and fearlessly debating them when they do not agree
with her “practical” expertise. “Anatomists have narrowly [hardly]
enquired into this secret Cabinet of nature” – the womb – she
laments, so those “best Learned men,” from Hippocrates through
Galen to Colombo, cannot agree on even the most fundamental
facts, like “how many Cells are in the womb.” So, she declares – and
indeed follows suit – “Let their ignorance or disputes be what they
will to no purpose, I shall satisfie all by true experience, which cannot
be contradicted”: that is, her “own experience.”
 The New Medicine and the New Body
Medical practitioners’ trust in their skills and knowledge, which Sharp
powerfully expresses, resonated among learned physicians. This
was a development with deep cultural roots: since the rise of
Humanism (Chapter 5) and through the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the demand that all knowledge be based on “true
experience” was becoming increasingly common. It also had crucial
significance for the shape which the cathedral of science would
assume (we will return to this idea in Chapter 9), and in medicine,
with its essential practical bent, this demand found strong adherents
even earlier than in other branches of the budding New Science.
Humanists from the Italian Petrarch (1304–1374) to the Dutch
Erasmus (1466–1536) – both intellectual leaders of their respective
centuries – expressed their resentment towards the medieval
intellectual traditions with deep suspicion towards learned medicine.
Sharp was therefore already acquainted with learned physicians
turning to her midwife “sisters,” as well as to “tramps, butchers and
barbers,” for their practical experience, importing with it, perhaps
unwittingly, their concepts of the body and of disease.
 Paracelsus and the Alchemical Body
Priding himself for learning from “tramps, butchers and barbers” was
the most celebrated of these physicians: Philippus Aureolus
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493/4–1541), who
brazenly called himself Paracelsus, that is – “beyond Celsus” (the
classical medical encyclopedist mentioned above). A son of a Swiss
physician with some suspect claims to noble descent, Paracelsus
attended the medical faculties of Basel and Ferrara, apparently
graduating neither. Very unimpressed, according to his own account,
with what was taught there, in 1517 he opted instead to enlist as a
military surgeon in the Venetian army. In that capacity, he traveled for
the next seven years through much of Europe and as far as
Constantinople, gathering practitioners’ and artisans’ knowledge, as
well as a reputation for his own skills. His attempts at an urban
medical practice were frustrated by the German peasants’ revolt (he
barely escaped the gallows), but in the mobile Renaissance society
this reputation for practical medical skill proved efficacious. In 1526,
apparently vouched for by Erasmus himself, it gained him a position
as town physician and professor of medicine in his alma mater
Basel, where he made a point to lecture in German and in an
alchemist’s leather apron. Add to this image the spectacle he
performed by publicly burning editions of Ibn Sina and Galen
(imitating, as in his insistence on the vernacular, another
contemporary revolutionary – Martin Luther) and it’s easy to
understand why his tenure lasted all of two years. He returned to the
life of an itinerant medic, wandering through German-speaking
middle Europe, intermittently gaining popularity and losing his
license. Throughout these journeys he wrote incessantly – mostly in
German – on subjects ranging from the treatment of syphilis, through
surgery and alchemy to Hermetic philosophy, allegedly dictating his
teachings while drunk to ensure their authenticity (at the price of their
coherence). He ended his tumultuous life in Salzburg, aged 48.
The colorful details of Paracelsus’ personality and biography
may be slightly embellished, but they testify to the complexity of the
task he took upon himself and the unconventional intellectual tools
he employed. “When I saw that nothing resulted from [doctors’]
practice but killing and laming, I determined to abandon such a
miserable art and seek truth elsewhere,” he declared. That meant a
new theory of the body, and to frame it – a new account of the world
in which the body dwells. The “elsewhere” in which he sought truth
turned out to be the hermetic tradition (Chapter 6) and magical
practices.
The healthy body of the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition was a
temple: a tranquil and permeable whole, seeking balance within itself
and with the cosmos. Paracelsus’, in comparison, was a bustling site
of activity: an alchemical workshop. Powerful transformations were
taking place inside it: digestion, respiration and generation
comprised fermentation and distillation, calcination and sublimation.
In this respect (though not in others, as we’ll immediately see), the
body’s boundaries were clear and physical: materials, coming from
the outside, were transmuted into life processes on the inside. Its
inner organs were clearly separated – like the instruments of the
alchemist – and each was controlled by its own archeus; a kind of
life spirit or governing principle. This ‘internal alchemist,’ as
Paracelsus sometimes referred to it, was responsible for the proper
operations of the healthy organ as well as for the malfunction of the
diseased one. Disease, for the traditional learned physician, was
imbalance; for Paracelsus, it was a foreign invasion: an external, evil
agent, corrupting the archeus.
For us, used to chemical biology, to microbes and viruses,
Paracelsus’ ideas may sound familiar: the body is an enclosed
system of processes; disease is the effect of an independent entity,
existing outside the body, subverting its operations when infiltrating
inside it. But as we stressed on similar occasions, historical ideas
appear ‘modern’ because we ended up adopting them, not because
the people elaborating them were anticipating us. Paracelsus’ case
is particularly interesting in this regard, because he drew his
resources from magic – both practical and learned – so his influential
medical writing is one of the most important conduits of this kind of
thought into modern science.
According to Paracelsus, disease is the effect of an
autonomous, specific entity, invading from outside and disrupting a
specific part of the body. But here the ‘modern,’ physical resonance
of his analysis gives way to the Hermetic resources he draws on. In
Paracelsus’ world, growing things – which for him, the committed
alchemist, meant also minerals and metals – receive their life from
spirits emanating from the stars. In their role as mediators between
matter and spirit, these astral emanations have direct influence on
the archei, which fulfill a similar role within the body. And with this
mediation these spirits also carry the marks of human debasement –
the original sin and the fall – so occasionally they project this
corruption onto the operation of an archeus, turning, for example,
fermentation into putrefaction. The effects of such corruption are
disease.
Alchemy provided Paracelsus with a model for the internal
operations of the body and resources for a concept of disease, and it
also provided a concept of healing and medication. In traditional
medicine, balance could be restored by negating the cause of the
imbalance: cholera, for example (as its name suggests), was caused
by an excess of yellow bile, which relates to fire, so it needed to be
treated by cooling and moisturizing. According to Paracelsus, on the
contrary, like healed like: a kidney stone was cured by stones, such
as crab’s claw or lapis lazuli, and arsenic cured arsenic poisoning.
This was because symptoms signaled which archeus was suffering
corruption – the archeus of the organ in which the disease resided.
That archeus required support from the parts of the macrocosm to
which it related by affinity and representation. It also explained why
every substance could be both poison and medicine, depending on
the dose and the disease.
The Paracelsian physician, therefore, was a careful observer of
those aspects of nature that interested the magician. He had a keen
eye for hidden signs, by which things signaled their relations to other
things and their capacity to influence them, because “there is nothing
that nature hasn’t marked, and through these marks one can
discover what is hidden in the marked.”2 Orchids looked like
genitalia, walnuts like the brain. These similarities between parts of
the macrocosm and parts of the microcosm – the body – couldn’t be
accidental; they signaled affinities, and these affinities were relevant
for treatment. The Paracelsian physician was also an alchemist,
because “[n]othing has been created as ultima materia – in its final
state” (“Alchemy, Art of Transformation,” in Oster, Science in Europe,
p. 100). Alchemy was the art of perfecting; of elevating materials
from the state of prima materia in which God had left them to “the
nobler pure, and perfect” (ibid.) state in which they could be used
medically. Just as the farmer grows fruits out of seeds, the alchemist
transmuted base metals into silver and gold, and simple minerals
and herbs into medicines.
Paracelsus found in alchemy even more: a new understanding
of the cosmos as a whole. The Aristotelian cosmos, the basis for
Galenic medicine, had four elements configured in harmonious
symmetries. In their stead, Paracelsus installed the Tria Prima – the
three active principles of the magician: Salt – the unburnable;
Sulphur – the combustible; and Mercury – the metallic and volatile.
Like the inside of the body, nature, according to Paracelsus, was a
site of incessant, intense change. It didn’t strive to harmony but to
constant separation: it began when God separated light from
darkness, continued with the separation of the three principles, from
which separated the elements and so forth, to the separation of
every animal from its mother. The alchemists, we saw in Chapter 6,
harnessed different processes of separation – distillation, digestion,
fermentation – in their quest to gain control over the transmutation of
metals. But this is where Paracelsus’ fascination with their theories
and practices came to an end: for him alchemy was in the service of
medicine.
 Iatrochemistry
It’s difficult to fully gauge the legacy of Paracelsus. The term
‘Paracelsian’ became quite common in the century following his
death, but it’s not likely that many of the physicians adopting it could
carefully follow his difficult and less than consistent philosophy. For
them, it primarily connoted the release from the shackles of
traditional learned medicine and its institutions and the demand for
practical and efficient treatment. Within the traditional institutions of
learning, the title ‘Paracelsian’ was used mostly pejoratively, to
connote the charlatanism of magic. Those who were more genuinely
curious came to know Paracelsus’ work mostly second-hand, and
mostly through summaries like that offered by Peter Severinus
(Peder Sørensen, 1540/2–1602) in his Idea medicinae philosophicae
(The Idea of Philosophical Medicine, 1571). Severinus was an
emblematic learned physician – a professor at the University of
Copenhagen and a physician to the Danish court – and in renditions
like his, Paracelsus was domesticated: the Hermeticism (Chapter 6)
was put in a Platonic framework; the medical philosophy was
reconciled with Hippocratic medicine; and the role of alchemy was
reduced to the production of useful drugs.
Ironically, given Paracelsus’ volatile personality, drunken visions
and furious rants,3 it is this practical aspect of his teachings that
seems to have survived best, under the title Iatrochemistry. Mostly
rejected in the universities, which remained loyal to the Aristotelian
framework and the Galenic medicine within it, the search for new
chemical remedies found a home in the courts of monarchs and
nobility, where the promise of effective treatment outweighed worries
about academic substance. Learned physicians could accept the
idea of distilling essences from medicinal herbs and minerals – this
was an ancient practice – but were apprehensive of its magical
connotations, which were intellectually suspect and legally
dangerous. The required compromise was provided by
pharmacopeia books, like Alchemia (1597) and Alchymia triumphans
(1607) by Andreas Libavius (Libau, c. 1540–1616) – an impressive
intellectual who taught history and poetry at the University of Jena
and oversaw medical disputations there. His approach exemplifies
not only the state of European medicine around the turn of the
seventeenth century, but the combination of excitement and
trepidation by which scholars welcomed the New Science in general.
Libavius was happy to teach his readers alchemical practices
and dictate recipes for transmutations of metals as much as for
distillations medicines, but he was careful to warn against all
superstitions and call for a proper chymia, free of mysticism and
secrets. A generation later, the German professor Daniel Sennert
(1572–l637) went even further in this attempt to reconcile
Paracelsianism with traditional, mainstream academic medicine. He
introduced iatrochemistry to the medical curriculum at the University
of Wittenberg, and in his writings, which remained influential through
the eighteenth century, tried to give it an atomistic grounding (with
the aim to give credence to both). Yet the magical ancestry of these
ideas wasn’t easy to ignore: the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis that the
Royal College of Physicians published in 1618 (already with Harvey
at the helm) still included remedies made from dried viper, foxes’
lungs, live frogs, wolf oil and crabs’ eyes.
 Van Helmont and the Invading Disease
The most important advocate of iatrochemistry, Jan Baptist van
Helmont (1579–1644), demonstrates its complex relation to magical
thought: he found himself in trouble not for defending magic, but for
attempting to naturalize it, hoping to make use of magical practices
without the danger of their associated beliefs. The worst came in
1621, when he volunteered his views about the possible efficacy of
the weapon salve: an ointment that could heal wounds when applied
to the instrument that caused the wound. This is possible, argued
van Helmont, but not because of some occult affinity between the
weapon and the wound. Rather, it was a magnetic attraction
between the blood in the wound and that remaining on the weapon
that did the healing. The censures at Louvain University in the
Spanish Netherlands found this idea (and similar attempts to
naturalize miracles) very dangerous, because they blurred the all-
important distinction between divine, natural and demonic magic
(see Chapter 6 for a discussion of the role of this distinction), and he
was put under house arrest.
Van Helmont resented being regarded as a Paracelsian, but it’s
easy to see why both his biography and his medical philosophy
made both historians and contemporaries see him in that light. The
son of a Brussels council member, van Helmont studied medicine in
Louvain, struggling, like Paracelsus, with boredom and frustration.
Unlike the Swiss, he did return from periods of travel to complete his
MD in 1599, and, confined for many years by these house arrests,
had little opportunity to gather knowledge from far and wide, and
thus concentrated instead on experimenting from within his secluded
household. Van Helmont survived, but was only released from
confinement two years before his death, so almost all his writings
were published posthumously, mostly by his son Franciscus
Mercurius.
In the next two chapters we’ll explore how the New Science
fashioned itself in the seventeenth century: as an experimental,
instrumental, mathematical, worldly and state-sponsored venture.
Together with Paracelsus, van Helmont represents an alternative
route that was available in the rebellion against Aristotelianism: a
medicine-based natural philosophy (not to be confused with science-
based branches of medicine, like biochemistry) whose later versions
came to be known as ‘vitalism.' This natural philosophy was as
fiercely empirical and as committed to knowledge relevant to the
human condition in this world as the mathematized natural
philosophy that came to define the New Science. But unlike the
mathematical objects and forces with which Kepler, Galileo and their
disciples populated the universe, Paracelsus and van Helmont found
a cosmos of living forces. And accordingly, whereas the physicalist
tradition adopted mechanics as the fundamental science, the vitalists
found it in chemistry.
For van Helmont, the vitality of the cosmos was such a strong
assumption that it made Paracelsus’ analogy between macrocosm
and microcosm superfluous, and he rejected it as empty words, just
as he rejected Aristotelian elements and qualities and Galenic
humors. He did admit the three active Paracelsian principles – Salt,
Mercury, Sulphur – but not as elementary; they arose in chemical
operations. Water and air were the only true elements, and all
nutrition was water, as van Helmont demonstrated experimentally
and quantitatively: a willow gained in weight, over five years, almost
exactly the overall weight of the water it was given in this time, hence
it fed only on that water. Everything, whether mineral, vegetable or
animal, evolved from seminal seeds, directed by their own archeus,
and so did disease. Each disease was caused by a particular entity –
ens – existing independently from the body, invading it from the
outside and planting its seed within, confounding the archeus and
diverting it to act at its service rather than the body’s.
Just as with Paracelsus, most of the physicians who called
themselves ‘Helmontians’ didn’t seem to appreciate or even
understand the complexities of his natural philosophy. But by the
second half of the seventeenth century, especially in England, where
Franciscus Mercurius settled, a significant number of well-known
physicians were proud to identify themselves as van Helmont’s
disciples. As with the Paracelsians, this mostly meant a rebellion
against traditional learned medicine and its powerful institution – the
Royal College of Physicians. But it also meant a devout – ‘Christian’
– commitment to the welfare of patients, and a claim to expertise in
the treatment of contagious diseases.
Iatrochemistry, with its concept of disease as an independent
entity, was much better equipped than traditional learned medicine to
explain contagion. Whereas the Galenists needed to ascribe the
spread of disease in a particular place to the corruption of water and
air, the Helmontians could make sense both of the peculiarity of the
disease and how it traveled from one patient to another. Such an
account was provided by Paracelsus’ contemporary Girolamo
Fracastoro (c. 1476/8–1553) in his 1530 treatise on syphilis (a term
he coined): Syphilis, sive morbi gallici (Syphilis or the French
Disease). Fracastoro seems to be the first iatrochemist to employ the
concept of a seed of a disease, which he further developed in his
1546 De contagione et contagiosis morbis (On Contagion and the
Contagious Disease) and that van Helmont would adopt and adapt.
Van Helmont’s version of the concept was quite esoteric, involving
the imagination as an agent of transmission of both disease and
cure, but it gained him and his disciples a reputation as the most
proficient in treating epidemics.
In 1665, the devotion and the expertise came to a test together.
The Bubonic Plague broke in London in the winter, lasting for a year,
killing some 200,000 of its inhabitants and driving anyone who had
the means to leave out of the city. Most well-established Royal
College physicians were among those who left, but the leading
Helmontians stayed, among them George Thomson (c. 1619–1676),
who had this to say about their behavior:

… although I could enjoy my ease, pleasure, and profit in the

Country, as well as any Galenist; yet I would rather chuse to
loose my life, then violate in this time of extreme necessity, the
band of Charity towards my neighbour, and dedecorate that
illustrious profession I am called to, in hopes to save myself …
according to that infamous, and insidious advice which Galen
hath given his Disciples.
 Cited in Wallis, “Plagues, Morality and the Place of Medicine,”
p. 16

This “Charity” cost many Helmontian physicians their lives, most

famous among them George Starkey (see Chapter 6), the great
alchemist of American descent. But it was also curiosity that lured
them into staying in afflicted London. They had an elaborate theory
of the plague that Thomson summarized thus:

I pass to the Essence and Quiddity of the Pest; which is

contagious, for the most part very acute, arising from a certain
peculiar venomous Gas, or subtile Poyson, generated within, or
entering into us from without: At the access, or bare
apprehension of which, the Archeus is put into Terror, and
forthwith submitting to the aforesaid Poyson, invests it with part
of its own substance, delineating therein the perfect Idea of
Image of this special kind of Sickness distinct from any other.

Cited in Miller, The Literary Cultures of Plague, p. 63

Unwilling to pass up the opportunity to examine it with their own

eyes, they risked their lives performing autopsies of victims.
Thomson himself survived dissecting a just-deceased servant of one
of his patients, but others weren’t so fortunate. In fairness, although
some College physicians treated the Helmontians’ deaths with more
glee than compassion, others found their own in a similarly heroic
style. The famous Samuel Pepys (1622–1703), from whose diary we
learn much about the daily goings-on in this crucial time and place
for the rise of early modern science, laments, on Friday, August 25,
1665, the death of his personal physician, Alexander Burnett.
Burnett, a Royal College fellow, was one of an eclectic group of
some ten men, comprising Fellows, surgeons and apothecaries, who

… in a consultation together, if not all, yet the greatest part of

them, attempted to open a dead corpse that was full of the
tokens, and being in hand with the dissected body, some fell
down immediately, and others did not outlive the next day at
noon.
Cited by Munk,
http://munksroll.rcplondon.ac.uk/Biography/Details/665

Among the victims was William Johnson, a chemist of the College

and a moderate Helmontian – the lines between the camps were
sometimes blurred, and were definitely not respected by the plague.
 The Rise of Anatomy
The Paracelsians and Helmontians were challenging learned
medicine ethically and politically; they even purported to establish
their own “Noble Society for the Advancement of Hermetick Physick”
to compete with the Royal College of Physicians. And they were
challenging its fundamental principles and practices with ideas
developed from that “Hermetick” tradition. In these ideas lay a new
concept of the human body, with much clearer internal and external
boundaries: disease came from without and affected each organ
separately and differently. The body’s boundaries were to be
respected, and van Helmont had a particularly dim view of the
traditional practice of trespassing them through bloodletting: “a
bloody Moloch presides in the chairs of medicine,” he decried.
At the same time, a similar challenge to the permeable,
balanced body of traditional – Galenic – medicine was coming from
the heart of the establishment: from the medical faculties at the
universities, where interest and proficiency in anatomy was growing
at a fast pace.
 Early Questions and Limits
Physicians have always been interested in anatomy. Barbers needed
to know how to locate blood vessels to open for bleeding or to avoid
damaging while cleaning wounds; surgeons needed to know their
way within and around organs while removing a cataract or opening
a fistula; and learned physicians were naturally curious about their
subject matter – the human body. Yet there were clear limits to the
usefulness and availability of anatomic knowledge. Practical
physicians, much like the modern GP, could reach and treat only
organs close to the body’s surface. For the learned physicians, the
humoral concept of the body provided little motivation and guidance
concerning the various internal organs: the body operated as a
balanced whole, so studying each organ on its own was fascinating
but potentially misleading. The inside of the body could only be
observed when it was no longer alive, and even that was rare and
difficult: the dignity of the human body was carefully observed by
both pagan and monotheistic cultures, although for different reasons.
Curious anatomists didn’t always perceive the inability to peer
into the human body as a great hindrance: what distinguished
humans from animals was their soul; their bodies seemed
analogous. Galen, for example, learned much about human anatomy
by dissecting sheep, goats, pigs and apes. Yet this analogy between
humans and animals caused confusions, which could not be rectified
without comparison with human bodies. Galen, for example,
assigned much importance to the rete mirabile; a network of nerves
and blood vessels found at the base of many species’ brains. Its
position and complexity suggested to him that it was the place where
the vital spirits emanating from the heart turned into the animal
spirits distributed by the brain. When dissections of the human body
became common, however, it turned out this structure wasn’t to be
found.
These uncertainties disturbed anatomists, and debates about
structures and functions within the body had raged since Antiquity:
whether sensation occurred in the brain or the heart; how many
lobes the liver had; how many compartments to the womb; and so
forth. Some of these questions were practically important: when
bleeding, for example, it was useful to know whether the arteries
contained physical air, pneuma or blood. But physicians healed
individual patients, and mostly, individual bodies were different
enough from each other that physicians needed to literally feel their
way around each. All they could gain from anatomical theory was the
general knowledge of relative positions, like the knowledge
represented in the diagrams in Figure 8.7. Images like these are not
failed attempts at a realistic depiction of the body. Rather, they are
maps – mnemonic and educational devices – and in this role their
schematic appearance is a benefit. They represent the anatomical
knowledge required of the physician without the burden of
unnecessary visual details.
Figure 8.7 Two diagrams of skeletons from Johann Ludwig
Choulant’s 1852 History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration.
The image on the left is from the fourteenth-century Latin Munich
Manuscript Codex; the one on the right is the first printed image of
the skeleton, from Schedel’s 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle (see
Figure 1.12). Neither is attempting a realistic depiction, and the
later one, despite the details allowed by print, demonstrates this
point even more strongly. Rather than a model, the drawing
explicitly follows the theory of Richard Helain – the dean of the
Faculty of Medicine in Paris at the time – about the bones, their
total number (which he set at 248) and their configuration, assisted
by the name tags, and prints from this woodcut were apparently
used as teaching devices.
Figure 8.8 Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the cardiovascular
system and principal organs of a woman from c. 1509–10, now in
the Royal Collection in Windsor. Although this marvelous image is
much more realistic than those in Figure 8.7, it isn’t only a drawing
but an anatomical study: it doesn’t present the cadaver in front of
Leonardo – no open abdomen, etc. – but a recreated living body. It
reflects careful attention to structural details like spatial relations
between organs, and requires more than one ‘sitting,’ so even as a
drawing it would have to have been a composite of different
cadavers or different states of the same one. But in fact, much of
the knowledge conveyed in this image comes from traditional
accounts of the body that later observations discarded, like the
understanding of the structure of the liver that appears also in
Figure 8.9 and the spherical shape of the uterus. Moreover, the
only documented autopsy conducted by Leonardo (in the winter of
1507–1508) was of an old man and, indeed, the external organs in
this drawing – the arms, shoulders and pectorals – are masculine.
 Humanists and Artists
In the grand cathedral of science, realistic, detailed human anatomy
and physiology came to define the import of learned medicine. But
for the reasons we just discussed, the new interest in anatomy didn’t
originate with institutional medicine. Tellingly, it didn’t originate with
the disciples of Paracelsus and van Helmont either, both of whom
didn’t think much of “dead anatomy,” as Paracelsus called it. For
them, we saw, the living body wasn’t an assemblage of static
structures, but a site of active processes and constant change.
The new curiosity about human entrails arose from two sources
that did not share an admiration of novelty but a rhetorical nostalgic
tone: an admiration for the great achievements of the Hellenistic
glorious past. The first source was what has been called ‘medical
humanism’: the search for and translation of classical medical texts
around the turn of the sixteenth century. It culminated in the
discovery and translation of the first part of Galen’s On Anatomical
Procedures, which aroused so much admiration it made humanists
replace contemporary procedures of dissecting human cadavers with
Galen’s allegedly more rational ones. The practice of starting
dissection from the internal organs, for example, because they were
most vulnerable to putrefaction, gave way to Galen’s order of
dissection, which followed the structural order of the body: starting
from the bones, moving to the muscles, nerves, blood vessels and
only then the abdominal organs.
 If humanists were drawn to anatomy because of Hellenistic
texts, artists became infatuated with it because of Hellenistic art. The
new attention to the spectacular exemplars of Greek and Roman art
in Rome, Pompeii and elsewhere in Italy convinced fifteenth-century
artists that emulating such marvels of corporeal harmony required a
thorough knowledge of the human body, inside and out; the body’s
internal structures had to be meticulously studied in order to
understand its external appearance. The most famous outcome of
these studies is Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) anatomical
illustrations, which he worked on from the late 1480s with the
unfulfilled intention of producing a comprehensive anatomical atlas
(Figure 8.8); but he wasn’t alone. Leonardo’s younger
contemporaries Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Michelangelo
(1475–1564) were as proficient in human anatomy, and Leonardo’s
teacher Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488) had all his students
study flayed cadavers. Paradoxically, the new admiration for the
human (mostly male) body came with a relaxation of the anxiety
about its posthumous dignity: in 1482, Pope Sixtus IV formalized this
by informing the University of Tübingen that, provided a body comes
from an executed criminal and its remains are given a Christian
burial, there was no objection to dissecting it.
Indeed, even if the original urge came from outside, with
aesthetic rather than medical motivations, it was in universities like
Tübingen where the new curiosity about human anatomy turned into
an innovative project. Leonardo’s drawings, for example, as detailed
and realistic as they are, remain completely loyal to Galen’s
descriptions of the internal organs (they also remained unpublished
until the nineteenth century, so couldn’t inform his contemporaries
and immediate successors). The medical faculties were primed to
take the challenge: from the middle of the thirteenth century, they
needed to prepare their graduates to carry out public autopsies for
forensic purposes, and around 1315, Mondino de’ Luzzi (c. 1270–
1326), who held the chair of medicine in Bologna, turned this into
part of the curriculum there. Mondino used his empirical studies to
compose the Anatomia mundini, which served as the fundamental
textbook on dissection until the sixteenth century, first as a
manuscript and from 1478 in print – in some forty editions.
Figure 8.9 Vesalius’ anatomical spectacle. On the left: the
frontispiece of his 1543 De humani corporis fabrica. “The
frontispiece of the Fabrica,” wrote Roy Porter (The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind, p. 181), “presents the dreams, the
programme, the agenda, of the new medicine. The cadaver is the
central figure. Its abdomen has been opened so that everyone can
peer in; it is as if death itself had been put on display. A faceless
skeleton [above the cadaver] points towards the open abdomen.
Then there is Vesalius, who looks out as if extending an invitation
to anatomy. Medicine would thenceforth be about looking inside
bodies for the truth of disease. The violation of the body would be
the revelation of its truth.” On the right: his Tabulae Anatomicae
from 1538. Much less famous than the later images from the
Fabrica, these sketches are in a sense more telling. They are
drawn in Vesalius’ own hand, and demonstrate the original
commitment to Galenism that he was gradually shedding with the
development of his project of autopsy: the liver (on the left) is
depicted as the origin of the blood vessels and has five lobes.
 Back to the University: Vesalius and the Padua School
As the interest in human anatomy spread over the next century,
other universities adopted the spectacle of public dissection (Figure
8.9) as a combination of pedagogical and promotional means. Its
most important center after Bologna became Padua, where Harvey
was educated.
The tradition developed there, already famous by the time of
Harvey’s arrival, is most associated with the name of the Belgian
anatomist Andreas Vesalius (Andreas van Wesele, 1514–1564), yet,
like his contemporary Copernicus, Vesalius wasn’t self-consciously a
revolutionary. His early medical education was in Paris, under the
tutelage of the medical humanist Jacobus Sylvius (Jacques Dubois,
1478–1555), whose trust in Galen was such that he insisted that any
dissected corpse exhibiting a deviation from the master’s teaching
must be a negligible exception. When religious hostilities drove
Vesalius back to Louvain, he was taught dissection by Guinther von
Andernach (1487–1574), a translator of Galen’s On Anatomical
Procedures into Latin. In later years, Sylvius and Vesalius developed
disparaging views of each other, but when the latter arrived in Padua
in 1537 to complete his MD, he was committed to re-establishing
Galen’s authority. Upon completion, Vesalius was immediately
offered Padua’s professorship of surgery and anatomy, and took to
the task (Figures 8.9 and 8.10).
Yet Vesalius’ loyalty to Galen’s empiricism turned out to be
deeper than to the Alexandrian’s anatomy. He continued to take
Galen’s teaching as the default, but whenever his autopsies (literally
meaning: ‘see for oneself’) suggested that the great master was
wrong, apparently led astray by his non-human subjects of
dissection, Vesalius took it as his duty to correct him. In Vesalius’
hands, empirical, detailed accuracy became the core of anatomy,
and a new tradition was created, in which every generation proudly
corrected the errors of its predecessors. Realdo Colombo (Realdus
Columbus, c. 1515–1559), for example, who studied under Vesalius
and taught some of his teacher’s classes in the 1540s, turned
Vesalius’ anti-Galenic argument against him. In his own De re
anatomica (published posthumously in 1559), Colombo
demonstrated that many of Vesalius’ own anatomical claims were
based on dissecting animals rather than humans. Credit was
fervently sought, and expertise became necessary: Colombo himself
concentrated on the heart and the sexual organs, and demanded
recognition for the identification of the pulmonary cycle and the
clitoris.
The new anatomy was an exemplary instantiation of the New
Science, but it never forsook its roots in painters’ studies. On the one
hand, teaching in art academies would become a common
employment for leading anatomists – Colombo himself was a close
collaborator with Michelangelo. On the other, Vesalius gave a new
meaning to the ‘see for yourself’ dictum by instituting visual
presentation as a fundamental part of the discipline. His relatively
modest and conservative Six Anatomical Tables (Figure 8.10) was
followed in 1543 by De humani corporis fabrica (On the Structure of
the Human Body, Figure 8.9), containing more than 250 illustrations,
in the talented hand of Jan Stephan van Calcar. It corrected some of
Galen’s errors – like getting rid of the five-lobed liver and the rete
mirabile – but its seven books were very much arranged according to
Galen’s logic: from the bones, through the muscles and tendons,
then the blood vessels, nerves, organs and generation, the heart;
and, finally, the brain. Published in the same year as Copernicus’ De
revolutionibus – 1543 – De fabrica is as emblematic of the new age
of science.
 Conclusion: Tradition, Innovation and the
New Body
While Vesalius’ images were taking the anatomy spectacle outside
the university walls for display, his disciples were carefully
marshalling it within them. Restoring seriousness to public dissection
was important: the frontispiece of Colombo’s De re anatomica is
much less extroverted than that of De fabrica – Colombo is
dissecting there amid only a small group of somber men in academic
gowns – and Rembrandt’s 1632 The Anatomy Lesson of Dr.
Nicolaes Tulp is even more somber. More important yet was the
establishment of a physical place and a standardized procedure for
the anatomical dissection. This was provided in 1599 by Hieronymus
Fabricius (Girolamo Fabrizio, 1537–1619), who designed the
anatomical theater – still to be viewed in Palazzo Bo of the University
of Padua (Figure 8.10) and a model for all such theaters around
Europe. William Harvey arrived in Padua at the very year of its
completion, and although the education he received there still had
much of Galen and Ibn Sina, the anatomical theater embedded the
new practices he was taught and the new concept of the body
emerging from them: a body of clear structures and processes;
separated from the world materially and connected to it causally; to
be studied by a violent infringement of its boundaries. Harvey’s heart
and circulating blood were prime representatives of this body.
Figure 8.10 The anatomical theater in Palazzo Bo of the
University of Padua, designed by Fabricius, constructed in 1599
and still in place, although the wooden structure is now considered
too fragile to allow standing on. The standing-benches are steep
and narrow, so the viewers are shoulder to shoulder. The cadaver
would be prepared on a stretcher in the lower level that can be
seen through the opening at the bottom. The stretcher would be
raised to the floor where it would be dissected.
 Discussion Questions
1. What is the significance of the relations between medicine and
magic? What does it say about our interest in and our understanding
of our body?

2. How different is the holistic conception of the body at the basis of

pre-modern medicine from the one we are familiar with? Was
rejecting this conception a necessary price for the advantages of
modern medicine? Was it a reasonable price?

3. The advent of early modern and then modern medicine was

predicated on inflicting a great amount of pain on other animals. Is
this an important fact? Does it have bearing on the knowledge
gained?

4. Pre-modern physicians and their patients described their pains

and maladies in very different terms than we would, referring to very
different symptoms and causes. Is it reasonable or useful to say that
they actually sensed their bodies differently?

5. Does the role of art in the development of medical anatomy give

modern medicine an aesthetic dimension?
Suggested Readings
 Primary Texts

Galen, On the Natural Faculties, Arthur John Brock (trans.), The

Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heineman, 1652), pp. 3–17.

Galen, Galen on Anatomical Procedures, Charles Joseph Singer

(trans.) (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 1–9.

Bald and Child, “Leechbook” in Oswald Cockayne (ed.), Leechdoms,

Wortcunning, Starcraft (London: Longman, Green Reader & Dyer,
1865), Vol. II, pp. 3–17, 27–31, 57–59, 323–335.

Paracelsus, “Alchemy, Art of Transformation” in Malcolm Oster (ed.),

Science in Europe, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2002), pp. 99–107.

Sharp, Jane, The Midwives Book, or the Whole Art of Midwifry

Discovered (London: Simon Miller, 1671), frontispiece and pp. 153–
162.
 Secondary Sources

General history of medicine:

Porter, Roy, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of

Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Fontana Press,
1999).

Ancient medicine:

Kuriyama, Shigehisa, The Expressiveness of the Body and the

Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: ZONE
BOOKS, 1999).

Nutton, Vivian, Ancient Medicine (London: Routledge, 2004).

von Staden, Heinrich, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early

Alexandria (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Medieval medicine:

Siraisi, Nancy, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An

Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (University of Chicago
Press, 1990).

Other medicines:

Lo, Vivian (ed.), Medieval Chinese Medicine (Oxford: Routledge

Curzon, 2005).
Winterbottom, Anna and Facil Tesfaye (eds.), Histories of Medicine
and Healing in the Indian Ocean World, Vol. 1: The Medieval and
Early Modern Period (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

On the weapon salve and the relations between medicine

and magic in general:

Harline, Craig, Miracles as the Jesus Oak: Histories of the

Supernatural in Reformation Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2011).

Moran, Bruce T., Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry and the

Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005).

On the changes to medicine in the age of global commerce:

Cook, Harold John, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and

Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2007).

On the London plague and its significance:

Miller, Kathleen, The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern

England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Wallis, Patrick, “Plagues, Morality and the Place of Medicine in Early

Modern England” (2006) 121(490) English Historical Review 1–24.

1 Ptolemy was already an old man when Galen arrived in

Alexandria, but it’s still exciting to think of them chatting on the
stairs of the forum.
2“Nichts ist, was die Natur nicht gezeichnet habe, und durch die
Zeichen kann man erkennen, was im Gezeichneten verborgen ist.”
Paracelsus, Der Mystiker Paracelsus, Gerhard Wehr (ed.), Kindle
edn. (Wisbaden: Marixverlag, 2013).

3 One that sums up his attitude can be found in his “Credo”: “I do

not take my medicines from the apothecaries; their shops are but
foul sculleries, from which comes nothing but foul broths. As for
you, you defend your kingdom with belly-crawling and flattery. How
long do you think this will last? … let me tell you this: every little
hair on my neck knows more than you and all your scribes, and
my shoebuckles are more learned than your Galen and Avicenna,
and my beard has more experience than all your high colleges.”
Paracelsus, Selected Writing, Jolande Jacobi (ed.), Norbert
Guterman (trans.) (Princeton University Press, 1979 [1951]), p. 6.
 9
The New Science
◈
 Galileo’s Mechanical World
Leaving the protective confines of the university for the glamour of
the court ended up costing Galileo his freedom, but it wasn’t merely
a reckless career move. Galileo did have a powerful idea of himself
as a philosopher, making unreserved claims about the make-up of
nature – claims that his university rank as a mathematician didn’t
allow. Like Kepler, however, he didn’t intend to forsake mathematics
for philosophy. His project, rather, was to submit the philosophy of
nature to mathematics: to claim mathematical foundations for nature
and thus designate the mathematician as its most skilled and
authoritative interpreter. The mathematical disciplines Kepler
reshaped in his quest to fulfill this ambition, as we saw in Chapter 7,
were optics and astronomy. For Galileo, the aim was his own
discipline of expertise – mechanics.
 The Aristotelian Theory of Motion and Its Discontents
Mechanics was (and still is) the mathematical science of solid bodies
in motion. To turn it into the foundation of natural philosophy meant
turning these elements – bodies and motion – into the foundations of
nature. Moreover, it meant giving them – especially motion – a new
meaning: a meaning that would serve the tools and skills of the
mathematician rather than the analytical tools of the traditional,
Aristotelian natural philosopher. This was indeed an ambitious
undertaking. Motion, as we discussed above (especially in Chapter
2), was at the core of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature, and it had
a rich and precise meaning.
Nature was change – the acorn changed into an oak and the
child changed into an adult – and the epitome of change was change
of place; local motion (in fact, Aristotelians often used ‘motion’ as a
synonym for all motion, but for simplicity we’ll now reserve ‘notion’
for local motion). Every change required a cause – deciphering these
causes was the main task of the natural philosopher – and so did
local motion. The cause could be internal – not in a spatial sense,
but belonging to the moving body’s nature – in which case the
motion was natural. The heavy elements belonged at the center of
the cosmos, so bodies consisting primarily of them tended to move
down naturally, and vice versa for the light elements. Or the cause
could be external – a stone could be thrown up or air could be forced
down with a bellow – and then the motion was forced, or violent. A
body moving naturally carried its cause of motion with it, as it were –
the heaviness of the stone, which was the cause of its moving down,
was an inseparable property of the stone. So the naturally moving
body would only come to rest when it arrived at its natural place or
as close as possible to it; the stone would fall until reaching the
center of the earth or more likely – hitting the ground. Violent motion,
by contrast, would stop immediately when the force causing it
ceased to affect the body. Again: change – motion – could only
happen for a cause; once the cause ceased, so did the change;
once the moving force ceased, so did the motion.
Natural and violent motions were thus metaphysically opposites,
so they could not mix – a body moved either naturally or violently,
never both. Acceleration and deceleration were self-explanatory: a
heavy body falling would naturally get faster as it neared its proper
place and vice versa. The velocity of the fall depended on the body’s
weight: the heaviness was the cause of the motion and an effect is
proportional to the cause. Velocity was the measure of the effect.
Conversely, velocity was inversely proportional to resistance of the
medium in which it moved, hence motion only made sense in a
medium (details in Chapter 2).
Aristotelian theory of motion was as well entrenched as any in
the history of science, but Galileo didn’t need to take on this set of
concepts all alone. Neat as it was, it had some serious deficiencies
which were noted already in antiquity and deliberated upon in the
Middle Ages, and a number of these deliberations were particularly
relevant to Galileo’s project.
 Buridan and Impetus Theory
A particularly acute deficiency of the Aristotelian theory was that it
made little sense of the most familiar phenomenon of motion: the
flight of projectiles. In simple words: the fact that when we throw a
stone or shoot an arrow, it keeps on moving after it's left the hand or
the bow. According to the Aristotelian analysis, we saw, this
shouldn’t happen: a thrown stone or shot arrow are in violent motion,
so it needs a continuous external cause in order to continue moving.
But once a projectile leaves the hand or the bow it is no longer
pushed by anything: why then does it keep moving?
Aristotle tried to resolve the mystery by suggesting that it was
the air, pushed by the bowstring, that kept pushing the arrow, as it
was spread by the arrow’s head and curled behind its rear end to
prevent a vacuum from being created behind it. To many of
Aristotle’s own disciples, this was clearly an unsatisfactory
explanation. First, the air, in Aristotle’s own analysis, was supposed
to be the resisting medium – how could it provide both propulsion
and resistance? Think of a boat, which keeps moving after its sails
are dropped – clearly the water is not what pushes it, because it is
the same water that would soon bring it to a halt. Secondly, the same
question asked about the arrow and the boat could be asked about
the air and water themselves: how do they keep moving after
detaching from the original cause of their motion? And if instead of a
stone or an arrow we think of an object sharp on both ends – like a
spear – how can the air move it by pushing against a sharp end?
And what about circular bodies and motions, like a potter’s wheel,
which also continues to spin on its axel for some time after the potter
has left it? In the fourteenth century, a professor at the University of
Paris, Jean Buridan (c. 1300–c.1358), collated these arguments to
conclude that Aristotle’s theory of violent motion had to be wrong. In
its stead, he suggested, we need to assume that the moving body –
hand, bow or wind – delivers some force to the moved body – stone,
arrow or boat. This force, he argued, remains in the moved body and
continues to propel it after the two have separated: after the stone
has left the hand, the arrow has left the bow or the wind has
stopped. He named this force ‘impetus.’
‘Impetus’ was a very fertile concept. It explained not only why
projectiles keep on moving, but also why they slow down and stop:
this is because the impetus diminishes with time and resistance. It
also explained why falling bodies – moving in natural motion –
accelerate: the inner force propelling them – their gravity –
continuously adds impetus to the falling body, which accumulates
and speeds it up. Impetus could even be used to make sense of the
unceasing, uniform motion of the heavenly bodies: all God needed to
do was to provide them with the appropriate amount of circular
impetus at creation, and because there is no resistance to their
motion, it continues in perpetuity.
The science-educated modern reader may be tempted to read
modern concepts like momentum and inertia into Buridan’s theory,
but note: in spite of his criticism of Aristotle, Buridan’s fundamental
understanding of motion is still Aristotelian. For him, motion always
needs a cause, and its speed is proportional to the force, or the
cause, and inversely proportional to resistance. Some of these
ancient commitments Galileo would keep, others he’d discard;
sometimes consciously, sometimes not.

The Mysteries of Free Fall

Not only violent motion presented difficulties to Aristotelian natural
philosophy, but also natural motion. The paradigm of such motion
was the falling body: moving because of its own heaviness, its
velocity was assumed to be proportional to its weight (and inversely
proportional to the resistance of the air or water it fell through). But
the relations between weight and motion were far less clear than one
would have expected. A good example of these difficulties was the
phenomenon of the lever, or the balance: the weight of a body put on
a balance is proportional to its distance from the center of the
balance – the fulcrum. This is an empirical fact that we can tell was
well known in Antiquity, because there are many ancient remains
and images of the steelyard, an instrument based on this principle
(Figure 9.1, right). In the Aristotelian world, heaviness – gravitas –
was the striving of a heavy body towards the center of the Earth,
which was its proper place; there was no reason why horizontal
displacement, parallel to the center, should change its weight.
Aristotelians tried to solve the riddle in terms of motion (as captured
in the diagram in Figure 9.1, left) by treating the balance as a
compass. They divided the body’s circular motion around the fulcrum
into a natural component (down) and a forced component (towards
the fulcrum), and reasoned that the higher “positional weight” was an
expression of the higher ratio of natural-to-forced motion the farther
the body was from the fulcrum. This was an ingenious solution, but
also a true strain of Aristotelian theory: natural and forced motions
were not supposed to be mixed, and weight was supposed to explain
motion, not the other way around. More than anything, these
attempts demonstrate the difficulty of the Aristotelian analysis in
handling the relations between the static and dynamic expressions of
weight – on a balance and in free fall.

Figure 9.1 The steelyard and the principle of the lever. The image
on the left is a woodcut from Gaultherus Rivius' Architecture …
Mathematischen … Kunst (Nuremberg, 1547). This sixteenth-
century diagram stresses that the practical tool can be
mathematically analyzed. The image on the right, however, is a
Roman steelyard, preceding it by more than a millennium. It
demonstrates that the principle of the lever was understood well
enough to be embodied in a material, artificial device well before it
was formulated and formalized.

So it was in free fall that Galileo found a particularly soft spot to

assault the Aristotelianism theory of motion, using arguments mostly
formulated by sixteenth-century scholars of mechanics, especially
Giambattista Benedetti (1530–1590). Common lore and Galileo’s
own rhetoric credit his turn to empirical observations, but these
arguments are strictly abstract – a series of thought experiments.
According to the Aristotelian theory, Galileo points out, the velocity of
a falling body should be proportional to its weight. This means that a
big cannon ball, weighing 1,000 drachms (Galileo’s favorite unit,
about 4 grams), should fall 100 times faster than a small musket ball
weighing 10 drachms. The big ball may be falling somewhat faster,
but had anyone ever seen one metal object, no matter how large, fall
100 times faster than another metal object, no matter how small?
Even worse is the following insight: attaching a light body (a) to a
heavy one (b) makes the combined body (c) heavier than (b), hence,
according to the theory, it should fall faster. But (a) was supposed to
be slower than (b) – how can the addition of a slower-moving body
make the faster-moving one accelerate?
The complementary Aristotelian assumption – that the fall is
inversely proportional to resistance – didn’t make any more sense. A
piece of wood falls through air and rises in water.
But if the velocity of the fall is inversely proportional to
resistance, no resistance can change the direction of the falling body
– only its velocity. If water is ten times more resistant than air, the
velocity of the fall through water should be a tenth of the velocity
through air; if it’s 100 times more resistant – the velocity should be a
hundredth. But no division will change the direction of the fall.
Galileo’s conclusion from this consideration was simple: to
calculate the velocity of a falling body, resistance should be
subtracted from the driving force, not divided by it (V ∝ F – R rather
than V ∝ F/R). If the resistance is greater than the force, the
direction of motion will change, as happens to the wood that falls
through air and rises through water.
This seemingly minor mathematical alteration had far-reaching
metaphysical consequences. V ∝ F – R means that resistance could
be zero – with zero resistance, the body would move at the velocity
determined solely by the original force: V ∝ F. But a body can suffer
zero resistance – no resistance at all – only if it moves through
empty space. As you may recall (Chapter 2), this was exactly
Aristotle’s argument against the possibility of void or vacuum: in a
void resistance is zero, and assuming that velocity is inversely
proportional to resistance, he argued, that means that through a void
bodies would move in infinite velocity (F/0 = ∞). Infinite velocity is
absurd (it means being in more than one place simultaneously),
Aristotle continued, hence a void is absurd, and motion necessitates
medium. Galileo’s new formula annulled this consideration: in direct
opposition to Aristotle, motion through avoid was possible!
 Galileo’s Resources

Archimedes and the Simple Machines

This non-Aristotelian concept of resistance hints at the resources
Galileo drew on in his assault on Aristotelian natural philosophy and
in developing his alternative. One crucial resource came from
Antiquity, but only became fully available to Europeans in the middle
of the sixteenth century: the works of Archimedes (287–c. 212 BCE).
Archimedes presented a world quite different from Aristotle’s.
Aristotle populated the terrestrial realm with natural substances
moving in straight lines towards or away from their proper places.
The elements of Archimedes, instead, were simple machines (Figure
9.2) – idealized mechanical devices like the inclined plane, the
wedge and the lever, which turned forces into motions and vice
versa. Instead of Aristotle’s causal stories, this world was best
described by mathematical proportions – the law of the lever, namely
the ratio between weight and distance from the fulcrum, is one
example. These were mathematical laws, but they were neither the
wild mathematical speculations of the Pythagoreans, abhorred by
Aristotle, or the very rigorous mathematics of Euclid, admired by
Aristotle’s disciples. Euclidean mathematics recognized only
constructions with ruler and compass and one motion at a time –
that’s how its theorems about angles, circles, triangles and so on
were proven. Archimedes replaced this rigor with rich flexibility,
defining a plethora of curves created by a combination of motions.
These were tellingly known as ‘mechanical curves’ – both because
they were produced by motions of solid bodies – the subject matter
of mechanics – and because they were, again, idealized machines:
they could do work in the world. The screw, which Archimedes
famously invented, is a good example of those curves:
mathematically, it’s produced by a point which moves simultaneously
around a given point in one plane and away from it in a line
perpendicular to this plane. Mechanically, it pumped water from the
Syracusan ships trying to fend off the Roman invaders.
 Figure 9.2 The simple machines. On the left, clockwise from
upper left: lever; inclined plane; wedge; screw; wheel and axle,
pulley. The diagram is from John Mills, The Realities of Modern
Science (New York: Macmillan, 1919), and it expresses the idea,
going back all the way to Archimedes, that geometrical
configurations of matter have real, physical effects: the more
pulleys are engaged in lifting a body, the lighter it is; the farther a
body is from the fulcrum of a lever, the heavier it is. The idea that
these machines are both practical implements and abstract
principles is nicely captured by the image on the right – an
engraving from a drawing by Cesare Cesariano, from a 1521
Italian translation of Vitruvius’ De Architectura (see Chapter 1).
The principle of the lever is embodied both in the two rods used to
roll the hewn stone M on the left and in the steelyard on the right.

Archimedes’ simple machines injected mathematics directly into

the world. This concept of mathematics’ import in the cosmos was
very different from Kepler’s dream of perfect divine order, but it
fulfilled a similar function with similar success. It made sense of the
new physical aspirations of the traditional mixed sciences (see
Chapter 7), and elevated the mathematician to the role of natural
philosopher. Archimedes also offered Galileo a model for analyzing
the complex relations between weight and fall in a different way to
Aristotle's. The basis for this analysis was his principle of buoyancy,
immortalized in the famous Eureka story. Archimedes, so the story
goes, was charged by the king to determine if a crown presented to
him was indeed made of gold. The challenge was to find if the crown
weighed as much as the same quantity of gold should weigh, but
because of the crown’s complex shape there was no simple way to
tell how much metal it actually contained – what its volume was.
Seated in the bathtub, the story continues, Archimedes hit on the
solution: when he dipped into the water, the water rose, because his
body pushed it aside. Here was the Eureka: measure the volume of
the water displaced, and you know the volume of the submerged
body – Archimedes’ or the crown’s.
Beyond solving the king’s riddle, Archimedes had thus
answered the question why heavy bodies float in water: if the water
displaced weighed more than a submerged body, the water carried
that body. A boat could be made of metal, but if it also contained
enough air (or other light materials), then the weight of its combined
volume could be lower than the equivalent volume of water, and the
boat would float. This was a very different approach to weight than
Aristotle’s. It was not the total weight of the body that mattered, but
its weight per volume or ‘specific weight.’ This was because it wasn’t
the body’s individual drive towards or away from the center of the
Earth that determined which body would descend and which would
ascend. Rather, all bodies were heavy, and it was the relation
between them that determined which would sink and which would
rise.
 The principle of buoyancy was, therefore, also an excellent
example of the idea of a world made up of simple machines: what
was the floating body if not the lighter hand of a balance, moving up
not because it was light, but because the other hand was heavier?

Tartaglia and the Symmetrical Trajectory

Archimedes provided Galileo with one set of resources with which to
develop his mathematical-mechanical alternative to Aristotelian
natural philosophy; Renaissance scholars like Tartaglia (Chapter 5)
provided another set. As you may remember, his Nova Scientia
promised a marked improvement of artillery practices through the
theoretical analysis of the trajectories of cannonballs. This analysis
was supposed to be fundamentally Aristotelian and Tartaglia begins
the book declaring “that it is impossible for a heavy body to move
with natural motion and violent motion mixed together.” Yet for the
practical use of the “bombardier,” this strict distinction needed some
amendment; after all, cannonballs do both – fly violently, driven by
the force of the gunpowder, then fall naturally by the force of their
gravity. So Tartaglia devised the idea he expressed in diagrams like
Figure 9.3, top: the projectile moves first in straight, violent motion (H
to K); then in circular motion (from K to M); then falls straight down in
natural motion (M to N). His explanation as to why balls don’t usually
fall down straight from the sky, but rather touch the ground or their
target obliquely, was that the point at which the trajectory meets the
ground is often before the end of that circular part, for example at M.
Figure 9.3 The two contradictory ways in which Tartaglia analyzes
cannon ball trajectories in his 1537 Nova Scientia. Top: one of the
many diagrams of ‘triplicate’ trajectory reflecting the principle that:
“Every violent trajectory or motion of uniformly heavy bodies
outside the perpendicular of the horizon will always be partly
straight and partly curved, and the curved part will form part of the
circumference of a circle.” Bottom: the frontispiece of the 1550
 edition. Here the trajectories of the cannon and mortar balls are
clearly drawn to look smoothly curved and symmetrical, reflecting
his insight that: “truly no violent trajectory or motion of uniformly
heavy body outside the perpendicular of the horizon can have any
part that is perfectly straight, because of the weight residing in that
body, which continually acts on it and draws it towards the center
of the world.” Whichever way he was truly leaning, this
discrepancy reveals the tremendous difficulty of using
mathematics – the art of perfect forms – to capture nature in its
constant change. Tartaglia hints that this is the main challenge he
is undertaking with the allegorical landscape in which he places
the artillery pieces in the frontispiece. To enter the first realm of
knowledge, all comers must pass through a gate guarded by
Euclid. Inside they encounter Tartaglia, flanked by the muses of
the various mathematical disciplines – those of the quadrivium
first, and the more esoteric, like astrology, behind. Only those who
traveled through this mathematical terrain can enter the inner
sanctum of philosophia, guarded by Aristotle and Plato.

Whether Tartaglia genuinely believed he found a compromise

between theory and experience or was only bluffing, the Aristotelian
doctrine didn’t really survive his analysis. What was that circular part
of the trajectory – KM – if not the forbidden mixture of natural and
forced motion? But even more interesting was his further conclusion:

… truly no violent trajectory or motion of uniformly heavy body

outside the perpendicular of the horizon can have any part that
is perfectly straight, because of the weight residing in that body,
 which continually acts on it and draws it towards the center of
the world.
Tartaglia, Nova Scientia, in Drake and Drabkin, Mechanics in
Sixteenth-Century Italy, p. 84

Look again at the diagram at the top of Figure 9.3, Tartaglia’s

reasoning becomes clear: where exactly should point K be? It’s
supposed to be the point at which the heaviness of the body would
start curling its trajectory – but the body is always heavy. So the
trajectory should start curling immediately when the ball leaves the
cannon, which means, contra Aristotle, that heavy bodies move in
mixed motions and curved trajectories! Tartaglia was undoubtedly
convinced that this was indeed the case – look at the smoothly
curved, symmetrical trajectories in the illustration of his book’s
frontispiece (Figure 9.3, bottom). In a free drawing, rather than a
mathematical diagram, Tartaglia showed no hesitation in offering a
clear alternative to the Aristotelian theory of motion he had started
with.
 Galileo’s Investigations

The Parabolic Trajectory

The trajectories of projectiles were smoothly curved and symmetrical
– but what was their shape? This was the question for the new
mathematical natural philosopher. Mathematics was imprinted in
nature – perhaps distributed by God through light, as Kepler
imagined, or embodied in those simple machines, as Archimedes
taught and Galileo learned. It was for the philosopher-mathematician
to decipher the mathematical curves that nature drew. The question
was to be asked empirically, so the answers could be surprising –
mathematics was no longer committed to saving the phenomena
with ideal, perfect abstractions. Led by this conviction through the
first decade of the seventeenth century (as we saw in Chapter 7),
Kepler found that in the heavens, the planets were drawing ellipses –
not circles. In the last decade of the sixteenth century, Galileo set out
to find what curves heavy bodies were tracking on Earth.
Like Tartaglia, and for the same regrettable reasons, the heavy
bodies drawing Galileo’s curiosity were cannonballs, and in the
1590s, still a young mathematics professor, Galileo began
experimenting with them. Together with his older friend and patron
Guidobaldo del Monte (1545–1607), he was dipping balls in ink and
rolling them on an inclined roof, investigating the lines they were
drawing (Figure 9.4).
 Figure 9.4 Guidobaldo’s protocol of his experiments with Galileo.
The roof is on the upper right; the curve of the rolled ball at the
center, and its analysis as a parabola – bottom left.

This was quite a new way to ask the question: it was an

empirical question, but the objects were not asked to behave as they
do in nature. Tartaglia was also studying his cannonballs empirically:
debating with the duke’s ‘bombardiers’ as to whether the best range
for the cannon would be achieved at an elevation of 30° (as custom
had it) or 45° (as he calculated); they wagered and tested and
Tartaglia won (it is he who tells the story). The test consisted of
actually shooting the cannon, attempting to keep all irrelevant factors
(direction, amount of gunpowder, etc.) in check. Galileo and
Guidobaldo, instead, created an artificial environment – balls rolling
on a roof. It served their purposes, because the inked balls left a
trace on the roof, a trace they could investigate. But this
convenience came at the expense of the authenticity of the
experiment: the assumption that slow-rolling balls truly represent fast
flying ones was far from obvious. This reversal of hierarchy between
natural and artificial would become a centerpiece of the new
experimental study of nature, and we’ll return to it below.
The experiments convinced Galileo and Guidobaldo that
Tartaglia was right in claiming that the trajectory was symmetrical,
but not if he really thought that it was a segment of a circle (the
continuously curved trajectory on the frontispiece – Figure 9.4
bottom – indeed doesn’t look circular). What was the curve then?
They settled on the parabola. Why? Maybe it was a guess similar to
Kepler’s: Kepler decided that the planetary orbit – a closed curve –
could not be a simple circle, and the next most-simple closed conic
section was the ellipse. Galileo and Guidobaldo decided that the
trajectory – an open curve – was not a circle, and the next simplest
open conic section was the parabola.
But perhaps the parabola originated in a more educated guess:
Galileo, practically inclined and curious, may have been familiar with
masons’ knowledge about the stability of the parabolic arch (the
knowledge implemented by Brunelleschi building the Duomo – see
Chapter 5). Yet why should the stability of a static curve intimate
anything about the shape of a dynamic trajectory?
For Galileo, the answer would have come from Archimedes: it
was because the two different phenomena actually represented the
same mechanical principle. A trajectory is created by the
combination of the weight of the cannonball and the force produced
by the gunpowder explosion spontaneously balancing each other.
Similarly, an arch is stable when the vertical weight of the stones and
the horizontal forces of the structure balance each other. In other
words: an arch is stable when its weight is distributed in the curve it
assumes spontaneously – like a trajectory – otherwise the weight
would stress the arch towards that curve and destabilize it. Hence, if
a stable arch is a parabola, so should be the trajectory.
Galileo never reveals if this was his line of thought concerning
trajectories, but he does provide hints that he was convinced that the
parabola is the curve which will spontaneously result from a
combination of weight and horizontal pull. He even thought that a
freely hanging chain is also a ‘simple machine’ of the same kind – an
inverted stable arch or trajectory – and should therefore also be a
parabola. Here he was wrong: a chain line – a catenary – is a more
complex curve, but throughout his life he was hanging chains,
marking them on the wall and attempting to reduce them to
parabolas (Figure 9.5).
 Figure 9.5 One of Galileo’s attempts to reduce a chain line into a
parabola. He drew the curve by hanging a chain against a piece of
paper and marking through the links, and in the calculations on the
left he tries to find a regular ratio between the empirically given
curve, drawn by nature herself, and a similar parabola. Galileo
MS72, 43 r.

Pendulums, Inclined Planes and the Law of Free Fall

Galileo was constructing a mathematical philosophy of nature using
ancient and Renaissance resources, and it was as different from
Aristotelian natural philosophy as Kepler’s astronomy was from
Ptolemy’s. The strict distinction between natural and violent motion
was broken – they were mixed in the curved trajectories; as was the
strict distinction between motion and rest – static and dynamic
phenomena were explained in parallel ways. In place of the
Aristotelian causal narratives came analysis in terms of
mathematical structures. Symmetry in particular became a powerful
tool in Galileo’s hands. It was the feature common to the trajectory,
the arch and the hanging chain, as well as the pendulum.
 The pendulum was interesting exactly because it was so un-
Aristotelian: an earthly motion that was circular, without a terminus,
and seemingly could continue forever. Drawing on another of his
resources – Buridan and his impetus theory – Galileo could make
sense of this continuous motion. The ‘impetus’ gained by the
pendulum on its way down should be sufficient to elevate it to the
very same height on the other side, so it would now have enough
impetus to return to its original height and so forth. Only the
resistance of the air and the friction of the string should ever make
the pendulum stop. Crucially, for Galileo, the symmetry was not
created by the circular path of the pendulum, but by this exchange of
forces and motions (Figure 9.6, left). This is why, even if a nail
stopped the string along the way, the cord of the pendulum would
wrap around it and deliver the bob (the weight at the end of the cord)
to the same height.
Figure 9.6 On the left: Galileo’s stopped pendulum from his Two
New Sciences. The pendulum oscillates around A and starts
descending from C. It will always get to the same height of C along
line CD, even if stopped, whether the stop is above this line at E,
or even under it – at F or B. Galileo reasons that what determines
how high the pendulum would ascend (ignoring friction) depends
solely of the amount of momento – the amount of driving force – it
receives during the fall. This amount of force would suffice to bring
it to exactly the same height, independent of the slope in which it
falls or rises. On the right: Galileo’s pendulum clock design. The
same line of reasoning convinced Galileo that the circular
pendulum is isochronous – its period will remain the same (for a
given length of the cord), regardless of its amplitude. This is
because increased amplitude will increase its restoring force, and
the consequent increase in velocity will exactly compensate for the
lengthening of the trajectory. In 1641, already blind, he dictated the
idea to his son Vincenzo (named after his father), who drew this
design. The first working pendulum clock was designed by
 Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) in 1658–1659. A few years later,
he proved that the curve of isochrony is not the circle of Galileo’s
pendulum, but the cycloid – the curve drawn by a point on a rolling
wheel. In pendulums of very small amplitude, however, the
difference between the circle and the cycloid is negligible, hence
the very long circular pendulums with very short amplitude of
‘grandfather’ clocks.

Within the Archimedean framework, this line of thought proved

extremely fertile: the pendulum is yet another simple machine, and
the descending bob is just like a ball rolling down an inclined plane –
one of Archimedes’ simple machines. Just as the bob will always
ascend to the same height, even if the string is restrained by a nail,
so the descending ball, if presented with a rising inclined plane at the
end of its role, will roll up on it to its initial height – regardless of how
steep either incline is. But what if the slope on which the ball
ascends is very gentle? So gentle that the ball would never get to its
original height? Then it would continue to roll, forever (if we ignore
friction), because the force moving it – the impetus from the fall –
would never be exhausted. It would, in fact, require an opposite force
to stop it.
Galileo thus invented a new kind of motion: ‘neutral motion,’ with
no designated beginning or end, neither accelerating nor
decelerating, neither forced nor natural:

A body subject to no external resistance on a plane sloping no

matter how little below the horizon will move down in natural
motion, without the application of any external force. This can be
 seen in the case of water. And the same body on a place
sloping upward, no matter how little, above the horizon, does
not move up except by force. And so the conclusion remains
that on the horizontal plane itself the motion of the body is
neither natural nor forced. But if its motion is not forced motion,
then it can be made to move by the smallest of all possible
forces.
Galileo Galilei, On Motion and Mechanics, I. E. Drabkin and
Stillman Drake (trans. and ann.) (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1960), p. 66

It is worth stressing, for readers familiar with modern mechanics, that

Galileo does not think of this kind of motion as we do of ‘inertial
motion.’ He never suggests that motion could continue without at
least “the smallest of all possible forces”; he doesn’t think that he has
discovered a general law of motion – this is specifically an analysis
of motion on Earth; and he doesn’t think of this motion as rectilinear
– it’s along the horizon, so will continue in a very big circle around
Earth. But the change to the analysis of projectile motion that this
new concept of ‘neutral motion’ allowed is dramatic.
The parabola of the projectile’s trajectory, Galileo reasons, is a
mixture of forced and natural motion – against Aristotle’s injunction:
rectilinear motion created by force in the direction it’s aimed; and
rectilinear motion downwards, created by the heaviness of the body.
In fact, instead of forced and natural, these motions are better
understood as ‘neutral’ and ‘accelerated.’ The neutral motion, like
that of the ball rolling, horizontally, proceeds in uniform velocity; the
motion down accelerates. But at what rate? The ‘neutral,’ horizontal
ingredient, in its uniform velocity, covers distances proportional to
times, and in a parabola the vertical line is proportional to the square
of the horizontal line (in modern notation: y = x2). Hence, the
distances of the free-fall component of the projectile motion are
proportional to the square of times, or: a freely falling body covers
distances proportional to the square of the time of fall. The first law
of modern mechanics has been formulated. And how is this
proportion created? After some confusion, Galileo comes up with a
proper law of acceleration: a freely falling body adds equal
increments of velocity in equal times. Weight has nothing to do with
the velocity of its fall! The foundations of Aristotelian theory of motion
have been heavily battered.
 Descartes and the Mechanical Philosophy
A mathematical philosophy of nature required a mathematical world
to study, and Galileo provided that as well:

I do not believe that for exciting in us tastes, odors and sounds

there are required in external bodies anything but sizes, shapes,
numbers, and slow or fast movements; and I think that if ears,
tongues, and noses were taken away, shapes and numbers and
motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds. These,
I believe, are nothing but names, apart from the living animal,
just as tickling and titillation are nothing but names when armpits
and the skin around the nose are upset.

Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, in Stillman Drake and C. D.

O’Malley (eds. and trans.), The Controversy on the Comets of
1618 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1960), p. 311

There is nothing in Galileo’s world but properties fit for the

mathematician to study: “sizes, shapes, numbers, and … motions.”
All the rest – all those properties that make the world what it is for us
– “tastes, odors and sounds” – are just that: the impressions that the
objects make on us. They are not real properties of things, and the
challenge for the new natural philosopher is to explain them away –
to reduce them to those mathematical properties, which are the only
real ones.
 In the two decades after Galileo’s trial, this formulation of the
task of the New Science, and this new ontology he devised to make
sense of it, came to be called the mechanical philosophy, and its
main prophet was the Frenchman René Descartes (1596–1650).
 Descartes’ Life and Times
Descartes’ lifetime overlapped with Galileo’s and Kepler’s, but his
biography, almost until his premature death, reads as though
belonging to a different era: outside both university and court, it’s a
biography of an independent, urban intellectual. Born to minor
Catholic gentry in La Haye (now named after him – Descartes),
Descartes was educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, which
provided him with a strong footing in both Aristotelianism and the
Humanist curriculum. He spent only two years at the University of
Poitiers, earning a license in law, and at the age of 20 he moved to
Paris. There he wrote his first original tract, on music, for the Minim
Friar and Polymath Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), who would
become his lifelong intellectual interlocutor. Two years later, in 1618,
he traveled to Breda, where he took a practical-mathematical course
in military engineering and joined the Dutch army under Maurice of
Nassau, apparently more as a physician than a warrior. For three
years, he traveled Europe as a mercenary in the Thirty Years’ War
until discharging himself and commencing traveling on his own.
Descartes then returned to his hometown and, in 1623, he sold his
share of the parental estate, bought bonds whose interest would
support him, modestly but comfortably, for the rest of his life, and
returned to Paris. Even mighty Paris was apparently too quiet for him
and, in 1628, he moved to the most bustling European center of the
time – Amsterdam, where in the crowds, he said, he found the
solitude and freedom for his ambitious intellectual work. His earlier
adventures turned out to be of value: he became quite well known
for his medical knowledge, mostly by word of mouth, and he formed
a working alliance with his erstwhile teacher from military school:
Isaack Beeckman (1588–1637), also a physician with interests in the
new mechanical philosophy. For some ten years (until priority
disputes soured the relationship), the two worked together on
problems of mechanics and hydraulics, developing the mathematical
tools and physical principles for this new science.
Descartes never gave much credit to Galileo, but it’s very clear
that he was keenly aware that they were both involved in the same
project: when the news of the Italian’s trial came, he canceled his
plans for a big work that was to be named The World, and instead, in
1637, published its contents more modestly, as three independent
essays collected together and fronted by his first famous
philosophical tract – On Method. In one of these essays – La
Géométrie – he laid the foundations for a new kind of mathematics,
by teaching his readers how to solve geometrical problems with
arithmetical operations. His Méditations (1641) and Principes de
philosophie (1644) made him the most influential natural philosopher
in Europe. His Passions of the Soul (l650), which presented quite a
different approach to knowledge than his youthful ambitions for
certainty that he’s commonly identified with, had to be published
shortly after his death. In the winter of 1649, after years of being self-
supporting, he accepted a position as court philosopher to Queen
Christina of Sweden. The queen, returning from a horseback hunting
expedition just before Christmas, liked to be taught philosophy over
breakfast, and Descartes, whose writings are dotted with discussions
of sleep and dreams, and whose brilliance bought him a
dispensation to rise late even in La Flèche, succumbed to a frigid
Swedish winter morning. He caught pneumonia six weeks into his
tenure and passed away.
 The Mechanical Ontology
In Descartes’ confident hands, Galileo’s poetically expressed ideas
turned into full-blown ontological foundations for a mechanical
philosophy of nature. The only elements that this philosophy allowed
in nature were those which could be fully captured by mathematics:
matter and motion. Matter itself – which for the Aristotelian was such
a rich metaphysical category – was reduced to mathematical
dimensions – the space it occupied or its ‘extension.’ Color, smell –
all unquantifiable properties, even hardness – were ‘secondary’;
derivatives of the ‘primary,’ mathematical properties. And motion was
only relative change in the geometrical configuration of parts of
matter – it didn’t entail places, termini or resistance. It didn’t require
causal explanations like those of the Aristotelian natural philosopher,
but mathematical analysis, like Galileo’s analysis of free fall.
The Aristotelian education Descartes received at La Flèche is
often apparent in his terminology and modes of argumentation, but
the contents of his mechanical philosophy are explicitly and
dramatically different. Even though he couldn’t allow empty space or
true atoms – if matter and extension are one, all space is ipso facto
full and everything that has dimensions can be divided – his image of
the world is much more akin to that of the Atomists. It’s a world
devoid of any forces, places or forms, and populated only with hard
material ‘corpuscles’ which constantly collide. Collision is the only
real form of causation in Descartes’ world – no formal or final causes
allowed – and this causation is conserved. Namely: both the amount
of motion in each collision and the total amount of motion in the
world remain the same, even if the directions and speeds of the
colliding corpuscles change.
Descartes practiced what he preached, making a concerted
effort to formulate the mathematical laws of collision. He wasn’t
successful with the details – his laws were amended within a
generation – but the image of corpuscles exchanging motions,
together with Descartes’ principles of how to describe these motions
mathematically, came to define the New Science for the next
generation of natural philosophers. He also provided them with the
fundamental laws governing the motions (Figure 9.7):
Figure 9.7 Descartes’ way of demonstrating his laws of nature.
The stone whirled by the hand will only remain in the circular
trajectory as long as it is constrained by the sling. Once released
(say at A), it will move in a straight line (ACG) and in uniform
velocity. This centrifugal pull is also responsible for the sling
remaining taut along EAD, although how the tangential tendency
becomes radial was only solved only much later by Descartes’
disciple Christiaan Huygens.

The first law of nature: that each thing, as far as it in its power,
always remains in the same state, and that consequently, when
it once moved, it always continues to move …
The second law of nature: that all movement is, of itself, along
straight lines; and consequently, bodies which are moving in a
circle, always tend to move away from the center of the circle
which they are describing.
Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, pp. 37–40
These laws were Descartes’ version of Galileo’s conclusion that a
body moving along the horizon will continue until stopped by force,
but as Laws of Nature they were no longer insights about motion on
the surface of the Earth. They were universal truths concerning all
motions of all bodies in the world: motion in a straight line and
uniform velocity was not a form of change but a state. It didn’t need a
cause to continue, only to change: to start, stop, or alter direction or
velocity.
 The New Mechanized Sciences
This was a final divorce from the Aristotelian way of understanding
nature which directed scholars throughout Europe, North Africa and
much of Asia for two millennia. Historians argue over whether the
change should be termed ‘revolution,’ and that of course depends on
how one uses the term. There is no doubt, on the one hand, that
Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and others who engaged in the New
Science perceived themselves as bringing about a dramatic and
radical change, doing away with old ways of knowledge and creating
new ones – almost at any cost (mostly intellectual, but sometimes
personal). But neither is there any doubt that the change wasn’t
instantaneous and wasn’t ex nihilo, as the cathedral metaphor
illustrates: novelties are constructed over time, using available
resources. Galileo’s work was an essential resource for Descartes,
and Galileo himself drew heavily on Archimedes, Buridan and
sixteenth-century mechanics. Kepler’s work was as essential: his
optics (Chapter 7) provided Descartes with a model of purely
mathematical-physical science; the unpublished Le Monde (The
World) was to be subtitled A treatise on Light.
Light, according to Kepler’s new optics, was a physical agent
that could be fully analyzed in mathematical terms, and Descartes
demonstrated this in his analysis of the rainbow, a phenomenon
which baffled traditional natural philosophers. Aristotle taught that
transparency was a property of some media, like water and air, while
opaqueness was a property of solid objects, and color was a form of
opaqueness. So how could colors float in mid-air? Descartes’
answer was both mathematical and empirical. The light ray, he
explained, is refracted and reflected multiple times within the
raindrop, as diagramed in Figure 9.8, and the colors are determined
by the angles of these changes in direction – red, he discovered by
experimenting with a water ball, is the result of a 42° angle of
refraction. It is likely that thinking of light as pure motion, always
rectilinear, is what allowed Descartes to turn Galileo’s ideas about
‘neutral motion’ around the Earth into the law that straight motion of
uniform velocity needs no cause (to continue). Descartes would go
on to try to develop, along the same principles, theories of planetary
motions, of meteors and comets, of magnetism, physiology and
human sensations. Although none was as successful as his version
of Keplerian optics, these attempts became the paradigms of the
new mechanical philosophy of nature.
Figure 9.8 Descartes’ analysis of the rainbow from his Meteors of
1637. The ray coming from A passes through the raindrop, which
Descartes mimicked with a water ball. It is refracted at B, reflected
at C and refracted again at D, and the angle in which it falls on the
eye E determines its color.
Founding the New Science
 The Collapse of the Old Order
Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century – the decades that
saw the emergence of the New Science in the work of Kepler,
Galileo and Descartes – was a troubled place. The tensions building
up for a century – since the Reformation – finally burst in 1618 in a
war that would last until 1648, earning the moniker ‘The Thirty Years’
War.’ It began as a squabble between Catholic and Protestant
countries, but as Descartes’ mercenary adventures demonstrate (he
was a Catholic; Prince Maurice, his employer and commander – a
Protestant), it soon deteriorated into a cruel all-against-all war, driven
by greed and opportunism. To the direct wreckage it caused – in
some parts of Germany more than 50 percent of the population was
lost – a new sort of devastation was added. The plethora of princes
and fiefs rushing to enjoy the spoils were making use of new banking
techniques (Chapter 5), taking monetary obligations way beyond
their means. Promissory notes with princes’ signatures and coins
with kings’ images flooded Europe, losing their value
correspondingly. Inflation was a new and strange phenomenon: how
could money, the allegedly transparent means of exchange, have a
price? What did it represent? And what did the prince’s image on the
coin stand for, if it didn’t guarantee its value?
The crisis extended to all forms of stability and lawfulness:
religious, political and economic; and its most rattling expression
came, of all places, from England. Physically detached from the
continent and institutionally detached from the Church already a
century earlier by Henry VIII, it should have been less affected. In
fact, the war sent its worst shock through the old relations in England
between the divine and political order, which also made sense of the
natural order philosophers were searching for (Chapter 1). King
Charles, keen to join the seemingly profitable great war, kept raising
taxes to finance his (unsuccessful) military ventures until Parliament
rebelled. The members of the House of Commons – lesser nobility
and representatives of major towns – felt that tradition and common
law gave them the authority over taxation, and were willing to fight
for it. Charles’ suspect religious affiliations – he was of Scottish
descent and married to a Catholic – and his (failed) attempts to
arrest the House leaders exacerbated the rift. In 1642, a proper war
erupted between Parliament’s army and the king’s army, which
ended on January 20, 1649 with the king being put on trial:

Charles Stuart has been and is the occasioner, author, and

continuer of the said unnatural, cruel and bloody wars, and
therein guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings,
spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to this nation, acted
and committed in the said wars or occasioned thereby … And
the said John Cooke [the prosecutor] on behalf of the people of
England does for the said reasons and crimes impeach the said
Charles Stuart as a tyrant, traitor, murderer and a public and
implacable enemy to the Commonwealth of England.
Quoted in Kesselring, The Trial of Charles I, p. 34

On January 26, Charles was found guilty and condemned to death;

four days later he was beheaded.
 This was not the first time in history that a king found his violent
death in the hands of his angry subjects, but it was the first time a
king was put on trial. But on whose laws? By whose authority?
Wasn’t the king the “author” of all laws? How could a king be a
traitor? Against whom? It was Charles, when he had finally
addressed the court – the Parliament whose jurisdiction he never
recognized – who put the dilemma most eloquently:

A king cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth … If

power without law may make laws – may alter the fundamental
laws of the Kingdom – I do not know what subject in England
can be sure of his life, or anything that he calls his own.
Quoted in Kesselring, The Trial of Charles I, p. 41

But tried he was, and executed.

Europe descended into a deep void absent of religious and
political authority, which the New Science, with the new knowledge it
was offering and the new practices and instruments by which to
gather this knowledge, could have filled. It could have, like other
unorthodox movements in centuries past, become a ‘heresy’ – a
populist religion of nature making moral and social demands. Most of
these movements were quashed, but the Reformation proved that
they could also succeed. Galileo, we saw, gave Bellarmine good
reasons to worry that this was exactly the danger that he
represented.
Yet the New Science didn’t redirect its revolutionary tendencies
from knowledge to politics or religion. Instead, it shaped itself as a
progressive, reformist project, supportive of and cooperative with the
institutions of power. Three persons were particularly influential in
formulating this stance – a project of radical epistemology in the
service of conservative politics: Francis Bacon (1561–1626),
Descartes, in his philosopher’s hat, and Robert Boyle (1627–1691).
 Bacon’s Idols
Bacon belonged to a new erudite English elite. His mother, Lady
Anne Cooke, daughter of Edward IV’s tutor, the great humanist
Anthony Cooke, was famous for her learnedness. His father,
Nicholas Bacon, was knighted when he became Lord Keeper of the
Seal – the second highest rank in Elizabeth’s court. Francis studied
in Cambridge, then sought a career in law when his father’s death
impoverished the family. He became a confidential advisor to the
most powerful Earl of Essex (power won and lost through Elizabeth’s
grace), then a Member of Parliament and, in 1613, Attorney General.
When James succeeded Elizabeth, Bacon’s stock began to rise, and
a series of impressive court intrigues landed him the Lord Keeper
position in 1617, and the following year he bettered his father to
become Lord Chancellor and Baron Verulam. Similar intrigues
brought about his downfall in 1621: he was charged with bribery,
found guilty upon his own admission, fined 40,000 pounds,
sentenced to the Tower of London and prohibited from holding office
or sitting in Parliament. The sentence was reduced, no fine was paid
and only four days were spent in the Tower, but his political career
was over and he dedicated his last years to philosophy and science.
In March 1626, while riding, Bacon decided to experiment with the
effect of cold on the decay of meat. He purchased a chicken, stuffed
it with snow (Europe was much colder in the seventeenth century),
caught a cold that developed into bronchitis, and died on April 9.
 As the frozen chicken story macabrely demonstrates, Bacon
took himself seriously as an active, empirical philosopher of nature.
His Sylva Sylvarum (Forest of Forests), published only
posthumously, is a massive compilation of such work, and as its
name attests, very much in the tradition of natural magic (Chapter 6).
But Bacon’s most influential works were philosophical: The
Advancement of Learning of 1605 and Instauratio Magna (Great
Revival) and Novum Organum Scientiarum (New Organ for the
Sciences – paraphrasing the title of Aristotle’s logical works – the
Organon) of 1620. Together they lay out a strongly empirical
program for the New Science, whose clearly benevolent ambitions
he summarized in a 1592 letter to his uncle, Lord Burghley: “I hope I
should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and
profitable inventions and discoveries.”
As befitting a statesman and a Humanist (see Chapter 5
concerning the Humanists’ ideas of knowledge), Bacon’s science
was to be responsible, concrete and beneficial; it was not aimed at
elevating the soul or deciphering God’s creation, but at the
betterment of life on Earth. He had some practical ideas about how
to achieve these goals. He offered a new systematic rearrangement
of the disciplines of learning and a method of collecting empirical
data in ‘tables of presence and of absence’ from which one could
presumably discover the hidden forms of things by carefully
comparing their apparent properties. But all in all, again as the story
of his death reveals, he had a limited understanding of the complex,
instrumental and mathematical route that empirical research was
given by the savants of his generation – notably Galileo and Kepler.
His great influence was on the way the budding science began to
perceive and present itself – and thus on the way it still does – and
he achieved this influence through the critical part of his philosophy
even more than through his methodology. His harsh critique of the
sciences – both those taught at the universities and those practiced
at their fringes – is summarized well in this letter:

… if I could [only] purge [philosophy of nature] of two sorts of

rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations,
and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular
traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils.
Francis Bacon, in J. Spelding et al. (eds. and trans.), The
Works of Francis Bacon (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press,
1900), Vol. VIII, p. 109

“Disputations, confutations, and verbosities” is a disparaging

reference to Aristotelianism; “blind experiments and auricular
traditions” – to traditions of practical know-how, including alchemy
and natural magic. Just as Galileo had been doing in Florence and
Descartes was beginning to do in Amsterdam, the Englishman was
vehemently rejecting tradition. Aristotelianism, on which they were all
educated, with its sophisticated terminology and practices (Chapters
4 and 5), was a favorite straw man, but tradition was their real target.
Knowledge had to start anew.
Knowledge had to start anew because it could get much further
than tradition aspired to or allowed. There’s an air of complaint to
Bacon’s words, but they express, in fact, tremendous optimism and
confidence in the human capacity for knowledge in general and in
the new ways of achieving it in particular. We err because we’re
deceived, but we can learn to identify and free ourselves from these
deceptions. In his Advancement, and especially the Novum
Organum, Bacon classifies these deceptions, poetically, as different
Idols. The “Idols of the Tribe” arise from our limited nature, deceiving
us because “human understanding is like a false mirror, which,
receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things
by mingling its own nature with it.” “The Idols of the Cave” are the
deceptions stemming from one’s individual education and habits,
“[f]or everyone … has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and
discolors the light of nature” – clearly a reference to Plato’s cave.
Distortions owing to prejudice, prejudgment, “unfit choice of words,”
etc. he names “Idols of the Marketplace,” and the “Idols of the
Theater” are those stemming from “various dogmas of philosophies.”
 Descartes’ Common Sense
Bacon’s hopes were mild and responsible; but the means were
radical: all we usually take as the basis for gathering knowledge –
learnedness, education, tradition, our senses – are obstacles, rather
than foundations, and we need to start our inquiry by ridding
ourselves of them. Some fifteen years later, Descartes would
express a similar sentiment in his On Method:

… as soon as I was old enough to emerge from the control of

my teachers, I entirely abandoned scholarship, resolving to seek
no knowledge except what I could find in myself or read in the
great book of the world.
Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part I

Descartes is much more careful than Bacon in admitting the value of

reading books and studying from the learned, if only “in order to
know their true value and guard against being deceived by them.” He
was also much more abreast of the New Science: he conducted
sophisticated experiments, built instruments and deeply understood
– and worked to shape – the role mathematics would play in it. But
most fundamentally, his idea of science was akin to Bacon’s:
optimistic, unbound, unmediated, personal and open:

Good sense is the best shared-out thing in the world; … the

power of judging well and of telling the true from the false –
which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’ – is
naturally equal in all men.
 Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part I,
www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf, p.
1

So, like Bacon, he offered a ‘method,’ which was supposed to

ensure that everyone could participate in the marvelous creation of
new knowledge:

As for me, I have never presumed my mind to be in any way

better than the minds of people in general. Indeed, I have often
had a sense of being less well-endowed than others: I have
wished to be as quick-witted as some others, or to match their
sharpness and clarity of imagination, or to have a memory that
is as capacious … But … in one respect I am above the
common run of people. Ever since my youth I have been lucky
enough to find myself on certain paths that led me to thoughts
and maxims from which I developed a method; and this method
seems to enable me to increase my knowledge gradually,
raising it a little at a time to the highest point allowed by the
averageness of my mind and the brevity of my life … So I don’t
aim here to teach the method that everyone must follow if he is
to direct his reason correctly, but only to display how I have tried
to direct my own.
Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part I, pp. 1–2

Even more than Bacon’s, Descartes’ idea of method remained

vague. Early in his intellectual career, he seems to have truly
believed that he could formulate “Rules for the Direction of the Mind”
– as he called a treatise he began writing when he moved to
Amsterdam. These rules were meant to lead by steps of
mathematical certainty, from ‘clear and distinct ideas’ to indubitable
conclusions. But Descartes never completed this project, and not for
negligence. As he honed his skills in the new mathematical,
experimental natural philosophy, the idea of such a method faded,
and his vast scientific work was as eclectic and opportunistic as that
of any cathedral builder, real or metaphorical.
Still, the philosophical conviction behind the idea of method was
undoubtedly genuine. It embedded the tremendous hope that, done
‘the right way,’ human knowledge has few boundaries. Galileo had
formulated this optimism in the most radical way:

I say that the human intellect does understand some

[propositions] perfectly, and thus in these it has as much
absolute certainty as Nature itself has. Of such are the
mathematical sciences alone; that is, geometry and arithmetic,
in which the Divine intellect indeed knows infinitely more
propositions, since it knows all.
Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World
Systems, Stillman Drake (trans.), 2nd edn. (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1967), p. 103

God knows everything, and humans – only very few things. But
whatever we do know – notably mathematics – we know as well as
God. To Church authorities and more conservative-minded scholars
claims like this were much more alarming than any argument for the
motion of the Earth. Medieval philosophers made the distinction
between human and divine knowledge a fundamental part of both
their theology and epistemology. God didn’t only know everything,
He also knew it differently from humans. Our knowledge was
discursive – it had to be put in into words and sentences, and thus
necessitated generalization and categorization, which meant
disregarding much of the true essences of particular things. God’s
knowledge, on the other hand, was intuitive – He knew each and
every part of His world ‘from within,’ wholly and individually. God
knew the world as its maker – to suggest that we could know it in the
same way was to suggest that humans could somehow emulate
Creation – an inexcusable show of hubris. Yet as we saw in Chapter
6, even the practical Bacon’s ambitions were not far removed from
this near-heresy, and the priest-scientists of “Salomon’s House” in
his New Atlantis brag that they have, indeed, unlocked the mysteries
that would allow them to mimic creation: “we make demonstrations
of all lights and radiations; and of all colours … we practice and
demonstrate all sounds and their generation … We imitate smells,
making all smells to breathe out of other mixtures than those that
give them …” (Bacon, New Atlantis, pp. 33–35).
 The Academies
It is not surprising that Bacon was promoting his idea of the New
Science by envisioning a new kind of institution, like Salomon’s
House. Knowledge needs a place, and the New Science needed a
new place. The universities were too entrenched in the traditional
conglomerate of beliefs and practices that directed education and
scholarship for centuries while giving them a measure of freedom
(Chapters 4 and 5). Court sponsorship, as both Tycho and Galileo
learned, was too capricious to trust.
New institutions of knowledge indeed started sprouting,
informally, already in sixteenth-century Italy. The model may have
been the Accademia Aldina, which the publisher and humanist Aldo
Manuzio (1452–1515) had established in Venice, in 1492. It was
supposed to be a “new academy” – a new incarnation of Plato’s
Academia – whose purpose was to help him solve the philological
challenges of printing classical texts, and it comprised, as its
successors would, gentlemen of independent means and intellectual
interests who met regularly to discuss new ideas. Later academies
would have more practical, and increasingly experimental, agendas.
The Florentine Camerata, an academy concentrating on music and
music theory, sponsored Vincenzo Galilei, and we’ve mentioned the
Accademia dei Lincei, which supported Galileo. To these one can
add the Accademia del Cimento (‘of experiment’), founded by
Galileo’s students in Florence in 1657.
 These academies usually didn’t survive the death of their
founder, so it was an important milestone when, in 1635, Cardinal
Richelieu, the most powerful man in French politics, convinced Louis
XIII to grant ‘letters patent’ to a Parisian group interested in French
philology. This created the Académie Française – the first state-
sponsored academy with an official status – and allowed its almost-
continuous existence to our time. It also provided the great French
politician of the next generation – Jean-Baptiste Colbert – with a
model he could offer The Sun King, Louis XIV: a state-sponsored
scientific academy, whose members and statutes were determined
by the state and its representatives. This institution was established
officially in 1666 as the Académie des Sciences, and together with
the Académie Française it became the core of the Institut de France.
Perhaps more than any other institution, the Académie des Sciences
represents the unofficial pact that the New Science struck with the
political elites – quite a different one from that represented by the
universitas. The state would provide funds and institutional support,
while the new scientific institutions would take into consideration the
state’s priorities – commerce, industry, transportation, arms – and
work to enhance them.
 Boyle and the Royal Society
It is also not surprising that the Baconian rhetoric appealed to
practical men like Richelieu and Colbert: less “verbosities” and more
“demonstrations,” “perfumes” and “engines” (see full quote in
Chapter 6). The activists of the New Science were no less keen
about their side of this pact: the flagship of all early modern
academies put much of its early energy into acquiring the mandate
to call itself The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural
Knowledge.
The Royal Society evolved from two informal groups. One called
itself “The Invisible College,” and had been meeting from about 1645
around London, especially in Gresham College. The college was a
public education institute of the city, named after its 1597 founder,
Thomas Gresham, who endowed a number of resident professors to
give regular open lectures. The other group was “The Experimental
Philosophical Club,” which used to meet in Wadham college, Oxford,
where its leader, John Wilkins (1614–1672), was the warden. The
two were brought together by a person for whom the realization of
Bacon’s vision was a life-long undertaking, with deep personal and
even religious significance: Robert Boyle (1627–1691).
Robert was the youngest son of Richard Boyle, an ‘adventurer’
who had made an enormous fortune – becoming perhaps the richest
person in England – in the colonization of Ireland as its Lord High
Treasurer. Boyle Junior was educated as was appropriate of his
father’s acquired status as First Earl of Cork; by private tutors at
home, then at Eton, then in a long Grand Journey through the
continent. Returning to England in 1644, he settled at the Dorset
estate left to him by his father and began to compose religious-
moralistic treatises, but his interests started to shift towards the new
experimental sciences. In 1649 he successfully set up a laboratory at
the estate and in 1656 he moved to Oxford to join Wilkins’ group,
spending there twelve years of intensive experimenting and writing.
In 1668, he moved to London and to his sister’s, Lady Ranelagh,
building himself a laboratory there and rarely leaving the city
thereafter.
Boyle, then, was well acquainted with both the London and
Oxford groups and had the financial and social resources to
formalize them. He felt comfortable doing so when England’s failed
attempt to become a republic ended and the king – Charles II, son of
the beheaded Charles I – was reinstated. Relative calm settled
among the English ruling classes and intellectual elites – only
Cooke, Charles’ prosecutor, was made to bear the brunt of the
monarchy’s fury – and in November 1660, in a meeting following a
talk at Gresham College, the College for the Promoting of Physico-
Mathematical Experimental Learning was established, receiving the
Royal charter two years later.
The early membership of the Society tells much about the kind
of institute it was and the kind of science it would promote and
bequeath. The first president was William Brouncker (1620–1684) –
a viscount, commissioner of the Royal Navy and mathematician;
Seth Ward (1617–1689) was a bishop, mathematician and
astronomer; Sir William Petty (1623–1687) was an economist,
geographer and physician-general to Oliver Cromwell (the leader of
the Parliament army and England’s ‘Lord Protector’ during its
republican decade). We’ve mentioned John Wilkins, the warden and
natural philosopher; in his Oxford group were also John Wallis
(1616–1703), a chaplain and a mathematician-cryptographer, and
Thomas Willis (1621–1675), a court physician and anatomist. John
Evelyn (1620–1706) was the most urbane of the group: diarist and
historian, he came from a wealthy gunpowder-producing family. The
secretary of the Society was Henry Oldenburg (1619–1677), a
German immigrant and theologian by education. Oldenburg
developed his ideas about the structure and mode of operation
proper for such a society when he visited many of the European
academies during his travels through Europe as a diplomat (and a
spy). He was one of the two paid members of the Society (at least in
theory – the Society was slack in collecting membership fees and in
meeting its financial obligations). The other was Robert Hooke
(1635–1703), its ‘curator of experiments.’ Hooke was the one
professional among the fellows: he designed and built instruments;
planned and performed experiments; suggested theories and
reviewed new books. When he was (rarely) unavailable, the weekly
meeting would usually be called off. We will return to him at length in
Chapter 10.
The official ideology of the Society – the way it understood and
presented itself – is well displayed in its emblem (Figure 9.9):
Charles II is wreathed by an angel, flanked by Brouncker on the
viewer’s left and Bacon on the right; books are set to the side;
instruments of observation and experiment are ready at hand; and a
clear, sunny vista opens at the back. Their motto on the coat of arms
above Charles’ bust is even clearer: Nullius in Verba – “in no-one’s
word.” The emblem served as the frontispiece for The History of the
Royal Society of London, commissioned in 1662 as part of the effort
to secure the royal charter, and the author, Thomas Sprat (1635–
1713), expressed this ideology in powerful words:
Figure 9.9 The Royal Society’s emblem, engraved by Wenceslaus
Hollar as the frontispiece to the first edition of Thomas Sprat’s
(1635–1713) History of the Royal Society of London (1667).
Charles II’s bust at the center, Brouncker on its left and Bacon on
its right. Note the barometers on the right, the clock on the left,
Hooke and Boyle’s air pump above Charles’ right shoulder, and a
large hanging telescope behind it. © The Royal Society.

TO THE KING.
SIR, OF all the Kings of Europe, Your Majesty was the first,
who confirm’d this Noble Design of Experiments, by Your own
Example, and by a Public Establishment. An Enterprize equal to
the most renoun’d Actions of the best Princes. For, to increase
the Powers of all Mankind, and to free them from the bondage of
Errors, is greater Glory than to enlarge Empire, or to put Chains
on the necks of Conquer’d Nations …
Thus they [the fellows of the Society] have directed, judg’d,
conjectur’d upon, and improved Experiments. But lastly … there
is one thing more, about which the Society has been most
sollicitous; and that is, the manner of their Discourse: which,
unless they had been very watchful to keep in due temper, the
whole spirit and vigour of their Design, had been soon eaten
out, by the luxury and redundance of speech. The ill effects of
this superfluity of talking, have already overwhelm’d most other
Arts and Professions …
They have therefore been most rigorous in putting in
execution, the only Remedy, that can be found for this
extravagance: and that has been, a constant Resolution, to
reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style:
to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men
deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words.
They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked,
natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a
native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical
plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans,
Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars …
The Society has reduc’d its principal observations, into one
common-stock; and laid them up in publique Registers, to be
nakedly transmitted to the next Generation of Men … as their
purpose was, to heap up a mixt Mass of Experiments, without
digesting them into any perfect model: so to this end, they
confin’d themselves to no order of subjects; and whatever they
 have recorded, they have done it, not as compleat Schemes of
opinions, but as bare unfinish’d Histories.
Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London
(London: J. Martin, 1662), Dedicatory Epistle

One needn’t be overwhelmed by seventeenth-century hyperbole nor

wonder when it was that Charles gave an example of designing
experiments – he didn’t (his uncle, Prince Rupert, did have
experimental interests). It’s the sentiments Sprat is conveying on
behalf of the Fellows of the Society that are illuminating, and they
are clearly Bacon’s, almost as if Sprat is paraphrasing the New
Atlantis: openness – all are invited; progress – boundless optimism
in human capacity for knowledge and responsibility towards “the next
Generation”; strict empirical accountability – ‘see for yourself’; and
an utter distrust in words – in verbosity, in slippery court language, in
highfalutin theories.
The Experimental Legacy
 Who Was Allowed in?
The Royal Society Fellows must have genuinely believed in these
ideas, but reality was much more complex. The Society, as the list of
its fellows demonstrates, wasn’t and couldn’t be open to “Artizans,
Countrymen, and Merchants.” The Fellows, by nature, shared
background and education; they had to be of the class that had the
leisure and means to participate. There were also more fundamental,
philosophical reasons why it had to be exclusive. Science could only
emerge if fellows could “keep in due temper” – if their discourse was
civil and their debates were settled by evidence and well-reasoned
arguments. And such a civil discourse could only be maintained if
people whose views and interests were too divergent had to be
excluded. Atheists or religious zealots, political radicals or just
quarrelsome characters weren’t welcome. Thomas Hobbes (1588–
1679), the most prominent English natural philosopher of his
generation, was a conspicuous exclusion, which made him wryly
aware of this gap between ideology and practice:

About fifty men of philosophy, most conspicuous in learning and

ingenuity, have decided among themselves to meet each week
at Gresham College for the promotion of natural philosophy.
When one of them has experiments or methods or instruments
for this matter, then he contributes them.
Hobbes, Dialogus Physicus, cited in Shapin and Schaffer,
Leviathan and the Air Pump, p. 113
Why fifty? “Cannot anyone who wishes come and give his opinion on
the experiments which are seen, as well as they?” asks Hobbes, and
bitterly answers: “not at all.”
Members of this club of experimental philosophers needed to be
trusted: to dispassionately observe experiments and observations, to
calmly deliberate arguments, to civilly express their reasoned
opinions to gracefully subject themselves to matters of facts even if
they found them surprising or disturbing. This was a manly club –
even the great scholar, writer and aristocrat Margaret Cavendish
(1617–1673), whose 1667 visit to the Society was awaited with
trepidation and carried out with great pomp and circumstance, wasn’t
considered for Fellowship. Fellows needed to be of independent
means – which no woman, even of nobility, was allowed to be – and
hence, one would hope, of an independent mind. And they were
required to possess the right moral aptitude – to be gentlemen. In his
writings, Boyle shaped the character of this new person of science
after his moral ideal of himself; the Christian Virtuoso, as he called
his 1690 tract. Hobbes – opinionated, boisterous and suspect of
atheism – did not fit the bill. The technicians and servants operating
the instruments most certainly didn’t, and their names are never
mentioned – not even when injured by unyielding experimental
apparatus, sometimes fatally.
 The Air Pump
Yet it was not only presumptions rooted in class, ethics and religion
that shaped the Royal Society’s professed epistemology and its –
quite different – actual scientific practices. The mode of experimental
inquiry that the Society inherited, developed and shaped as modern
science was by its very nature exclusive and theoretically laden –
quite different from Bacon’s dreams and Sprat’s rhetoric. This is
particularly well demonstrated in the prize project of the Society’s
early years – Boyle’s experiments with the air pump, which were
carried out by the Pneumatical Engine designed especially for them
by Hooke (Figure 9.10).
Figure 9.10 The air pump Hooke designed and had constructed
for Boyle’s experiments. The cylinder (4) contains a piston that is
moved by the geared shaft (5) operated by the crank-handle (7).
Each time the piston is drawn down, it sucks air from the container
(A). The valve (X) is then closed, the piston rolled up and the
operation repeated until it becomes too difficult for the persons
working the handle. The operation can be reversed to condense
air into the container. The lid at the top (BD) with its stopper (K)
 allows the operator to insert the experimental apparatus into the
container.

This was a truly spectacular project. So much of everyday

phenomena seemed to be created or affected by air: respiration;
combustion; sound; the behavior of fluids; the velocity of fall. What
exactly was the role of air in all these? Inside the glass vessel, the
‘receiver,’ questions about air were answered by its removal. This
was a bold farther step in the direction set by Galileo and
Guidobaldo of interrogating nature by subjecting it to artificial means.
Galileo and Guidobaldo were at least mimicking real trajectories by
rolling inked balls; Hooke and Boyle were creating a wholly artificial
environment; an environment that could not, on principle, exist in
nature.
Most excitingly: the gentlemen gathered around the pump could
literally see, with their own eyes, what the answers were. These
were quite definitive: once the receiver was emptied of air, a bell
rattled inside would not be heard outside. Exhausting the air would
extinguish a candle, as well as the life of a canary – which could be
saved if air was quickly pumped back in. An empty bladder would
expand as the air was pumped out. Without air, a feather and a
metal bead would take the same time to fall from the top of the
receiver to its bottom – just as Galileo had predicted.
The spectacle, however, came at a price, both literally and in
terms of the Society’s avowed values. The air pump was a a set of
complex and very expensive piece of equipment, and by this fact
alone – exclusive: of the people who might be interested in such
experiments, only Boyle could afford one. Most people could not ‘see
for themselves’; they had to take ‘someone else’s words,’ and
Hobbes, again, curtly noticed: “Those Fellows of Gresham … display
new machines, to show their vacuum and trifling wonders, in the way
that they behave who deal in exotic animals which are not to be seen
without payment.” Boyle was also aware of this, and published his
experiments in a meticulous account of details – the ancient
rhetorical trope of enumeratio – which was to mimic, for the reader,
the genuine experience of witnessing the experiment:

First, then, upon the drawing down of the Sucker (the Valve
being shut) the Cylindrical space, deserted by the Sucker, is left
devoid of Air; and therefore, upon the turning of the Key, the Air
contained in the Receiver rusheth into the emptied Cylinder, till
the Air in both those Vessels be brought to about an equal
measure of dilatation. And therefore, upon shutting the Receiver
by re-turning the Key, if you open the Valve, and force up the
Sucker again, you will find, that after this first exsuction you will
drive out almost a whole Cylinder full of Air …
Robert Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanical
Touching the Spring of Air (Oxford: Robinson, 1662), pp. 11–
12

And so forth: detailed, accurate, impassive. Bacon’s rhetoric

pretends to “deliver so many things, almost in an equal number of
words,” as Sprat promised that same year. But it is still rhetoric:
Bacon’s readers could enjoy, at best, ‘virtual witnessing,’ mediated
by Boyle’s words. Even though Boyle’s was a “close, naked,” style, it
was still a self-conscious style.
 Vacuum in Vacuum
Perhaps the most problematic of Sprat’s promises was the ideal of a
“nakedly transmitted … mixt Mass of Experiments,” free of “compleat
Schemes of opinions.” One particular experiment demonstrates that
this was a pipe dream – the ‘vacuum in a vacuum’ experiment.
It was perhaps the most spectacular experiment of them all,
exporting into the new (and proudly English) apparatus, experimental
procedures and ideas developed in Italy, a generation earlier, by
Galileo’s disciples. The origin of these ideas was in the common
knowledge that suction pumps, used to remove water from mines,
could draw water only from depths up to 10 meters. The pumps
worked by creating a vacuum above the column of water in a pipe,
and the Aristotelian principle by which they were understood – that
nature didn’t allow vacuum and the water rose to prevent it – couldn’t
explain why they should stop working at any particular depth. For
Galileo, the limits of vacuum pumps meant that Horror Vacuui was
not a metaphysical principle but a physical property, with clear
physical parameters – it had certain power and no more. He even
concluded that a vacuum can be created, if momentarily. When, for
example, two polished marble slabs are separated from each other,
the air quickly and forcefully drives in, but in the extremely short time
before it refills it, the gap between them constitutes a vacuum.
Galileo’s disciples took the argument a step further. The limit of
the power of vacuum water pumps, they claimed, was actually a
direct consequence of the principle that made them work: these
pumps were another example of the ubiquitous principle of the
balance. The water column was not drawn towards the vacuum, they
claimed – there was no such thing as horror vacuui. Rather, the
water was pushed by the weight of the atmosphere into the space
above it, which, being empty, offered no resistance. Like a balance,
they explained, this could work as long as the atmospheric column of
air was heavier than the column of water on which it rested;
apparently, the atmosphere weighed the same as 10 meters of water
(or more accurately: an atmospheric column weighed the same as a
column of air of the same cross-section).
In 1641, a Roman professor of mathematics by the name of
Gasparo Berti (c. 1600–1643) decided to try the hypothesis by direct
experimentation (Figure 9.11, left): he sealed the bottom of an 11-
meter tube, filled it with water and sealed the top. He then opened
the bottom seal into a basin of water – and the water column
dropped, leaving a space above it. Following Galileo’s argument, he
claimed that this space was simply empty – a void; a vacuum. In
1644, Galileo’s student Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647), with his
own student Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703), constructed a more
efficient version of Berti’s experiment (Figure 9.11, right). They
replaced the water with mercury, which, being 13.5 times heavier,
dropped when the column surpassed 76 centimeters (above line
NO).
Figure 9.11 Two stages of the vacuum experiments. On the left:
Berti’s original experiment from 1640/41, with the ’40 palms’ (or
so) length of leaden pipe fastened to the wall of his lodging. When
the bottom valve R was opened, some of the water from the glass
flask CA on top of the pipe fell into the cask EF at the bottom. The
bell M was apparently an idea of one of the spectators – the great
Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680): if the space
remaining above the water was indeed devoid of air, he reasoned,
then striking the bell with the hammer N wouldn’t produce any
sound. This ingenious idea was only carried off in Hooke and
Boyle’s air pump. On the right: Torricelli and Viviani’s 1644 version
of the vacuum experiments. The tube is filled with mercury to the
top, closed (note the hand at B, bottom of the tube) and turned
upside down into a vat of the same heavy liquid metal. When the
hand at B is removed, the mercury column falls to 76 centimeters
(equivalent to the 10 meters for water). Both images are imagined
reconstructions by the Jesuit Gaspar Schott from his Technica
Curiosa (Wurzburg, 1664).
 This version of the experiment became known as the Torricellian
Experiment and won Torricelli fame as the inventor of the barometer
– the device to measure air pressure. Boyle imported it into the air
pump: if it were indeed the atmosphere that held the mercury column
up, the column should fall as the air was pumped out of the receiver.
And fall it did.
But what was in the space left above the mercury? According to
the Galileans and Boyle – nothing. It was simply a vacuum. Hobbes
didn’t agree – neither with the possibility of a void in general, nor with
the idea that the Torricellian tube or the ‘Boylean Machine’ produced
one. Already in May 1648 he wrote to Mersenne that:

… all the experiments made by you and by others with mercury

do not conclude that there is a void, because the subtle matter
in the air being pressed upon will pass through the mercury and
through all other fluid bodies, however molten they are. As
smoke passes through water.
Quoted in Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump,
p. 86

Boyle wouldn’t engage with Hobbes on the metaphysical question of

the very possibility of vacuum:

… it appears by Mr. Hobbes’s Dialogue about the Air, that the

Explications he there gave of some of the Phaenomena of the
Machina Boyliana, were directed partly against the Virtuosi, that
have since been honour’d with the Title of the Royal Society,
and partly against the Author of that Engine, as if the main thing
 therein design’d were to prove a Vacuum. And since he now
repeats the same explications, I think it necessary to say again,
that if he either takes the Society or me for profess’d Vacuists,
he mistakes, and shoots beside the mark; for, neither they nor I
have ever yet declar’d either for or against a Vacuum.
Robert Boyle, Animadversions upon Mr. Hobbes’s Problemata
De Vacuo (London: William Godbid, 1674), pp. 26–27

But was there anything – air or “subtle matter” – in the receiver after
pumping or wasn’t there? As far as Boyle was concerned, it was
enough that

… the Instrument … had been so diligently freed from Air, that

the very little that remain’d, and was kept by the Wax from
receiving any assistance from without, being unable by its
Spring to [affect the experiment].
Boyle, Animadversions, p. 94

In the long run, it was Boyle who won. The experimental tradition
created by the “Virtuosi … of the Royal Society” learned to display
the same indifference towards metaphysical worries. In their stead,
experimenters were happy to admit what came to be called
‘operational definitions’ like the one Boyle offered here for vacuum:
as long as “the very little that remained” didn’t affect the experiment,
the receiver could be considered empty. But the debate clarifies that
theory could always contest experiment. Pace Bacon, Boyle and
Sprat, nothing could be seen “nakedly.”
 Conclusion: The Independent Life of the
Instrument
Even though openness and language-free observation turned out to
be unattainable, progress was not an empty ideal. Yet the “increase
[of] the Powers of all Mankind” didn’t all come in the way Boyle and
the ‘gentlemen virtuosi’ expected. It had less to do with their
virtuosity and more to do with that of their rarely mentioned
instrument builders.
Hooke didn’t invent the pneumatic engine ex nihilo (nor did
Galileo the telescope, as we saw in Chapter 7). Glass balls had
already been used in optical experiments for centuries, and pistons,
cranks and valves were in common use by artisans of different
trades (like mining and waterworks). His basic design followed a
machine invented in 1650 by the Prussian civil servant and natural
philosopher Otto von Guericke (1602–1686), who traveled with it
around Germany, demonstrating how marvelously difficult it was to
separate two attached hemispheres once the air was exhausted
from between them (one could not conduct experiments inside von
Guericke’s sphere; the option of reaching into the receiver was
Hooke’s addition). Moreover, Hooke’s design was far from the last
one. In 1727, another Englishman and a member of both the Royal
Society and the Académie des Sciences – Stephen Hales –
presented a way to collect gases in Hooke-like glass spheres by
heating substances and letting the released fumes bubble through a
trap – ‘trough’ – of water. By the 1760s, a number of experimentalists
replaced the water in the trough with mercury, through which gases
soluble in water could also pass, and most eighteenth-century
chemical research revolved around experimenting on and theorizing
about the ‘airs’ collected in the glass vessels, whose shape was also
evolving. And already in 1679, a junior colleague of Hooke and an
employee of Boyle – the Frenchman Denis Papin (1647–1713) –
used the principles developed by the budding tradition of vacuum
machines to invent an apparatus whose future effects would be even
more dramatic than the trough’s. It was, originally, a ‘steam digester’
– a pressure cooker for bones – but observing the pressure valve
(which distinguished his invention from earlier versions, prone to
explosions) bobbing by the power of the steam, he realized that this
power could be harnessed. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen (1664–
1729), a blacksmith and Baptist lay preacher, received a patent for a
working application of this idea, inventing the “engine” – literally and
metaphorically – of the Industrial Revolution: the steam engine.
In the grand story about erecting the cathedral of science, these
mostly (though not always) anonymous instrument-makers were not
only the bricklayers, required for their labor and fundamental skills,
but also – to press the metaphor a little further – the master masons.
They not only carried traditional craft knowledge from generation to
generation, but also honed, refined and developed it for new uses.
They were obliged to do so: their livelihood depended on selling the
artifacts they produced, so those needed to be useful and affordable,
evolving to suit changing needs. So when Hooke felt obliged to pay
homage to his Royal Society employers, he retreated to the
traditional hierarchy between episteme and techne, writing:

… all my ambition is, that I may serve to the great Philosophers

of this Age, as the makers and the grinders of my Glasses did to
me; that I may prepare and furnish them with some Materials,
which they may afterwards order and manage with better skill,
and to far greater advantage.
Hooke, Micrographia, Preface

But when he came to discuss instruments directly, all Hooke’s

reticence and humility disappeared. Those “artificial organs,” as he
called them, brought “prodigious benefit to all sorts of useful
knowledge,” but even more excitingly,

By the means of Telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but

may be represented to our view; and by the help of
Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry;
hence there is a new visible World discovered to the
understanding.
Hooke, Micrographia, Preface

The “the makers and the grinders of … Glasses” didn’t only “furnish
… materials”; the mechanical world was very much a world
constructed by the mechanic. The innovations of the virtuosi
challenged the instrument-makers to come up with new ways to
gauge and query nature. At the same time, “the makers,” with their
own initiative and innovations, created a whole “new visible World”
for “the great Philosophers of [the] Age” to study.
 Discussion Questions
1. Is the discrepancy between the Royal Society’s ideology of
openness and its exclusionary practices important? Does it have an
ethical significance? An epistemological significance? Does it reflect
on science or our times?

2. What kind of relations do you see between early modern science

and early modern philosophy? Does science follow a philosophically
laid path? Is philosophy recruited to assist science? How?

3. Add Descartes’ life to the comparison suggested in question 3 of

Chapter 7. What kind of new persona does he present?

4. The inside of the glass vessel of the air pump is the only vacuum
on Earth. Does this represent a new stage of experimentation? Does
is say something about contemporary empirical science?

5. The ‘mechanical philosophy’ of Descartes and his disciples is

often described as a crucial pillar of modernity, with its mathematical
approach to nature and technological approach to the human
condition. Do we still live in a ‘mechanical era’?
Suggested Readings
 Primary Texts

Bacon, Francis, New Atlantis (London: Tho. Necomb, 1659),

www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2434.

Descartes, René, Principles of Philosophy (Principia Philosophiæ,

1644), Valentine R. Miller and Reese P. Miller (trans.) (Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1983), pp. 59–63.

Elisabeth, Countess Palatine and René Descartes, The

Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René
Descartes, Lisa Shapiro (ed. and trans.) (University of Chicago
Press, 2007), pp. 61–81.

Hooke, “Preface” to Micrographia (London: Jo. Martin and Jo.

Allestry, 1665), www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15491.
 Secondary Sources

On the Scientific Revolution:

Floris Cohen, H., The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical

Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Koyré, Alexandre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe

(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957).

On the history of optics:

Lindberg, David C., Theories of Vision from Al-kindi to Kepler

(University of Chicago Press, 1976).

On Descartes’ science and philosophy:

Garber, Daniel, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (University of

Chicago, 1992).

Schuster, John, Descartes-Agonistes: Physico-mathematics, Method

& Corpuscular-Mechanism 1618–33 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013).

On Boyle and the Oxford experimentalists (historically

accurate fiction):

Pears, Iain, An Instance of the Fingerpost (New York: Berkeley

Publishing Group, 1998).
Atkins, Philip and Michael Johnson, A Dodo at Oxford: The
Unreliable Account of a Student and His Pet Dodo (Oxford: Oxgarth
Press, 2010).

On Boyle and the Royal Society:

Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Gentility, Civility and

Science in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Chicago
Press, 1994).

On Robert Hooke and the Royal Society:

Shapin, Steven, “Who Was Robert Hooke?” in Michael Hunter and

Simon Schaffer (eds.), Robert Hooke: New Studies (Wolfeboro, NH:
Boydell Press, 1989), pp. 253–286.

Pumfrey, Stephen, “Ideas above His Station: A Social Study of

Hooke’s Curatorship of Experiments” (1991) XXIX History of Science
1–44.

On the New Science in its cultural context:

Gal, Ofer and Raz Chen-Morris, Baroque Science (Chicago

University Press, 2013).

Jacob, Margaret, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution

(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988).

On Galileo’s science:

Koyré, Alexandre, Galileo Studies, John Mepham (trans.) (Atlantic

Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1973).
Renn, Jürgen, Peter Damerow and Simone Riger, “Hunting the
White Elephant: When and How Did Galileo Discover the Law of
Fall?” (2000) 13 Science in Context 299–423.

On the instrumental tradition:

Bertoloni Meli, Domenico, Thinking with Objects: The Transformation

of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2006).

Landes, David S., Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the
Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983).

Lefèvre, Wolfgang (ed.), Picturing Machines 1400–1700 (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 2004).

On the mathematics developed for the New Science:

Mahoney, Michael, “Changing Canons of Mathematical and Physical

Intelligibility in the Later Seventeenth Century” (1984) 11 Historia
Mathematica 417–423.

Mancosu, Paolo, Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical

Practice in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996).

On Francis Bacon’s philosophy:

Rossi, Paolo, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, S. Rabinovitch

(trans.) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968).

On Boyle and the Royal Society, ‘virtual witnessing,’ etc.:

Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Gentility, Civility and
Science in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Chicago
Press, 1994).

Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump

(Princeton University Press, 1985).

On the experimental tradition:

Schaffer, Simon, “Glassworks: Newton’s Prisms and the Uses of

Experiment” in David Gooding, Trevor Pinch and Simon Schaffer
(eds.), The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 67–104.

Shapin, Steven, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century

England” (1988) 79 Isis 373–404.

On Charles I’s trial and execution:

Kesselring, Krista J. (ed.), The Trial of Charles I (Peterborough, ON:

Broadview, 2016).

Robertson, Geoffrey, The Tyrannicide Brief (London: Chatto &

Windus, 2005).
 10
Science’s Cathedral
◈
The Two Savants
 Robert Hooke
Putting the experimental ideology of the Royal Society into practice
was the role assigned to Robert Hooke (1635–1703) – who was
perhaps the first person whose entire career was defined by the
institutions and practices of the New Science he helped shape.
He was born on the Isle of Wight in the south of the English
Channel to Cecil Gyles and her husband John Hooke, a Church of
England priest. These were origins at once respectable and
peripheral: on the Isle, his family was notable enough to move in the
circles surrounding the court of the embattled King Charles when it
found itself in exile there in 1647. When his father died in 1648,
however, the 13-year-old Hooke took his small inheritance and went
to London. He became an apprentice to the famous portrait painter
Peter Lely (Peter van der Faes), but left a career in painting behind
when he moved to study at Westminster School, where he worked
for his tuition but was brilliant enough to be spared the famous cane
of master Richard Busby. In 1653, he continued to Oxford, again
working for his tuition and livelihood, and here his unique
combination of practical and theoretical talents found the outlet that
would make him such a pivotal figure in fashioning the experimental
practices of the New Science.
In 1656, Hooke found employment with Thomas Willis as a
“chemical assistant” in the latter’s anatomical-physiological
experiments. He thus affiliated himself with Wilkins’ “experimental
philosophical club” (see Chapter 9) and in 1658 was hired by Boyle
to be his experimental assistant and instrument designer. Hooke was
thus an active participant in the Royal Society’s meetings from early
on, but, telling of the Society’s character, his early contributions were
discussed as if presented by Boyle, his gentleman employer. This
was the fate, for example, of his discourse and demonstration of
capillary action from April 10, 1661. In November 1662, this
changed: Hooke was officially appointed the Society’s ‘curator of
experiments,’ substituting the more traditional, patronage-like
relations with Boyle with a modern salaried position. The salary,
however – £60 per annum – was withheld more often than not, and
the Society was always eager to count other promised incomes
against it. The Gresham Professorship of Geometry (Chapter 9)
which he was awarded in 1664 did provide a stable income, but the
Cutler Lectureship (after the benefactor John Cutler) that he was
awarded in 1665 was very difficult to collect, even though his notes
for these lectures contain some of his most innovative work.
When the Society looked for an impressive gift for the king to
smooth over their request for support, Hooke was asked to collect
his microscopical observations in a book, and the outcome became,
unsurprisingly, a bestseller: the microscopic images of the 1665
Micrographia, all in Hooke’s hand, were spectacular. Although the
microscope was about as old as the telescope (its exact origins
aren’t clear) and a number of books presenting microscopic
observations had already been published in the previous decades,
none came close to Hooke’s in the number, variety and quality of
images (see Figure 10.1). In 1666, following the fire that devastated
London, Hooke finally found a regular, well-paying position: he
became one of the three surveyors nominated by the city. Working
alongside his friend and colleague Christopher Wren (1632–1723),
who was one of the surveyors on behalf of the king, Hooke and the
other surveyors redrew London’s map, deciding on allocation of lots
and property boundaries. Alongside Wren (the architect of St. Paul’s
Cathedral), Hooke was the architect of some important edifices,
many credited to the former, like the memorial column to the London
fire and the Bethlehem psychiatric asylum – immortalized in the
colloquial ‘Bedlam,’ but demolished in the early nineteenth century.
Figure 10.1 Images from Hooke’s Micrographia: his microscope
and accessories on the left, and a fly’s eyes, observed through this
microscope, on the right. Note how the instruments relate to and
support each other. The lenses for the microscope at Figure 6 are
ground by the device in Figure 3; Figure 4 is a liquid-filled
microscope, and the refrangibility index of the liquids to be used in
it is measured by the device in Figure 2, etc. The beautiful drawing
of the fly’s eye highlights how much of observation (Hooke’s and in
general) is a work of art – both in the traditional and the modern
sense. No one fly can be held still and alive long enough to
capture all these segments (Hooke did try to get them drunk) – the
image is not a naked reflection of an observation, but a
construction from many ‘sittings.’ And note the painterly skills that
Hooke invests in making the image look as if it is a direct, ‘real’
observation: the play of light and shadow and the multiple
reflections of the window in the eye’s lenses.

From late 1660 until his death, then, Hooke was a very
‘modern,’ urban character: moving fast around London, working
professionally as a practical mathematician, experimental expert,
teacher, architect and inventor, keeping a diary and meeting his
colleagues to discuss scientific matters over cocoa in the new coffee
houses around town. He supported this feverish lifestyle with an
unrestrained regimen of self-medication, passing away in 1703
unhealthy but wealthy (he left some £10,000 in a chest in his rooms).
 Isaac Newton
While Hooke was establishing his credentials as an experimenter
and instrument builder in Oxford, Isaac Newton (1642–1726) was
gaining a name as a mathematical wiz in Cambridge. Like Hooke, he
was an orphan of a provincial clergyman, from a little town in
Lincolnshire on the east coast of England, and like him he had to
work as a servant-student until his talents shone through. Unlike
Hooke of the taverns and cafés, Newton was a recluse, yet he
seemed to have had an intellectual charisma that Hooke lacked. He
became such a prodigy student of the great mathematician Isaac
Barrow (1630 – 1677) that in 1669 Barrow resigned in his favor from
Cambridge’s newly established, prestigious Lucasian Professorship
of Mathematics. Newton’s notebooks from his student years
demonstrate why: they are full of extremely innovative ideas for
creating the type of mathematics that could meet Kepler and
Galileo’s challenge; mathematics that could capture real physical
bodies and causes – real motions, real forces (Chapters 7 and 9,
and see Figure 10.2 for an example).
Figure 10.2 An example of Newton’s early application of his new
mathematical tools to solve a physical problem (from a manuscript
written between 1666 and 1669). It is crucial to remember that
Newton never had a proof for the mathematical rigor of the bold
approximations he is making – he develops this infinitesimal
approach as he goes along.
A body moves uniformly in circle ADE around C counterclockwise.
In uniform motion, times are proportional to distances, so tAD∝AD.
Following Descartes, if the body is released at A to move freely, it
will continue uniformly along the tangent AB, and for an
infinitesimally small time, Newton assumes AB=AD. The ‘little line’
BD therefore represents the centrifugal force at point D – it’s the
 distance this force would take the body, if allowed. Newton permits
himself to assume that for infinitesimally short time tAD, CDB is a
straight line, and this enables him to use the Euclidean theorem
AB2= BD•BE. He then adds the assumption that the centrifugal
force works like gravity, so according to Galileo, BD is proportional
to the square of the time: BD∝tAD2 or BD∝AD2. A series of simple
transformations leads Newton to the conclusion that the centrifugal
force of the orbiting body is proportional to the radius divided by
the square of the period: f ∝ R/T2. Merging this with Kepler’s Third
Law, according to which for the planets T2∝R3 (the square of the
period is proportional to the cube of the distance from the Sun)
Newton concludes that the centrifugal force on the planets is
inversely proportional to their distance from the Sun: f ∝ 1/R2.

With his secure position as a faculty member at Trinity College,

Newton settled into a much quieter life than Hooke: the traditional life
of a university scholar and teacher. His fame as a mathematician
spread, and his work on optics made him a name in the Royal
Society (and created a rift with Hooke, who found it lacking). But
Newton was just as – perhaps more – engaged in his alchemical
work and prophetic Biblical exegesis as his mathematics. In alchemy
and optics, he demonstrated practical skills that almost paralleled his
mathematical ones, and his optical experiments, though contested
and debated, gained him almost as much renown as his celestial
mechanics. His diagram in Figure 10.3 represents the most
celebrated of these experiments: the ‘Crucial Experiment,’
demonstrating that white light, pervading all creation, is not the
homogenous entity it was always assumed to be, but a mixture of
colored rays.

Figure 10.3 Newton’s ‘Crucial Experiment,’ demonstrating that

light is not fundamentally white, but a mixture of elementary
colored rays. The ray entering the hole in the shutters on the right
is focused by the lens and refracted by the prism. Colored rays fall
on the screen, arranged vertically. The further away the screen is,
the more the colored rays separate. Each separate (colored) ray is
allowed through a hole in the screen and through another prism.
The important finding is that each ray is refracted at the same
angle and keeps its color. It means that the original refraction
didn’t change the light – or the second refraction would have
changed it again. Rather, that refraction revealed the essential
properties of the primitive elements of light: a color and a
refraction index. The colored rays (the colors of the rainbow) are
not modifications of white light, but its constituents.
 The publication of the Principia Mathematica Philosophiae
Naturalis in 1687 – whose core insight we’ll follow below – made
Newton a celebrity well beyond the circles of the New Science and
earned him the uncompromising hostility of Hooke, who thought that
he himself deserved much more credit than he’d received. Newton
was involved in a similarly famous priority debate with the German
polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) – over the invention
of the infinitesimal calculus – but it’s very important not to fixate over
these debates. Science, as we’ve discussed from Chapter 1, is not a
contest whose goal is set in advance, but a cathedral built by many
hands. What we will see in this final chapter is what a complex,
collaborative effort the celestial mechanics of the Principia was. To
the protagonists, however, credit was very important. Newton waited
until Hooke’s death in 1703 to publish his Opticks – the subject of
their earlier debate – and become the Secretary of the Royal
Society, which he brought back from the disarray into which it had
fallen after the death of Oldenburg and most of the early members.
He moved to London, became Master of the Mint, was knighted, and
devoted most of his energy in his remaining years to consolidating
his influence and securing his legacy by having his disciples
appointed to influential positions and his detractors kept away from
them. Newton’s brilliance and innovativeness and his role in shaping
modern science are undeniable, but the demigod status he has
acquired in the epic of science owes more to those political skills
than to his intellectual ones.
The Correspondence: Forging a New
Question
 The Falling Earth
But in their prime, the two were still on speaking terms, and on
November 24, 1679, Hooke wrote a letter to Newton and sent it from
London to Cambridge. He had just been elected Secretary of the
Royal Society, following the death of its founding Secretary, Henry
Oldenburg. Hooke, you’ll remember, had been the Society’s curator
of experiments since 1662, responsible for presenting the gentlemen
members of the Society with serious yet entertaining demonstrations
at their weekly meetings. It was a thankless role. On the one hand,
he was the one professional experimental natural philosopher
among amateurs; on the other: a paid employee among leisurely
gentlemen, subservient to their whims. Hooke was keenly aware of
the discrepancy and his relations with Oldenburg – the only other
paid employee of the Society – were tense. Hooke always suspected
Oldenburg of making commerce with his ideas (as did Wren) and
instigating quarrels between him and other savants. As the newly
appointed secretary (an appointment destined to be short and
unsuccessful), Hooke was therefore happy to disregard past conflicts
and – he wrote to Newton – officially invite the famous
mathematician to correspond with the Society.
This wasn’t only a show of cordiality. As discussed in Chapter 5,
the Royal Society, like other academies, fashioned itself as a ‘global
institution of knowledge,’ and its success was closely tied to its
emergence as an international focus of such correspondence. It
aspired to be the audience which researchers sought and the
institute that donned acceptance and prestige, and indeed letters
came from all over Europe: from savants as well as merchants,
missionaries and travelers, from Asia and the New World. Hooke
was inviting Newton to move under the Society’s wings.
So Hooke begins his letter with the appropriate pleasantries,
presents some of the Society’s recent undertakings and then moves
on to the question that truly interests him. “I shall take it as a great
favour,” he writes,

if you will let me know your thoughts of that [hypothesis of mine]

of compounding the celestiall motions of the planetts of a direct
motion by the tangent & an attractive motion towards a central
body.

Newton, The Correspondence, Vol. II, p. 297

Hooke was proposing to look at the planetary orbit as a physical

effect, a ‘compound’ of two causes: rectilinear motion at uniform
velocity along the tangent to the orbit, and a rectilinear attraction
towards the central body – presumably the Sun.
This was a truly incredible idea. Rather than moving in the
harmonious circular motion expected of a heavenly body, Hooke was
suggesting that the planet is just stumbling along. It’s constantly
falling towards the Sun, somehow avoiding falling on the Sun
because of a second motion – an independent motion constantly
diverting it. Both motions are in a straight line, and the curved motion
around the Sun – the orbit itself – has no independent status. It
doesn’t express any celestial perfection: it’s merely a contingent
effect of a complex causal process.
 In hindsight, we may miss how difficult this suggestion was to
understand, let alone accept. First, because we are accustomed to
the idea of the planets and the Sun gravitating towards each other.
Secondly, it may seem that Hooke’s suggestion flows directly from or
is an extension of the works of his predecessors, from Galileo and
Kepler to Descartes. But in fact, by the time he wrote to Newton,
Hooke had been attempting to explain the idea of “compounding the
celestiall motions” to his colleagues and employees at the Royal
Society for some fifteen years, with little to show for it. Many
questions were asked about the properties of planetary orbits, but
even after Kepler it didn’t occur to anyone but Hooke to ask why the
planets orbit in the first place; and why they go around the Sun
(within the Royal Society milieu, there was no longer a question that
they orbit the Sun and not the Earth). The unquestioned assumption,
since Antiquity, has been that they just do – it is in their nature. As
we shall soon see, even Newton didn’t immediately understand
Hooke’s suggestion nor grasp its significance.
Hooke was presenting a great innovation, but as we have said
about every great innovator we've discussed, and as is always the
case, he was drawing on existing resources – which takes nothing
away from the novelty of his ideas.
Indeed, we should by now be able to recognize these resources.
The idea of ‘compounding’ – the idea that a curved trajectory can
result from two rectilinear motions – had been Galileo’s great
contribution (Chapter 9 and Figure 10.4). Galileo had in turn been
developing the insights of Renaissance mechanics, represented in
Chapters 5 and 9 by the work of Niccolo Tartaglia. Galileo was
interested in terrestrial motion – the motion of projectiles and
especially of cannon balls. For this reason, his curves were open –
the famous parabolas. But as Tartaglia’s struggles testify (remember
the discrepancy between the free drawing on his frontispiece and the
formal diagrams in the book), even these open curves had been
difficult to imagine; it was very difficult to conceive of a continuous
‘curving’ of one straight-line motion (the forced motion caused by the
gunpowder) by another straight-line motion (the natural motion
downward caused by heaviness).
Figure 10.4 Galileo’s experimental investigation of the idea that
the trajectory of a projectile is composed of two independent
motions – a horizontal ‘violent’ thrust and vertical ‘natural’ fall –
and that together they combine to create a parabolic path. He rolls
balls down an inclined plain and lets them shoot freely off the end
of it, marking the point of their fall. In this manuscript, he seems to
have reconstructed the trajectories, but in others he dips the balls
in ink and lets them do the drawing. He then measures the
distance they traveled (800, 1,172; 1,328; etc.) and looks for a
square proportion with the height from which they were rolled
(300; 600; 800) – the proportion constituting a parabola. He’s very
 aware that the material conditions – friction, inaccuracies –
prevent the figures from being exact, and the calculations around
are attempts to reduce the figures he obtained to the proportions
he is seeking. Historians debate whether he found the outcomes
of these experiments satisfactory.

Galileo thus offered Hooke one set of resources to draw on.

Kepler provided another. In Kepler’s work – which he knew well –
Hooke found physica coelestis, the term Kepler coined for his new
astronomy, which was to be the study of the real motions of the
heavenly bodies and the real forces operating between them.
Hooke’s decision to follow Kepler’s idea was far from trivial:
expanding the dominion of astronomy into physics was an ambitious
and controversial novelty, as Kepler himself had been keenly aware.
“Physicists, prick up your ears!” he wrote humorously (but completely
seriously), “for here is raised a deliberation involving an inroad to be
made into your province” (Johannes Kepler, New Astronomy
(Astronomia Nova, 1607), William H. Donahue (trans.) (Cambridge
University Press, 1992), p. 89).
When Hooke wrote to Newton about “compounding the celestiall
motions of the planetts,” he was proposing that Kepler’s celestial
physics could and should be the same as Galileo’s terrestrial
physics. This insight was original to Hooke; he couldn’t have found it
in Kepler or Galileo. As innovative as both had been, neither Kepler
nor Galileo had suggested that the innovations each brought to the
study of his respective realm – Galileo to terrestrial motions and
Kepler to celestial ones – could be applied to the other.
 For the idea that all motions – terrestrial or celestial – should be
explained by the same mechanical laws, Hooke had to turn to
Descartes. In Descartes, he found that rectilinear motion in uniform
velocity is not a type of change (as was assumed since antiquity, we
saw in Chapters 2 and 3), but a state. This meant that “straight
motion” didn’t require any force to continue – only to stop, start, or
change speed or direction: rectilinear, uniform motion required no
explanation. And that implied – against Kepler’s firm belief – that any
curved motion is derivative, that it is always a deviation from uniform
rectilinear motion, and that this ‘curving’ is what requires explanation.
This cluster of ideas was becoming common wisdom for the
mechanical philosophers of the generation after Galileo, but it was
Descartes who formulated them in the way that Hooke was to adopt:
as a law of nature, true of all bodies in the world – whether celestial
or terrestrial.
 The Falling Stone
These were the main resources Hooke was drawing upon. We
should stress again: that he had such resources does not mean that
his suggestion to Newton (which came to be called ‘Hooke’s
Programme’) was not profoundly original. We’ll discuss this
originality later; in the meantime, let’s return to their correspondence.
Late in 1679, when Newton received Hooke’s letter, he was still,
albeit known and respected, the junior of the two, and he answered
respectfully and very promptly – on November 28, within four days –
although with some reluctance. He had not heard of Hooke’s
hypothesis, he writes, and has been away from any similar studies
for all kinds of personal reasons. But so as not to come across as
completely lacking in manners, he offered a thought experiment for
Hooke’s consideration (Figure 10.5).
 Figure 10.5 Newton’s diagram from his November 28, 1679 letter
to Hooke. The view is from above the North Pole, as it is, so east
is on the left and the Earth rotates from right to left. It represents
two contradictory lines of thought. In the first, a stone falls from the
top of the tower A to the east, towards D, because, being further
away from the center of rotation than B at the bottom of the tower,
the eastward component of its motion is faster. This is a
demonstration both of the motion of the Earth and of Galileo’s
insight – that the ‘natural’ and ‘violent’ motions of a projectile
continue independently, and its trajectory is the combination of
both. In the second line of thought, the stone is allowed to fall
through the Earth, and it describes a spiral towards E until coming
to rest in the center C. As Hooke would explain in his reply (Figure
10.6), this contradicts the very insight the first argument illustrated.

Whereas Hooke’s hypothesis dealt with the annual motion of the

planets (including the Earth), Newton’s idea concerned the Earth’s
daily motion – its rotation around its own axis. Consider Newton’s
diagram: imagine a very tall tower BA, he suggests, and let a stone
fall from its top, A. The Earth is moving to the east towards G on the
left of the diagram – we are looking down from the North Pole.
Where would the stone fall? “The vulgar,” says Newton, namely
those who either follow Aristotle or simply let themselves be guided
by common sense, would answer ‘backwards’ – to the west of the
tower or the right of B in the diagram. The reasoning here is
common-sensical (and indeed, experience shows, this is the answer
most current science students tend to give): the tower seems to be
what connects the stone to the moving Earth, so once the
connection is severed and the stone starts falling, the Earth – the
bottom of the tower – should rotate away from it to the east. This
was the traditional argument against Copernicanism: since we don’t
see clouds and birds drifting to the west, the Earth can’t be moving.
Copernicus, as we saw in Chapter 7, gave a different answer than
that of the “vulgar”: ‘the Earth’ is not just the solid part which lies
under our feet, he insisted (following Aristotle). It is the sphere of the
elements, extending to the Moon, moving together as a whole. The
stone, according to the Copernicans, participates in the rotation of
the Earth whether or not it touches it solidly (or through the tower),
and would therefore fall just under the tower.
The correct and surprising answer, Newton points out to Hooke,
is that the stone will fall to the east – with the motion of the Earth,
and further towards D in the diagram. This is because the top of the
tower is further removed from the center of rotation – which is the
center of the Earth – than its bottom, which means it is traveling
faster: the further away a point is from the center of rotation, the
larger is the distance it travels when covering a given angle. And
even though the stone falls down in a straight line, it does not lose
the motion it received at the top of the tower. It keeps moving in a
straight line east faster than the bottom of the tower. This was
Galileo’s great insight: that motion in one direction (down) doesn’t
cancel motion in another direction (east). The final, curved trajectory
of the stone would be a combination of these two straight-line
motions.
Newton makes the obvious point that the height of the tallest
tower is negligible in comparison to the size of the Earth, so this is
mostly a thought experiment. But if conducted very carefully and
repeatedly, he suggested (alongside a clever idea of how it could be
done) that one could expect the stone to fall significantly more often
to the east of the tower’s base than to its west.
 Newton’s Mistake
At this point, Newton added a casual remark: if the stone could
somehow fall through the Earth, it would spiral along DEC (Figure
10.5), until it would finally come to rest at the center of the Earth, C.
This is a strange mistake. Not by our criteria – as we have stressed,
judging the historical agents by what we believe to be true is not just
useless. It truly interrupts our work as historians, because it
obscures their motivations, dilemmas and resources, blocking our
view of how and why they shaped the beliefs we have inherited from
them. Newton’s addition was a mistake according to his knowledge.
To think that the falling stone would come to a rest, Newton had
to forget the very Galilean insight on which his original thought
experiment was based. Namely: that a body in motion would only
stop if there is a force to stop it, and that two (or more) motions in
one body don’t cancel each other. The stone would fall to the east of
the bottom of the tower because it continues to move in the
tangential motion given to it at the top of the tower. In order to come
to a stop at the center, this motion has to cease – but why should it?
Hooke, replying almost as promptly as Newton did (on
December 9), seized exactly upon this mistake with the diagram in
Figure 10.6. The stone would not fall to the center, he corrected
Newton (undoubtedly with some glee). Rather, it would orbit around
it, along the “Elleptueid” AFGHA. Only an additional cause –
something like resistance of air – would cause it to slow down along
AIKLMNOP and come to a rest at C.
 Figure 10.6 Hooke’s diagram from his December 9, 1679 reply to
Newton. The circle ABDE is the Earth, and the stone, like in
Newton’s thought experiment, is allowed to fall through it. But it will
only describe the spiral AJKLMNOP and come to rest at C if some
third force – say friction or resistance – will hinder the original
tangential motion. Otherwise, if only that tangential motion and the
fall are at work, the stone will orbit the center along AFGHA – just
as a planet orbits the Sun by a combination of a continuous ‘fall’
and an independent tangential motion.

Newton’s mistake and Hooke’s correction are extremely

interesting because they allow a glimpse into science at a moment of
great change, when ideas, categories and assumptions were being
shaped and reshaped, and when new questions and challenges
were intermingling with old habits of thought. Newton’s slip-up was
not a result of misunderstanding or disagreement. Quite the
opposite: the first part of his thought experiment – the fall of the
stone to the east of the tower – demonstrates that he understood the
new ideas better, perhaps, than Galileo and Descartes themselves.
Certainly, neither of these masters of the previous generations
offered such a virtuoso elaboration of what these concepts of motion
implied. The closest had been Galileo’s famous thought experiment
in support of Copernicanism (in a letter from 1624), in which a stone
is dropped from the top of the mast of a moving ship. But the case
and his analysis were much simpler than Newton’s: the ship moves
horizontally, and the stone falls directly at “the foot of the mast
precisely at that point which is perpendicularly below the place from
which the rock was dropped” (Finnocchiaro, The Galileo Affair (see
Chapter 7), p. 183). The stone falling ‘forward’ is a truly brilliant
explication of the idea that motions ‘compound,’ which is the very
reason why the stone can’t stop at the center.
So how could Newton be so confused about an idea he had
such a good understanding of? How could he forget what he had just
preached? Clearly, the instinctive assumption that a falling object
ends up at some bottom-most point simply took over once he was no
longer thinking carefully about it. Hooke did not make this mistake
because it was exactly the idea he was trying to get across: that the
fall of the stone and the motion of the planet are fundamentally the
same mechanical process. This notion follows directly from Galileo
and Descartes, yet Hooke was the only one to concentrate on it:
given the opportunity, the stone’s fall would turn into an orbit. The
beauty of this idea is the very reason why it was so hard to come to
terms with: the planet’s orbit is an outcome of its continuous fall
towards the Sun.
To Hooke, his idea didn’t seem much of an innovation at all.
He'd already introduced it to the Royal Society thirteen years earlier,
in 1666, in an almost casual way. “I have often wondered,” he said
then,

why the planets should move about the sun according to

Copernicus’s supposition, being not included in any solid orbs
… nor tied to it, as their center, by any visible strings; and
neither depart from it by such a degree, nor yet move in a
straight line, as all bodies, that have but one single impulse,
ought to do.

Birch, The History of the Royal Society, Vol. II, p. 91: May 23,
1666

The planets, Hooke was assuming without much ado, are “regular
solid bodies,” and as such should follow the same laws that apply to
all bodies. This is one of the most fundamental insights of the New
Science: there is no cosmos divided into Heaven and Earth, only one
world full of “bodies.” As bodies, they should follow the laws of
mechanics, which means, first and foremost, that they are supposed
to “move in a straight line,” unless there is “some other cause … that
must bend their motion into that curve.” What can this cause be?
How does it operate? How does it create the planetary orbits the way
the astronomers describe them?
 Setting the Question Right
This is where Hooke’s originality lies. Not in providing a solution – he
did not really have one, although he did have some important clues
he provided Newton with – but in setting the question. The question
did follow from the teachings of Galileo, Kepler and Descartes, and
in hindsight, it may seem as if one of them should have already
asked it. Hooke did not possess any new knowledge, but the fact is
that he asked, and they did not. There is a big difference, so we
learn, between having all the ingredients for a crucial new idea and
actually formulating it. If ‘Hooke’s Programme’ appears in hindsight
as a straightforward, even trivial, development of those early ideas, it
is because he succeeded (with a lot of effort and after much
frustration) to convince his peers to adopt it. The only celestial
mechanics we know are developed as an answer to his query, and
we cannot but read Hooke’s immediate predecessors through this
lens.
It’s therefore telling, historically and philosophically, to consider
the three on whose work Hooke drew – Kepler, Galileo and
Descartes – and see where he left that work behind.
Kepler had tried to apply physics to the heavens, but his physics
had not been mechanics. He neither thought that straight-line motion
should be the basis of the explanation of all motions, nor that the
planets were “regular solid bodies.” For him, it was still the case that
“circular motions (and hence revolutions) belong to the everlasting
bodies … ; [and] rectilinear motions certainly [belong] to evanescent
bodies” (Kepler, De Cometis, translated and cited by J. A. Ruffner,
“The Curved and the Straight: Cometary Theory from Kepler to
Hevelius” (1971) 2 Journal for the History of Astronomy 181). So
Kepler didn’t ask ‘why do the planets move in a curve?’ but ‘why do
the planets move?’ To Kepler, matter was inert – it resisted all motion
– so for him the business of celestial physics was to explain how the
planets move in the first place. His tentative answer, you’ll
remember, was that the Sun is the cause of their motion. It rotates
and drags the planets along by some “motive force,” which may or
may not be magnetism; perhaps it was light. So unlike Hooke and
his ‘compounding’ hypothesis, for Kepler the rotation of the planets
was explained by the rotation of the Sun; one closed-curve motion
could only be created by another closed-curve motion.
Galileo had been closer to thinking about the heavens and the
Earth as following the same physical laws. His arguments for
Copernicanism had been based on analyzing motions on Earth – of
ships and tides – and in the Dialogues Concerning Two New
Sciences he gestured towards “the beautiful agreement between this
thought [about mechanics] and the views of Plato concerning the
origins of the various speeds with which the heavenly bodies
revolve” (Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences,
Henry Crew and Alfonso de Silvio (trans.) (New York: Dover
Publications, 1954), p. 261). But this was as far as he went in the
direction that Hooke would take. First, although his analysis of
projectile motion presented one motion curving another motion, he
did not assume that rectilinear motion had some unique
metaphysical status. His ‘neutral’ continuous motion, you may recall
from Chapter 9, was actually circular – along the surface of the
Earth. Moreover, despite the alleged “beautiful agreement,” he never
attempted to actually apply his considerations of terrestrial
mechanics to celestial motions.
Most surprising, and telling, is that Descartes never asked
Hooke’s question. After all, “every moving body tends to continue its
motion in a straight line” was one of his “Laws of Nature.” But, even
for Descartes, the idea that the motion of the planets was not truly
theirs was too far removed from common sense. Even he assumed
that they revolve because it is their nature – because such motion,
as Kepler said, “belongs to the everlasting bodies” – and didn’t see
that his own laws of nature implied otherwise. When he came to
speculate about the motion of the heavenly bodies, Descartes
seemingly forgot that bodies were supposed to move in straight
lines, unless their motion is curved, and wrote instead that “the
matter of heaven, in which the planets are situated, unceasingly
revolves” (René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (Principia
Philosophiæ, 1664), Valentine R. Miller and Reese P. Miller (trans.)
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), Part III, Article 30, p. 96 – emphasis
added). Look back at Figure 9.7: it shows a body in circular motion –
a stone in a sling – created by another circular motion – the whirling
hand. It claims that such a body has a tendency to continue in a
straight line, which for Descartes meant that if released from the
sling, the stone would continue along a straight line, tangential to its
circular trajectory at the point of release. The diagram is crucially
different from Hooke’s idea: it doesn’t treat the circular motion as
created by this straight-line motion. Descartes never asked the
question that Hooke would ask: how do two straight-line motions
‘compound’ into a curved, orbital trajectory?
We, in the post-Newtonian era, are taught as a matter of course
that the planetary orbit is an outcome of inertial motion along the
tangent and an attraction that constantly curves it towards the Sun.
And in hindsight, it may seem that it was a trivial elaboration of the
ideas that Galileo, Kepler and Descartes had already formulated.
But, so it turns out, no one before Hooke had drawn this picture in
their mind: that the planets – and we on Earth with them – constantly
tumble along, falling towards the Sun but never reaching it. Until it
did occur to Hooke, and then it seemed obvious to him, and the
obvious question followed: “I have often wondered why …”
Let’s return to the correspondence. We can now see why
Newton had missed Hooke’s point in the initial letter, and why
Hooke’s reply to his suggested experiment piqued Newton’s
attention. Not only did Newton positively dislike being caught in error,
he now recognized the importance of Hooke’s hypothesis and again
replied within four days (December 13, 1679). Newton understood
immediately where he got confused – and denied he ever did – and
cunningly tried to work out how much of the solution to his own
question Hooke already had. Why did Hooke think that he could get
a closed-curve orbit (presumably an ellipse, but any neatly closed
orbit) from two rectilinear motions? Why not something like the
complex trajectory in Figure 10.7, where the planet keeps changing
its path? Newton presented the diagram as if it was the outcome of a
calculation, but there is no reason to take his word for it. What is
crucial is that Newton, having now grasped the significance of
Hooke’s proposal, immediately put his finger on the extreme
challenge it represented, which was both cosmological and
mathematical-physical: how can we think of the orbit as an effect?
The heavenly orbit had always been a symbol of perfect order and
harmony. Its circular shape was a direct consequence of this
perfection, and required no further explanation. This assumption was
so deeply entrenched in cosmology and astronomy that most
working astronomers still didn’t understand Kepler’s idea of physics
of the heaven (an idea which by the time of the correspondence was
seventy years old). For them, Kepler’s ellipse was still a combination
of two circular motions – a deferent and an epicycle – as in
traditional astronomy from Ptolemy through Copernicus.
 Figure 10.7 Newton’s diagram from his letter to Hooke of
December 13, 1679. Newton accepts Hooke’s correction, but
questions his conclusion: why should the body moving by a
combination of free fall and tangential motion describe a neat
orbit? Why not this complex trajectory? Put the other way: why
should we assume that the neat orbits of the planets are produced
by such a combination? Does Hooke have an independent
argument to support his hypothesis?

How, Newton was asking Hooke, could such orderliness be

created by mere mechanical causes? How could the curve be
closed, so it would repeat itself in an orderly way?
Had Hooke been able to answer the question on his own, he
never would have requested Newton’s assistance. What he could
offer, three weeks later (January 6, 1680 – perhaps Christmas
caused a delay), were three principles along which a solution to his
answer may be constructed. He had already published these
principles some ten years earlier as a short text called “System of
the World,” which provides another opportunity to peek at science in
the making; in it we can recognize both the immediate origins of
these principles and the marvelous originality of putting them
together.
First, writes Hooke, one must assume that there is a relation
between the planet’s distance from the Sun and its velocity. Kepler
captured this relation with his Area Law, which is clearly what Hooke
has in mind, although he formulates it wrongly.
Secondly, the attraction from the Sun that curves the rectilinear
motion along the tangent into an orbit must diminish with distance.
Hooke again has Kepler in mind; this attraction should be something
like light – the other long-distance force connecting the Sun to the
planets. Light, Kepler had reasoned, expands like a sphere around
the source of illumination. The surface of a sphere grows as the
square of the distance from its center (we would say: {A = 4πr2};
seventeenth-century mathematicians would drop the constants and
say: {A α r2}). Hence, the amount of light falling on each point of this
surface diminishes as the square of the distance from its source: the
famous inverse square law. When he'd written the System of the
World, Hooke hadn't been sure what the law governing the decline of
the attraction from the Sun was. But by the time of his letter to
Newton, the similarity between the spherical expansion of light and
the spherical expansion of this attraction convinced Hooke that they
must follow the same law. This attraction – that both he and Newton
would now call ‘gravity’ – diminishes by the square of distance, and
he suggested that Newton should include this in his calculations.
 Finally, Hooke suggests a law governing the relation between
force – here the attraction from the Sun – and velocity: {f α V²}. That
is: force is proportional to the square of velocity: if a certain force is
required to bring a given body from rest to a certain velocity,
doubling this velocity requires four times the force. This presumably
arises from his own work on springs (although it is difficult to
reconstruct his reasons).
Newton must have decided that this was as much as he could
learn from his collaborator/competitor Hooke, for he no longer
bothered to respond. A couple of weeks later, on January 17, Hooke
tried one last time to initiate an exchange, with a summary of what
would now become the challenge of the new celestial mechanics:

It now remains to know the proprietys of a curve Line (not

circular nor concentricall) made by a centrall attractive power
which makes the velocitys of Descent from the tangent Line or
equall straight motion at all Distances in a Duplicate proportion
to the Distances Reciprocally taken. I doubt not but that by your
excellent method you will easily find out what that Curve must
be, and its proprietys, and suggest physicall Reason of this
proportion.
Newton, Correspondance, Vol. II, p. 313

Newton never answered this letter either.

 Conclusion: The New Celestial Mechanics
When thinking about the correspondence between Hooke and
Newton as a crucial and representative moment in the emergence of
celestial and terrestrial mechanics as we know it, two related issues
must be noted. One is how complex mechanical thought and
celestial physics have become over a couple of generations: forces
governed by complex laws; complex ratios between forces and
motions; complex relations between distances, velocities and the
shape of trajectories. Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and their immediate
correspondents and disciples may have hoped that the application of
mathematics to natural philosophy would reveal a simple and
certain, mathematical-like structure to nature; instead, it made it look
more and more complex.
The other issue is Hooke’s suggestion that the planetary orbit is
not only an effect, but indeed an effect of a ‘compound’ of causes.
This is very far from the harmonious, perfect motion which the
heavenly bodies had always been assumed to have. The orbit,
according to Hooke, is an outcome of a contingent balance between
competing forces and motions. Had either the original velocity of the
tangential motion, or the rate of decline of the attraction between the
Sun and the Earth (or both), been different, the orbit would have had
a different shape. A slight change to this velocity or this force law
and there would have been no orbit at all: the Earth would fall on the
Sun or shoot into space. The balance of forces and motions is
complex and precarious, and Hooke’s answer to Newton’s question
of ‘how does one get a neat orbit from all of this’ is, in a nutshell:
‘one does not.’ We should be content if we find that the orbit is more-
or-less stable – that we are not going to fall onto the Sun soon.
Four and a half years after the correspondence, in the summer
of 1684, Edmund Halley (1656–1742, he of the Halley’s Comet
fame) undertook the journey from London to Cambridge. Halley, one
of the most active members of the Royal Society (and later the
Astronomer Royal), had a story and a question to relate to Newton.
Had Newton heard about the following speculation? If one assumes
that the Sun attracts the planets by a force decreasing by the square
of the distance, so it went, one can construct elliptical planetary
orbits, as decreed by Kepler. This idea had become a favorite topic
of discussion in the coffee houses where the Royal Society circles
meet, Halley said. Recently, he told Newton, he had been dining with
Hooke and Wren – Hooke’s friend, collaborator and business
associate – and when they came to this topic, Wren said that he had
tried the calculation and failed. Hooke (whose tenure as secretary
was short and disappointing and by now in the distant past)
responded that he knew how to do it, but did not want to reveal the
solution yet. He wanted others to try and fail first, so they would
appreciate his achievement. Wren proceeded to offer a wager: a “40
Shillings book” to the first person who would perform the feat. Since
Hooke did not claim the book, and knowing “the philosophically
ambitious temper that he is of,” Halley could not believe he had the
solution. Would Newton care to join the discussion?
 To Halley’s surprise and delight, Newton replied that he had
already produced the demonstration a few years earlier, referring
presumably to work done immediately following, and instigated by,
the correspondence with Hooke. Yet he could not retrieve the
alleged paper, promising instead to recover the calculations and
send them shortly. Halley returned to London, perhaps skeptical, but
by November he could report to the Society that he had received the
promised paper (Figure 10.8): De Motu Corporum in Gyrum (On the
Motion of Bodies in Orbit).
Figure 10.8 Newton’s first manuscript version of De Motu
Corporum in Gyrum (On the Motion of Orbiting Bodies) – the
series of drafts of the Principia. The diagram on the upper right is
explained in Figure 10.9. The top-right diagram is a proof that
Kepler’s Area Law holds for all orbiting bodies: the radius vector of
a body moving around a center of force traverses areas
proportional to time. The fairly simple proof is explained below.
The bottom-right diagram is an advanced version of the
construction of the law of force from Figure 10.2.
 Figure 10.9 Newton’s demonstration that Kepler’s Law of Areas
applies to all bodies orbiting around a center of attraction. The
diagram first appears in Newton’s De Motu (see Figure 10.8) and
this version is from the Principia. The diagram on the right has
lines added to explain the demonstration. Note how Kepler’s so-
called ‘2nd law,’ which for him was but an empirical approximation,
receives in Newton’s hands mathematical status. It allows Newton
to use areas as representations of time in his analysis of the
planetary motions.

De Motu, nine tightly written and drawn (and scratched and

marked) pages, did not exactly answer Hooke’s challenge or Halley’s
question, but it offered much in exchange. It comprised three
definitions, four hypotheses, four theorems, seven problems and a
number of corollaries and scholia. Into those, Newton packed the
mechanical knowledge of the time, ‘Hooke’s Programme’ for physics
of the planetary motions, and his own highly original, highly
idiosyncratic mathematical wherewithal. The definitions cover
centripetal force – his newly coined term, designating the type of
attraction towards a central body that Hooke had in mind; inherent
force; and resistance. The second hypothesis is Descartes’ law: that
bodies in rectilinear motion continue to move in uniform velocity
unless forced otherwise. The third and fourth are taken from Galileo:
that motions are combined in a moving body (according to the
parallelogram rule) and that motion under force covers distances
proportional to the squares of time. The first theorem proves Kepler’s
Area Law in the most general way (and using the simplest of
mathematics) for every body forced into orbit around a center of
force (the proof is in Figure 10.9). The second theorem develops a
geometrical formula for calculating the force law governing any
particular orbit from the proportion between periods and distances (a
development of the one sketched in Figure 10.2). The fifth corollary
to this theorem plugs in Kepler’s third law – the proportion between
the square of the times and the cube of distances – to deduce the
inverse square law for our Sun and planets. Problem Three
demonstrates that for a body moving according to Kepler’s first law –
on an elliptical orbit with its center of power in one of the foci – the
‘centripetal force’ declines with the square of distance. This is the
reverse of Hooke’s challenge, which was to construct an elliptical
orbit by assuming an inverse square law of attraction, and as close
as Newton ever managed to provide an answer to that original
question. But this diminishes nothing from his achievement. Kepler’s
laws, enigmatic and empirical, turned out to follow directly from the
mathematical-physical structure of nature. The inverse square law of
force, offered by Hooke but without support and inexplicably dropped
in idle London conversations, had been turned, in Newton’s hands,
into the key that tied them together.
 Halley was so impressed with De Motu that he did not relent
until he convinced the Cambridge recluse to turn the little tract into a
book. It was to be published under the auspices of the Royal Society,
of which Halley was soon to become the ‘clerk,’ so he could see it to
print himself. Newton completed the manuscript within eighteen
months, and it was published the following year (1687): Principia
Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (The Mathematical Principles of
the Philosophy of Nature). A second edition appeared in 1713 and
the final, expanded edition in 1726.
 Coda: The Principia
Experience tells that a curious twenty-first-century student
introduced to the works of Galileo, Kepler, Descartes or Hooke also
requires some historical tools to recognize that they are relevant to
what she studies in her science classes. The first impression the
same student has when faced with Newton’s Principia Mathematica
is usually that of familiarity. Indeed, she requires historical sensitivity
to recognize that it is, in fact, quite different from what she is taught
as Newtonian Physics.
This, more than historiographic tradition, is what makes the
Principia a proper ending for this book. But a few words about this
cathedral of science are in order, primarily because for Newton’s
contemporaries, the Principia was a cathedral in quite a literal sense,
and Newton – its high priest: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in
night, God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light” was the epitaph
that Alexander Pope composed for Newton in 1730. Not long
thereafter, Voltaire suspended his usual cynicism to echo: “the
catechism reveals God to children, but Newton has revealed him to
the sages.” These words expressed more than just admiration – to
Halley, directly involved in the laborious production of the Principia, it
still seemed closer to revelation than a human creation, and he
prefaced it with an “Ode to Newton”:

Lo, for your gaze, the pattern of the skies!

What balance of the mass, what reckonings
 Divine! Here ponder too the Laws which God
Framing the universe, set not aside
But made the fixed foundations of His work
… Then ye who now on heavenly nectar fare,
Come celebrate with me in song the name
Of Newton, to the Muses dear;
for he Unlocked the hidden treasuries of Truth:
So richly through his mind had Phoebus cast
The radiance of his own divinity.
Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.1

The eulogies to Newton may read as quite over the top, but the
three books of the Principia are indeed composed as if deciphering
the very “Laws which God, framing the universe … made the fixed
foundations of His work,” and the approach sketched in De Motu is
magisterially laid out. Newton begins with a set of “Definitions” and
“Axioms, or Laws of Motions.” Then comes the First Book – “The
Motion of Bodies” – in which Newton lays out his new mathematical
tools and demonstrates how to apply them to his definitions and
axioms to solve and prove increasingly complex problems and
theorems concerning the motions of bodies orbiting according to
‘Hooke’s Programme.’ The Second Book deals with “The Motions of
Bodies in Resisting Mediums.” These are the motions we know
around us – within the atmosphere and in water, so if the First Book
prepares the way to deal with what in traditional cosmology used to
be the heavenly realm, the Second Book deals with the terrestrial
realm. But there are no longer distinct realms: the definitions and
axioms laid out at the beginning are true of all bodies and all
motions. This deep insight of the New Science is celebrated in the
Third Book: “The System of the World,” in which Newton shows how
the “phenomena” – namely Kepler’s laws, as expressed by the
moons of Jupiter and Saturn – follow the “mathematical principles”
developed in the First Book.
Calling his book The Mathematical Principles of the Philosophy
of Nature, Newton points to the work he is attempting to emulate and
surpass: Descartes’ Mathematical Principles. And in one
fundamental way, Newton follows Descartes’ lead better than
Descartes himself. Descartes demanded that only mathematizable
elements be allowed into natural philosophy, but with him this
demand remained mostly a philosophical aspiration. Newton put it
into practice. His very elements are quantities. Instead of ‘matter’
and ‘motion’ he defines “Quantity of Matter” (“density and bulk
conjoint”) and “Quantity of Motion” (“velocity and quantity of matter
conjoint”). But by the third Definition Newton veers sharply from
Descartes, breaks the latter’s decree that there is nothing in the
world but matter and motion, and introduces the third element at
work in Hooke’s Programme and in his own De Motu: force. Newton
had been studying the mathematics of force since his student years,
and the correspondence with Hooke had apparently convinced him
that Descartes’ philosophical requirements were too restrictive: a
physica coelestis, as imagined by Kepler, can’t be achieved without
giving force an independent ontological status, as Hooke did in his
Programme. So Newton defines “innate force of matter,” which is the
force by which bodies resist change of motion (or rest); “impressed
force” – the force which causes such change; and “centripetal force”
– like the attraction he had discussed with Hooke, which during the
correspondence they began to simply call ‘gravity.’ He then returns
to quantities, and defines “the quantity of force” from three different
perspectives: absolutely, measured by acceleration, and by
acceleration over time.
Before turning to apply these quantities to the analysis of nature,
Newton does feel the need to provide them with a metaphysical
framework. In Descartes’ spartan matter-and-motion universe, all
motion was strictly a relative change of place: whether I walk through
the door or the doorway slides around me (or whether the doorway
and I were moving simultaneously in opposite directions) is merely a
matter of perspective. But adding real forces to the fundamental
elements of the world, Newton had to establish a real distinction: it is
I who moved, not the doorway, because it is I who starts and stops
and turns – it is I who accelerates and decelerates. So it is in me, not
in the doorway, that the force resides.
But how can this distinction be made? What is the difference
between a body which accelerates because it experiences real force
and the body whose change of place is only apparent, an artifact of
the motion of bodies surrounding it? The difference between real and
relative motion requires a frame of reference independent of the
moving things, a frame of reference against which I was moving and
the doorway – not. Newton provides that frame by postulating an
“Absolute Time” and “Absolute Space”: a vessel in which the objects
of the world are and a duration in which the objects move, time and
space existing prior to and independently of the objects. This is not
an easy idea – Newton was later sternly criticized for it – and he
illustrates it with a little thought experiment. Imagine a bucket of
water hanging on a wound-up string. When the string is allowed to
unwind, the bucket spins around the water, which first remains still.
When the water gradually starts spinning with the bucket, it rises
against the bucket’s side. But when the bucket spins and the water
rests, the water’s relative motion – its motion relative to its immediate
environment, the bucket – is high. When the bucket and water spin
together, the water’s relative motion is low. Why does the water
change – why does its surface curve – when it spins with the
bucket? It has to be because it moves absolutely, argues Newton –
not relative to the bucket, but with respect to absolute space!
With the elements of his mathematical natural philosophy
defined – quantity of matter and motion; force; absolute time and
space – Newton continues the difficult but extremely fruitful synthesis
of Descartes’ and Hooke’s insights with his own “Axioms, or Laws of
Motion.” The first law is a neat combination of Descartes’ two Laws
of Nature: “Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform
motion in a straight line, unless compelled to change that state by
force impressed on it.” The second law is a strictly mathematical
version of the idea of force entailed in Hooke’s Programme: “Change
of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and is made
in the direction of the straight line in which this force is impressed.”
The third law adds symmetry to the developing structure: “to every
action there is always opposed an equal reaction.” A series of
“Corollaries” then teaches the reader how to conceive these laws of
motion and force. The first, simplest corollary is a good example: “a
body, acted by two forces simultaneously, will describe a diagonal of
a parallelogram in the same time as it would describe the sides of
those forces separately.” This is the ‘parallelogram of forces’ rule
from De Motu, and the attentive reader might recognize a strategy in
its Principia formulation. The parallelogram of forces entails Galileo’s
insight that different motions can be combined in a body without
eliminating one another. It is the idea that played such a crucial role
in his correspondence with Hooke, articulated as both a physical law
of nature and a workable mathematical tool. It can then be used for
constructing (and proving) much more complicated and less obvious
claims about nature.
This is indeed a powerful strategy. Newton’s use of it to
generate increasingly surprising propositions and endow them with
seemingly mathematical certainty may explain the enchantment
expressed by Halley, Pope and Voltaire – an enchantment shared by
many of their contemporaries. The treatment of Kepler’s Area Law –
taken quite directly from De Motu – provides another early and
simple, yet powerful, example. Newton begins “Book One” with
laying down his innovative “method of first and last ratios,” which
enables him to deal mathematically with singular points along a
trajectory of motion. He then takes the Area Law, which for Kepler
had been nothing more than an empirical generalization, and with a
combination of simple Euclidean geometry, physical assumptions
and mathematical approximations of questionable rigor, proves that
this law applies to any body orbiting a center of force (Figure 10.9).
With the Area Law now a theorem, Newton can express time
geometrically. A few propositions later he uses this capacity to
construct a simple geometrical expression, deducing from the
dimensions and period of an orbit the law by which the attraction
between the central body and the one orbiting it diminishes with
distance. A few propositions later, this geometrical formula for the
calculation of force laws is used to reveal the law governing the orbit
for which the exercise is carried out: an ellipse with the attracting
body in one of its two foci; the orbit Kepler assigned to the planets
around the Sun. The force that bends planetary motions into
Keplerian orbits, it turns out, declines by the square of the distance
between the two bodies. The attraction between the Sun and the
planets obeys the inverse square law – the law that Kepler
established for light; that Hooke applied to gravity on Earth and later
applied to his Programme; and that Newton himself, earlier in life,
had calculated for (the centrifugal force of) the planets. As we
already saw in De Motu, with the inverse square law, Newton ties
Kepler’s laws into a coherent mathematical-physical whole, and in
the Third Book it acquires another crucial significance to which we’ll
return below. But in the First Book Newton is careful to show that his
commitment to the inverse square law is strictly limited by empirical
considerations. He teaches his readers to calculate force laws for
orbits of a variety of curves and also adds a series of corollaries that
show how different force laws would have followed had Kepler’s
‘Harmonic Law’ (the proportion between the square of a planet’s
period and the cube of its distance) been different. Deep into the
book, in Propositions 53–55 and 66–68, he teaches the reader how
to handle complex orbits, which are interrupted by attraction from a
third body, as with the Earth orbiting the Sun together with the Moon:
by treating the orbit itself as if it’s rotating.
Originally, Newton had planned to add to the highly technical
Book One a second book, explaining this new way of conceiving
Heaven and Earth “in a popular method, that it might be read by
many” (as he writes in his introduction to the final Book Three). This
early “Treatise of the System of the World” was eventually published,
but only posthumously (Figure 10.10; the book is still readily
available: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=DXE9AAAAcAAJ).
In a decision that clearly marked the exclusive, elitist route that
modern science would take, Newton replaced the proposed “popular
method” with the deliberately technical and defiantly difficult “Motion
of Bodies in Resisting Mediums.” He had realized, he wrote to
Halley, that he didn’t want to be drawn into debates by people whose
philosophical agendas outweighed their mathematical skills. Science
was now for the professionals.
Book Two, as it came to print, was thus a late addition.
Historians often read it as a long argument against Descartes’
vortices theory: motion in resisting mediums is too complex to allow
explaining planetary orbit. Its Section III, for example, deals with “the
motion of bodies that are resisted partly in the ration of their velocity
and partly as the square of this ratio,” and its concluding scholium
summarizes the resistance of spherical bodies in fluids arising “partly
from the tenacity, partly from the attrition, and partly from the density
of the medium.” Section IV analyzes mathematically the point Hooke
had made to Newton in his December 9, 1679 letter (Figure 10.6):
resistance would turn an orbit into a spiral towards the center of
attraction.

Figure 10.10 Newton’s System of the World. Note how the

diagram turns Hooke’s abstract diagram from the correspondence
with Newton (Figure 10.6) into a didactic tool. A cannonball shot
from the top of a very high mountain V will fall to Earth at D, E, F
or G according to the force with which it was shot. If this force is
strong enough, the cannonball will never complete its fall, and will
continue to orbit around the Earth along BAVAB: a cannonball on
Earth and a planet ‘falling’ on the Sun follow fundamentally the
same process.

Replacing the original “System of the World” with the final, more
technical version of Book Three did more than limit it to “readers with
good mathematical skills.” It turned the book from an explication of
the principles of the new celestial mechanics into an argument for
their power. Newton presents careful tables of the periods of the
planets as well as those of the moons of Jupiter and Mercury; the
best measures of planetary distances; outcomes of pendulum
comparisons at different heights and in different places around
globe; the results of his own experiments on falling bodies (many of
those available only or corrected for the second edition); and more.
All, Newton shows, fit well within the structure erected with the
mathematical-physical theorems of Book One:

Proposition I: That the forces by which the circumjovial planets

(Jupiter’s moons) are drawn off from rectilinear motion and
retained in their proper orbits tend to Jupiter’s center and are
inversely as the squares of the distances of the places of the
planets as the squares of the distances of the places of those
planets from that center.
Proposition III: That the force by which the Moon is retained in
its orbit tends to the Earth and is inversely as the square of the
distance of its place from the Earth’s center.
Proposition XX: To find and compare the weights of bodies in
different regions of our Earth.
Proposition XXIV: That the flux and reflux of the sea arise
from the action of the Sun and the Moon.
Proposition XL: That the comets move in some conic
sections, having the foci in the center of the Sun, and by radii
drawn to the Sun describe areas proportional to the times.
This overwhelming array of phenomena establishes more than the
empirical efficacy of the mathematical-physical tools developed in
Book One: it demonstrates their universality. Newton’s “System of
the World” succeeds in realizing the plan Hooke had sketched in his
own text of the same name: to show that the attraction that curves
the motion of the planets into an elliptical orbit is not just a force
unique to the Sun (as Kepler had thought). Rather, it is the same
force that ties all moons to the planets they orbit and with whom they
orbit the Sun; the same force that makes stones fall towards Earth;
and the same force that ties every particle of matter to every other
particle. Perhaps the most spectacular argument for this universality
is the famous “Moon Test”: from the astronomical measures of the
Moon’s orbit, Newton calculates that the Moon’s acceleration
towards the Earth is 1/602 of the rate of acceleration on Earth. Since
the common estimation of the Moon’s distance from Earth is 60
Earth radii, it follows that the force which holds the Moon to the Earth
also obeys the inverse square law – just like the force between the
Sun and the planets. Obeying the same law implies that this is the
same force. Emanating from Earth suggests that this force is simply
gravity, even if it reaches all the way to the Moon. The conclusion is
the core of the Principia’s achievement: all celestial and terrestrial
attractions are one and the same – universal gravitation, following
the inverse square law.
This “catechism [which] revealed him to the sages,” however,
came at a steep price. Book Three is riddled with approximations,
compromises and bold generalizations. In the case of the Moon Test
itself, Newton admitted to Roger Cotes, the editor of the second
edition, that he had to ‘help’ the numbers in order to produce the
neat calculation. The choice of Jupiter’s moons as a prime example
was also far from innocent: they provide a much more orderly
example than any of the motion with the solar system. Most
importantly, Kepler’s Laws were an idealization: a planet could be
expected to orbit the Sun in an orderly ellipse, covering areas
proportional to time, only if the Sun and the planet were the only two
bodies attracting each other. Newton was acutely aware that the very
idea of universal gravitation prescribed a fundamentally different
scenario than that prescribed by Kepler’s fascination with divine
orderliness and by the Ancient Greek ideals of the perfection of the
Heavens. In the final version of De Motu, he admitted in a pensive
scholium:

If the common center of gravity is calculated for any position of

the planets it either falls in the body of the Sun or will always be
very close to it. By reason of this deviation of the Sun from the
center of gravity the centripetal force does not always tend to
that immobile center, and hence the planets neither move
exactly in ellipse nor revolve twice in the same orbit. So that
there are as many orbits to a planet as it has revolutions … and
the orbit of any one planet depends on the combined motion of
all the planets, not to mention the action of all these on each
other. But to consider simultaneously all these causes of motion
and to define these motions by exact laws allowing of
convenient calculation exceeds … the force of the entire human
intellect. Ignoring those minutiae, the simple orbit and the mean
among all errors will be the ellipse.
 Newton, De Motu III, in Herivel, The Background to Newton’s
Principia, p. 297

Nature is irreducibly complex and human knowledge is limited.

The planets don’t really revolve in neat orbits, and no science can
offer “exact law allowing of convenient calculation.”
This scholium, however, is nowhere to be found in the Principia.
In this opus magnum, Newton had no place for a modest admission
of the limits of science nor for the idea that “the ellipse” is nothing
more than “the mean among all errors.” In their stead, the General
Scholium concluding his great book offers a brash declaration of
unfailing knowledge of orderly nature:

… the whole space of the planetary heavens either rests (as is

commonly believed), or moves uniformly in a straight line, and
hence the communal centre of gravity of the planets … either
rests or moves along with it. In both cases … the relative
motions of the planets are the same, and their common centre
of gravity rests in relation to the whole of space, and so can
certainly be taken for the still centre of the whole planetary
system. Hence truly the Copernican system is proved a priori.
For if the common centre of gravity is calculated for any position
of the planets it either falls in the body of the Sun or will always
be very close to it.

Indeed, with Newton’s Principia, modern science had its

cathedral: incomplete, asymmetric, its divine aspirations never fully
hiding the traces of its human makers – an object to marvel at,
emulate, enhance and reshape.
 Discussion Questions
1. Is there something interesting to be learnt from the similarities and
differences between Hooke’s and Newton’s biographies on the one
hand, and the stark difference between their posthumous fame on
the other?

2. Can you suggest a way to think about the correspondence

between Hooke and Newton and the way knowledge seems to be
created in the exchange? Does it make you say something about
knowledge as social?

3. Look again at Figure 10.5. How could someone as skilled as

Newton make such a basic mistake in material he understood so
well? What does it say about the ideas discussed?

4. How can we think of Hooke’s innovation? Does it make sense to

say that he ‘invented a question’? Why didn’t this question come to
the mind of Kepler, Galileo or Descartes? Is this a reasonable query?

5. Does the idea that the Earth, and the other planets, constantly
‘falls’ towards the Sun but never makes it still seem strange? If it is,
what does it say about science that it assigns such an important role
to such a strange idea? If not, what does it say about us as
‘consumers’ of science that we have gotten used to an idea that was
so strange?
Suggested Readings
 Primary Texts

Hooke, Robert, “Address to the Royal Society” in Thomas Birch

(ed.), The History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1756–7).
Facsimile reprint in The Sources of Science, Vol. 44 (New York:
Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968), Vol. II, pp. 91–92.

Hooke, Robert and Isaac Newton, “Correspondence” in Isaac

Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, H. W. Turnbull (ed.)
(Cambridge University Press, 1960), Vol. II, pp. 297–313 (esp. pp.
300, 301–302, 305, 307–308, 312–313).

Newton, Isaac, “De Motu III-B” in J. W. Herivel (ed. and trans.), The
Background to Newton’s Principia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965),
p. 301.

Newton, Isaac, “Definitions, Scholium, Axioms” in Isaac Newton, The

Principia: Mathematical Principle of Natural Philosophy, I. B. Cohen
and A. Whitman (trans. and ann.) (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1999), pp. 403–418.
 Secondary Texts

Brackenridge, J. Bruce, The Key to Newton’s Dynamics: The Kepler

Problem and the Principia (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1996), https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?
docId=ft4489n8zn;brand=ucpress.

De Gandt, François, Force and Geometry in Newton’s Principia

(Princeton University Press, 1995).

Densmore, Dana, Newton’s Principia: The Central Argument, William

Donahue (trans.), 3rd edn. (Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 2003).

Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of

Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Gal, Ofer, Meanest Foundations and Nobler Superstructure: Hooke,

Newton and the Compounding of the Celestiall motions of the
Planetts (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002).

McGuire, James E. and Piyo M. Rattansi, “Newton and the ‘Pipes of

Pan’” (1966) 21 Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London
108–143.

Schaffer, Simon, “Glass Works: Newton’s Prisms and the Uses of

Experiment” in David Gooding, Trevor Pinch and Simon Schaffer
(eds.), The Uses of Experiment (Cambridge University Press, 1989),
pp. 67–104.
Westfall, Richard S., Force in Newton’s Physics (London: Macdonald
and Co., 1971).

1 In this and the following quotes from Newton’s Principia, I used

the 1729 translation by Andrew Motte with slight changes.
 Index
Abbasids, 130
Abraham, 130, 184
Accademia dei Lincei, 248, 259
Académie des Sciences, 335
Académie Française, 334
academies, the, ix, 334
Accademia Aldina, 334
Accademia del Cimento, 334
Agrippa, Cornelius, 206, 208
air pump, the, ix, 339, 344
Akkadians, the, 130
Albert
(Albertus Magnus), 143–145, 259
al-Bukha¯rıˉ, Jamal al-Din, 172
alchemy, 115, 177, 197, 200–201, 204, 276, 290–293, 331, 354
Alcuin of York, 119
Alexander, xii, 55, 103–104, 130, 148, 175
Alexandria, 27, 92, 101–104, 108, 161, 273, 307
Library, 101
Alhacen. See Ibn al-Haytham
Ibn al-Haytham, Abu¯ ʿAlı¯ al-H.asan ibn al-H.asan (Alhacen), 132,
137
Ibn al-Haytham, Abu¯ ʿAlıˉ al-H.asan ibn al-H.asan (Alhacen XE
‘Alhacen’), 190 See also Ibn al-Haytham
Al-Ma’mun (Abu Jaʿfar Abdallah), 131, 134
Almagest, xii, 95–100, 125, 132, 134, 219
al-Mansur (Abu Jaʿfar Abdallah ibn Muhammad), 130
Alphanus, 277–278
al-Razi, Muhammad ibn Zakariya (Rhazes), xiii, 128, 199, 274–275
al-Tu¯sıˉ, Nasir ad-Din (Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn al-Hassan
al-Tusi), 133, 173 See also Tusi Couple
al-Zahrawi, Abu’l-Qasim Khalaf ibn Abbas (Albucasis), xvi, 286–287
Amsterdam, xii, 107, 324, 331, 333
Andalusia, xiii, 17, 128, 140
Antikythera Mechanism, xii, 89, 116
Antiquity, viii, 63, 100, 176–184, 189, 213–215, 222, 266, 306
Late, 22
Apollonius, 96
approximation, 35, 83
approximations, xii, xvii, 89, 241, 353
Aquinas. See Thomas of Aquino
Arabic, xiii, xiv, xvi, 10, 95, 127–132, 138, 142, 166, 188, 198, 274–
278, 284, 286
Arabs, 127–128, 130, 161
Aramaic, xi, 77, 104, 185, 193, 206
arch, x, 7, 12–17, 30, 108, 319–320
stable, 16
Archbishop Raimundo (De Sauvetât, Raymond), 129
Archimedean, xiii, 153, 319, 322
Archimedes, ix, xvi, 94, 101, 129, 313–317, 327
Area Law, the, xv, 242
Aristarchus, xii, 90–94, 100, 222–223
Aristotelian, ix, 62–63, 66, 87, 96, 126, 132, 137, 141–145, 192,
197–198, 204, 219, 224, 254, 262, 273, 276–278, 284,
 292–326, 342
Aristotelianism, 61, 65, 103, 144, 148, 181, 206, 258, 295, 312, 324,
331
Aristotle, vii, xi, xii, xiii, xvi, 6, 22, 47, 54–103, 110–113, 124–132,
139–148, 159, 164, 183–184, 190–193, 198–200, 204–205,
211, 224, 238, 250, 273–275, 309–317, 322, 327, 330, 360
arithmetic, xiii, 113, 124–125, 275, 333
arithmetical, 324
Asclepius, 187
astrology, xvi, 42, 78–79, 130, 177, 196–197, 200–206, 210, 213,
276, 317
astrological, 202
astronomy, xii, xiii, 10, 22, 42, 74, 78–101, 110, 117, 125–126, 130–
132, 134–136, 145, 172, 197, 207, 210, 218–220, 224–227,
231–250, 258–262, 308, 320, 334, 357, 366
asymmetry, 5, 379
Athens, vii, viii, xii, 25, 33, 45–46, 54–55, 92, 101–105, 111, 125
Atlantic, the, 162
Atomists, 50, 53, 193
Atomism, 50
atoms, 51–53, 238, 273, 325
attraction, 294, 356, 364–370
Augustine, St. (Augustine of Hippo), vii, 22–34, 109–112, 126, 139–
144, 164, 181, 213–217, 252
autopsy, xvi, 301–303
Averroes. See Ibn Rushd
Averroists, 141

Babylon, 129, 183, 206

Babylonian observations, 83
Bacon, Francis, ix, xiv, xvii, 200, 204–211, 261, 330–340, 345, 347–
349
Bacon, Roger, 136, 204
Baghdad, xiii, 128, 131, 138, 274
Bald, 280, 283, 306
Barberini, Mafeo (Pope Urban VIII), 254
Barrow, Isaac, 352
Bayt al Hikmah, 131
becoming, 27–28, 34, 47
Bede, The Venerable, xiii, 110, 114–115, 117, 219
Beeckman, Isaack, 324
being, x, 27–28, 34, 47, 63–64, 72, 114, 143
belief. See faith
Bellarmine, Roberto, 250–254, 258, 329
Benedetti, Giambattista, 312
Berti, Gasparo, xvii, 342–343
Bible, the, xiv, 186, 207, 215–216, 250
bimaristan, 274
Birch, Thomas, 362
Black Death, the. See Bubonic Plague
Boëthius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 113, 125
Book of Nature, 257
Botticelli, Sandro, 147
Boyle, Robert, ix, xvii, 203, 330, 335–345, 348–350
Brahe, Tycho, viii, xiii, 135, 230–231, 258–259
Brecht, Berthold, 37
Brouncker, William, 336
Brunelleschi, Fillippo, xiii, 149–154, 166, 244, 319
Bruno, Giordano, viii, 214, 229–230, 234, 250–252
Bubonic Plague, the, 146, 296
Buridan, Jean, ix, 309–310, 320, 327
Burnett, Alexander, 297
Byzantine
culture. See Byzantium
Empire. See Byzantium
Byzantium, xi, xvi, 77, 111, 127, 130, 149, 189, 278, 286

Caesar, Julius, 102–104, 218

Cairo, 27, 92, 142
calendar, xi, xii, 70, 78–79, 89–90, 99–100, 117, 159, 172, 217–219
reform, 172
Cambridge, 351
Capella, Martianus, xii, 109–110
Carthage, 22, 25, 163
Casa de Contratación, xiv, 167–168
Casa de India, 167
Cassiodorus, Flavius Magnus Aurelius, 113
cathedral, the, x, xiii, xxi, 1–26, 30–33, 38, 52, 101–102, 117–120,
129, 149–151, 172, 176–177, 203, 236, 256, 265, 279,
287–289, 300, 327, 333, 346, 355, 379
Catholic Church, the, vii, viii, 9, 21–26, 31, 112–114, 119–120, 122,
125–126, 129, 140, 147–148, 169, 172, 207, 215–219,
229–230, 237, 246, 249–257, 260, 288, 328, 333, 350
Causal. See cause
Causation. See cause
cause, xiv, 3, 7–8, 60–66, 85, 90, 94, 127, 139, 192, 199, 204, 220,
224, 227, 241, 250, 255, 277, 308–310, 326, 328, 361–363
Cavendish, Margaret, 339
Celsus, 273, 290
Cesi Federico, 248, 254
Charlemagne (Charles the Great), 119
Charles the Great. See Charlemagne
Chartres Cathedral. See cathedral, the
China, 116, 160, 163–165, 170–172, 175, 218, 234, 273, 307
Chinese. See China
Christian. See Christianity
Christianity, viii, xiii, 10, 17–33, 37, 58, 60, 63, 87, 102–104, 108,
110–117, 126–149, 170–200, 206, 213–218, 256–257,
273–277, 280–284, 296, 302, 339
Chrysoloras, Manuel, 149
Church Fathers, 25, 126, 217, 252
chymia, 294
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, xiii, 105–108, 124, 127, 170
Cigoli (Lodovico Cardi), xv, 255–256
Cild, 280, 283
Clavius, Christopher, 171–172, 248
Cleopatra, 102–104
Collegium Romanum, 170
Colombo, Realdo (Realdus Columbus), xv, 266, 289, 304–305
Columbus Columbus, Christopher, 304
compromise, 25–29, 53, 90, 96, 139–143, 174, 193, 216–221, 225,
232, 241, 246, 257, 294, 315, 329
computus, xiii, 116–117
Constantinople (Istanbul), xiii, xvi, 111–113, 127, 135, 146, 161, 277,
286, 290
Constantinus, Flavius (Constantine the Great), 111
Constantinus Africanus, 277
contingency, xxi, 3, 15, 21–22, 37, 78, 143, 176, 226, 356, 367
Copernicus, Nicolaus, viii, xiv, xv, 7, 99, 219–237, 240–244, 250–
251, 258–259, 305, 360, 362
Cordoba, x, 16–17, 140
Cosimo de’ Medici, 189, 248, 254
cosmology, x, xi, 10, 20, 60, 68, 71, 74, 85–87, 96, 132, 148, 186,
223–226, 234, 246, 250, 259, 366
cosmos, xi, 21, 27, 40, 60–61, 63–64, 74, 83–87, 93–94, 99, 140–
141, 143–144, 183–184, 195–198, 211, 219–223, 229,
246–250, 268, 278, 291–292, 295, 308, 314–315, 362
Council of Trent, the, 216–219, 250
Counter-Reformation, viii, 217, 256
culture, xxi, 3, 10–14, 19–21, 25, 31, 35–37, 45–47, 53–54, 67, 78–
79, 83, 101–108, 114, 119, 122, 129–132, 137, 149, 171,
177, 213, 244, 255, 275

da Gamma, Vasco, 161

da Vinci, Leonardo, xvi, 147, 300–301
Damascus, 128–131
De Motu Corporum in Gyrum, 368, 371
de’ Luzzi, Mondino, 302
Dee, John, 195
deferent, xii, xiii, 95–98, 133, 220, 226, 240
della Francesca, Piero, xiii, 152
della Porta, Giambattista, xiv, 208–209, 213
Demetrius Phaeleron, 101
Democritus, 49
demon, the, 236
Descartes, René, ix, xvii, xviii, 323–333, 347–348, 353–358, 362–
365, 367–369, 380
Digby, Kenelm, 192
di-Leon, Moshe (Moses de León), 185
Dioscorides, Pedianos, xvi, 164, 284–286
discovery, xi, xv, 18, 36–39, 185, 190, 241–244, 247, 300, 304
dissection, 261, 264, 279, 298, 302, 305
Divine light, 145, 186
dome, x, 17, 69, 74, 151, 154
Domesday Book, 115
Dominican Order, xiv, 143–145, 181, 205, 230, 256
doxa, 35, 109
Drake, Francis, 162–163
Dürer, Albrecht, 300

Earth, the, x, xviii, 20, 58–63, 72–74, 87, 90, 93, 100, 106–107, 134,
196–198, 202, 219–244, 248–255, 311, 317, 322, 326–333,
356, 359–361, 364, 380
East India Companies, 167
eclipses, xii, 74, 78, 89–94, 170, 237
ecliptic, xi, xii, 73–83, 89, 92, 202, 221–222, 241
Egypt, xi, 23, 42–43, 46, 71, 83, 101–103, 129, 142, 146, 177–178,
189, 194, 206
Egyptian. See Egypt
empirical, xi, 7, 36–38, 53–56, 61–62, 72–74, 81, 86, 90–93, 100,
134–136, 144, 149, 182, 197, 200–208, 221, 224, 231–236,
 248, 261, 273–275, 295, 302–303, 311–312, 318, 327,
330–331, 338, 347, 370
empiricism, 66, 303
empiricist. See Empiricism
enlightenment, 24
enthusiast. See enthusiasts
enthusiasts, 230, 250
ephemerides, 165, 202, 246
Epicurean, 103
Epicurus, 49, 103
epicycle. See epicycles
epicycles, xii, xiii, 95–98, 133, 220, 225–226, 228, 240
episteme, 35–37, 45, 83, 109, 119, 149, 265, 346
epistemology, 26, 35, 67–68, 145, 206, 329, 333, 339
equant, xii, xiii, 95–99, 133–134, 225, 241
equinoxes, xi, 73–82, 92–94, 117, 218, 222
Erasmus, 290
Eratosthenes, 92, 94, 101
escapement, xiii, 116
estrangement, vii, 36
Euclid, xiii, xiv, xvi, 101, 124–131, 166, 172, 190–191, 275, 314, 317
Euclidean. See Euclid
Eudoxus, vii, xii, 87–90, 96, 101
Europe, xii, xiv, 7–10, 18, 22–24, 62, 89, 96, 111–114, 119, 129, 134,
140–146, 154, 157, 161–164, 169–172, 175, 182, 186–189,
204, 215–216, 219, 223, 231, 253, 261, 274–279, 283, 290,
305–307, 324–330, 336–337, 356
European. See Europe
Evelyn, John, 336
evil, vii, 23, 32
ex cathedra, 121
ex hypothesi, 121, 246
experience, xi, 24, 36, 49–62, 71–72, 144–145, 157, 165, 169, 289–
290, 315, 341, 360
experiment, xi, xv, xviii, 39, 47, 152, 208–210, 213, 243, 264, 273,
312, 318–319, 330–332, 334–345, 350, 354–355, 358–362,
365
experimental, xvii, xviii, 263, 295, 319, 333–335, 338–344, 349–351,
355, 358 See Experiment
expertise, x, 6, 78–79, 164–165, 172, 216, 234, 238, 289, 296, 304,
308
eye, the, xi, xv, xvii, 4, 21, 56, 80–81, 94, 107, 118, 136, 195, 238–
239, 244, 248–249, 256, 273–274, 286–287, 292, 327, 352

Fabricius, Hieronymus (Girolamo Fabrizio), 264, 304–305

facts, xv, xvi, 10, 15–17, 23, 27, 31, 34–35, 40, 48–51, 54, 60, 64,
72, 79, 85, 93–94, 100–102, 107, 111, 119, 129–132, 137–
140, 146, 203–204, 208, 215, 219–232, 236, 265, 281–282,
289, 301, 306, 311, 319, 322, 328, 331, 339–341, 356, 363
faith, 22–28, 112, 121, 130, 139, 140–145, 174, 181, 184, 194, 198,
211, 217, 229, 257, 358
Fibonacci (Leonardo Pisanus), 166
Ficino, Marsilio, 147, 189–190, 206, 213
final cause, 64
Florence, xiii, 9, 146–150, 157, 245, 249, 254–256, 331, 334
Florentine Camerata, the, 334
flying buttress, x, 2, 7, 16–18, 30
form, x, xiii, xvi, 1, 10, 21, 28–29, 56–60, 64, 74, 78, 104–106, 110,
121–123, 145, 165, 178, 185–192, 197–198, 228, 238, 262,
281, 317, 325, 327
forms
ideal, 27, 53, 184
mathematical, 37
perfect, xvi, 317
pure, 28, 35, 49, 56, 63
Foscarini, Paolo, 251
Fracastoro, Girolamo, 296
Franciscan Order, 145, 204
Francisci, Matteuccia, 179
Freud, Sigmund, 3

Galen (Claudius Aelius Galenus), ix, 95, 101, 108, 127, 177, 181,
192, 211, 273–278, 282–290, 296–306
Galenic tradition, 127, 274–278, 281–282, 284, 288, 291–292, 294–
295, 304
Galileo (Galilei, Galileo), viii, ix, xiii, xv, xviii, 6, 153, 157, 203, 207,
244–256, 258–262, 295, 308–310, 312–315, 317–329, 331,
333–334, 341–343, 345, 348, 352–353, 356–360, 362–365,
367, 369, 380
Genesis, xiv, 71, 74, 90, 160, 183–184, 194, 250
Genoa, 146–147, 161
geometry, xi, xvi, 15, 40, 42–44, 72, 83–85, 92, 96–99, 125, 131–
133, 150–151, 190–191, 201, 207, 225–228, 242, 313,
324–325, 333–334, 370
geostatic model, 225
Gerard of Cremona, 129, 277
Gilbert, William, 243
global commerce. See globality
global institutions. See globality
global knowledge. See globality
globality, 7, 161–175, 283, 307
God, x, xi, xiv, 1, 4, 7, 20–28, 33, 60, 71, 74, 121, 127, 139–145,
164, 178, 182–186, 190, 193–194, 197, 207, 214–217,
229–230, 234, 252, 289, 292–293, 310, 317, 331, 333
gods, 23, 85, 104, 139, 178, 196
good, 23–24, 27, 185
goods, 127, 132, 149, 153, 161–166, 171–173, 283
Gothic Cathedral. See cathedral, the
gravitas, 311
gravitation, 254
gravity, xviii, 1, 17, 176, 223, 310, 315, 353, 366
Great Chain of Being, x, 21, 28–29, 114, 184
Greek, vii, viii, xi, xii, xvi, 10, 13, 18–19, 23–25, 27, 33, 37–39, 45–
49, 53–55, 60, 66–68, 72, 77, 83–87, 90–95, 101–113, 118,
129–132, 137–138, 148–149, 166, 170, 177–178, 183,
186–187, 193–195, 206, 219, 252, 273–274, 282–286, 300
Gregory of Tours, 112
Gresham College, 335–336, 339, 341, 351
Guangzhou, 162
Guidobaldo (del Monte, Guidobaldo), xvi, 317–319
guilds, 118–120, 152, 169, 261, 286, 288
Gutenberg, Johannes, xiii, 154–156, 215

harmony, xi, 4–5, 38–40, 236, 293, 300, 366

Harriot, Thomas, 244
Harun al-Rashid, 131
Harvey, William, ix, xv, 261–266, 273, 276–278, 286–288, 294, 302,
305
Hausmännin, Walpurga, 179
heavenly spheres, the, 232, 235
Hebrew, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, 74, 77, 103, 128, 142, 184–186, 193, 206,
286
heliocentric, 93
Heliostatic Model, 225
Hellenism, xii, xiii, 25, 83, 100, 104, 108, 111, 115, 117, 127–134,
138–140, 172–174, 218–220, 227, 234, 266, 273–275, 277,
282, 300
Hellenistic
astronomy, xiii, 100, 117, 173, 220, 227
realm, xii, 104, 108, 127, 130–132
Helmontians, 296–297
heresy, 178–181, 216, 230, 250, 255–256, 329, 334
Hermes Trismegistus, 187–189
Hermetica, viii, 187–190, 206, 214, 290–291
Hildegard from Bingen, 279
Hipparchus, 92, 96, 101, 218
Hippocrates, ix, 101, 181, 266–267, 273, 276–278, 289
Hippocratic
tradition, ix, 266–268, 273, 276–277, 281, 286–288, 291–293
Hippocratic Corpus, ix, 266, 268, 273
Hobbes, Thomas, 339–344
Holy Roman Empire, 18, 114, 146–147
Hooke, Robert, ix, xvii, xviii, 336–381
horizon, xi, xiii, xvi, 69–81, 152, 202, 315–317, 322, 326
horses, x, 3, 10–15, 21, 31, 34, 47, 56–58, 78, 88, 92, 120, 130, 170,
192, 223
Hu¯la¯gu¯, 134, 173
Humanism. See Humanists
Humanists, viii, ix, 148, 170–171, 189, 217, 290, 300, 324, 330
humors, 268, 273, 276–278, 281, 295
Huygens, Christiaan, xvii, 321, 326
Hven, xv, 231–232, 237
hysteria, 3

Iberian Peninsula, 127, 163

Ibn al-Bayta¯r, Diya¯ʾ Al-Dıˉn, 284
Ibn Qurra, Thabit, 129
Ibn Rushd, ʾAbuˉ l-Walıˉd Muhˆammad Ibn ʾAhˆmad (Averroes), viii,
140–142, 276
Ibn Sina, Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn ‘Abdallah (Avicena), 129, 134, 141,
275–277, 284, 290, 305
Ignatius of Loyola, 169
impetus, ix, 309–310
India, iv, xii, 54, 103, 107–108, 146, 160–164, 167, 170
Industrial Revolution, the, 345
inertia, 310, 322, 364
inertial. See inertia
infinite space, 60
infinitesimal, xvii, 353–355
infinity, 49, 186
Institut de France, 335
instruments, xi, xvii, xxi, 81–84, 87, 92, 122, 134–135, 172–173, 180,
207, 231–233, 239, 244, 254, 258–259, 262, 279, 286–287,
291, 294, 311, 332–334, 336, 339, 345–346, 350–352
intellect, 27–28, 141, 144, 184, 207, 333
inverse square law, 240, 366, 370
Invisible College, the, 335
Isidore of Seville, 110
Islam, 127, 130–131, 138

Japan, 162–164, 170, 172

Jerusalem, x, xi, xiv, 6, 25, 69–70, 111, 160, 185, 283
Jesuits, the, viii, xvii, 169–175, 217, 232, 249–250, 255–256, 324,
343
Jesus, 25, 140, 169, 217–218, 230, 307
Jewish. See Jews
Jewish tradition, xi, xiii, xvi, 23, 70, 79, 120, 128, 140–144, 178,
183–185, 205–206, 218, 278, 286
Jews, x, xiii, 6, 103, 128–130
Sacrobosco (John of Hollywood), 125–126
Hunayn (Ibn Ishaq, Hunayn), 131, 274, 277
John of Seville, 129
Johnson, William, 297
Judaism, 25, 103, 139
judgment, 194, 275
Jupiter, xii, xv, 87, 201, 226–227, 235, 246–248

Kabbalah, viii, 181, 184–185, 192, 205

Kepler, Johannes, 363
Kepler’s laws, xv, xviii, 241–243, 366, 369–370
know-how, vii, viii, 13, 33, 114
knowing-that, vii, 18
Korea, 162–164, 172
Krämer, Heinrich, 179–181
Kublai Khan, 134, 172
Kuhn, Thomas, 99–100, 259

Latin, x, xii, xiv, xvi, 15, 20, 26, 50, 95, 104–106, 111, 114, 120–124,
128–129, 136–137, 141–145, 166, 170, 187–193, 206, 211,
219, 250–252, 273–277, 280–286, 299, 302
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 170, 355
Leucippus, 49
Li Zhizao, 171
Libavius, Andreas (Andreas Libau), 294
light, xiv, xvii, xviii, 18, 21, 28–30, 34–37, 51–52, 74–75, 80, 82, 84–
85, 90, 94, 136, 154, 186–187, 191, 201–202, 207, 238–
240, 243–244, 249, 293, 327, 332, 352–354, 363, 366
Light of Reason, 145
light, divine, 24
Lipperhey, Hans, 244
literati, 171
London, ix, xv, xvii, 118, 138, 170, 261–262, 266, 296–297, 330,
335–337, 350–351, 355, 368, 370
Lorenzo de’ Medici (‘il Magnifico’), xiii, 147, 152–153, 162
Lucretius, 50–53, 67, 148
Luria, Isaac, 181, 185–186
Luther, Martin, 215–219, 229, 290

Macao, 170–171
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 147
Maestlin, Michael, 237
Magellan, Ferdinand, 162
magical tradition, the, xv, 177–179, 185, 195, 198, 208, 211–213,
235
Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon), 142–145
Malacca, 165
Mallebarbe, Barbe, 179–180
Manuzio, Aldo, 334
mappa mundi, 171
Mara¯gha observatory, 134, 173
Marco Polo, 146
Mars, xi, xii, xv, 78, 80, 87, 195, 201–202, 226–227, 235, 238, 240–
241
Mary, 255
Masons, x, xiii, 6, 13–18, 26, 30, 33, 46, 108, 118, 152–153, 176,
179, 279, 286, 319, 346
mass, xiv, 3, 122, 199, 262
materia medica, 115, 276, 283–284
materia prima, 198
materia ultima, 198
mathematics, xi, xv, xvi, xxi, 3, 10, 36–38, 43, 56, 64, 67, 84, 96,
101, 113, 122, 125, 130, 149, 165–166, 169, 172, 217,
226–228, 236–238, 243–247, 308, 314, 317, 324–325,
332–333, 342, 348–349, 352, 367, 370
matter, x, xvi, 3, 14, 18, 21–24, 28–29, 38, 47, 50, 53, 56–64, 71, 82,
85, 93, 96–98, 110, 114, 127, 145, 184, 190, 192, 197–200,
 206, 228, 236–239, 250, 255, 262, 276, 291, 298, 312–313,
322, 325, 339, 344, 363–364
mechanical curves, 314
mechanical philosophy, 324–325, 328, 347
mechanics, 22, 210, 238, 262, 295, 308, 312, 322–324, 327, 354–
355, 357, 362–364, 367
Medici (the Medicis), 147, 162, 165, 189, 248
Mediterranean, 18, 23, 103, 114, 130, 161, 163, 176
Mercury, xii, xiii, xv, 87, 109, 112, 133, 190, 195, 201, 226–227,
234–235, 293, 295
Mersenne, Marin, 324, 344
method, 175, 273, 324, 332–333, 348
Mezquita, x, 16–17
Michelangelo (Buonarroti, Michelangelo), 147, 302, 304
microscope, xvii, 262, 346, 351–352
Middle Ages, xii, xxi, 10, 22, 62–63, 89, 110, 132, 134, 138–139,
145, 148, 177–181, 193–194, 197, 213–215, 238, 273, 279,
284, 288
mills, 9, 115
mixed sciences, 238, 314
momentum, 222, 310
money, 146, 328
Mongols, 134, 146, 161, 172
monotheism, viii, 23, 139, 174
Monte Casino, 127, 144, 277–278
Moon, the, x, xi, xiii, xv, 20, 60–63, 74, 82, 91, 117, 178, 201, 218–
221, 224–226, 232–236, 244–245, 248–249, 255–258, 360
Moses, 130, 189–190
motion, xi, xii, xv, xvi, xviii, 10, 48–63, 69, 75, 78–99, 132–134, 143,
196, 202, 220–228, 234, 240–242, 248, 250–255, 265,
308–317, 320, 322–327, 333, 353, 356–370
circular, 363
planetary, 364
rectilinear, 363
movable press, the, xiii, xiv, 123, 154–160, 174, 186, 215–216
musical consonances, xi, 18, 38–40
Muslim, viii, x, xiii, 10, 17, 30, 54, 96–97, 102, 127–148, 154, 161,
172, 190, 204, 225, 234, 274–278, 283–284
myth, 85, 108, 130, 202, 248, 252, 255
mythology, 24, 66, 71, 104, 140, 178, 181

natural philosophy. See philosophy, of nature

Neo-Platonism, 144, 184, 236
Newcomen, Thomas, 345
Newton, Isaac, ix, xvii, xviii, xxi, 3, 6, 66, 203, 210, 214, 349, 351–
371, 380–381
Nicholas of Poland, 181
Notre Dame Cathedral. See cathedral, the
Nullius in Verba, 336
numbers
irrational, 44
rational, 43
whole, 38, 42–44

observation, xi, xv, xvii, 54, 69, 71, 73, 75, 78, 81, 93, 142, 193, 218,
239, 249, 275, 336, 345, 352
observatory, xiii, xv, 134–135, 173, 220, 231–232, 237
occult, xiv, 185, 192–197, 205, 209–211, 284, 294
properties, 284
Oldenburg, Henry, 336, 355
optics, 134, 150, 190, 204, 238–239, 244, 259, 308, 327–328, 347,
352–354
orbits, xv, xviii, 72, 75, 87, 94–98, 220–236, 241–243, 249, 258, 319,
356, 361–370
order, xiv, 4–7, 21, 26–27, 33, 47, 52–58, 63–66, 71, 83–86, 90, 110,
114, 122, 134, 144, 170–171, 182–193, 198, 207, 210, 216,
220, 225–227, 238, 241, 314, 328, 334, 338, 346, 366
Osiander, Andreas, viii, 228–229, 251
Oxford, xv, 230, 266, 335–336, 350–351

Pacific Ocean, the, 160–162

Padrón Real, xiv, 167–168
Pagan. See Paganism
knowledge, 130, 142
science, 140–144, 204, 257, 275
Paganism, viii, x, 20–22, 26–28, 31, 139–141
palimpsest, xiii, 128
Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von
Hohenheim), ix, 210, 214, 290–296, 300, 306
parallax, 94, 223–224, 231
Paris, xvi, 1, 9, 31, 118, 120–122, 125, 141, 144, 146, 204, 279,
299–302, 310, 324
Bishop of, 141
Parmenidean, 49, 53, 72, 85, 102
Parmenides, vii, 47–60, 67–68, 193
passions, 45, 49, 217, 273
Peckam, John (Pecham), 136
Pepys, Samuel, 297
perfection, 4, 21, 38, 72, 85–87, 198–201, 255, 356
Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 148, 290
Petrus Lombardus (Peter Lombard), 125
Petty, William, 336
Peuerbach, Georg von, xii, 95
phenomena, 63, 71, 74–75, 83–90, 96, 99–100, 107, 136, 201, 210,
226–227, 243, 251, 277, 317–320, 341
philology, xii, 109, 206, 334
Philosopher’s Stone, xiv, 199
philosophy, xii, 10, 22, 25–30, 46–49, 53–55, 61–68, 83, 95, 103–
104, 108–109, 113, 125, 138, 140–145, 170, 177, 206,
229–230, 253, 275, 290–295, 308, 320–325, 330–331, 339,
347–349
of nature, 61, 64–66, 101, 139, 148, 190–198, 203–206, 210–211,
223–224, 244–246, 265, 273–279, 295–296, 308, 310,
313–315, 320, 333, 339, 367
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 147, 205–206
plague, xiv, 146, 185, 296–297, 307
planets, the, x, xviii, 20, 60, 73–74, 77–100, 107, 125, 132–134, 195,
201–202, 219–221, 225–250, 272, 276, 317, 353, 356, 359,
361–370, 380
Plato, vii, xvi, 27, 33–38, 42, 45–49, 53–60, 63–64, 67–68, 73, 83–
85, 102, 109–110, 127, 145, 183–184, 189–190, 196–197,
200, 205, 235, 273, 317, 332, 364
Plato’s Academia, 102
Platonism, xv, 25, 30, 44, 53, 103, 125, 141, 184, 196, 230, 235–
236, 276, 293
Platonist. See Platonism
Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), viii, xii, 106–109, 177
Plotinus, vii, x, 26–34, 47, 184
pneuma, 262–263, 273, 277
polis, the Greek, viii, 103
porcelain, 161–165, 169, 173
precision, xii, xvi, 89, 93, 100, 165–166, 231, 287, 308
Principia Philosophiæ, 364
Priscian, 125
Proclus, 125
projectiles, xviii, 309–310, 315, 317, 322–323, 357–359, 364
proof, xvii, xviii, 40–46, 131, 235, 353, 369–370
proper places, xi, 60–62, 313
proportions, xi, xii, xviii, 4, 39, 89, 235–238, 313, 358
Protestant Church, the, 217
Ptolemaic astronomy, xii, xv, 4, 96–99, 133, 172, 219–227, 233, 253
Ptolemy, vii, xii, xiii, xv, 83, 92, 95–101, 124–135, 148, 164, 193,
198, 219–221, 225, 235, 240, 275, 320
Pythagoras, xi, xiii, 38–39, 42–44, 124
Pythagoras Theorem, 44
Pythagoreans, vii, xi, xxi, 37–42, 45, 72, 85, 93–94, 183, 314

quintessence, 62
Qur’an, the, 140, 275

Rabanus Maurus, 110

Rambam (Moshe ben Maimon). See Maimonides
Ramus, Petrus (Pierre de la Ramée), 159, 175
reality, vii, 5, 38
realm of elements, the, x, xii, 20, 87, 222–224
reason, 22, 49–50, 56, 61, 85, 140–142, 145, 159, 193–194, 197,
200, 217, 224, 231, 250–252, 255, 332–333
Reformation, viii, 215–218, 229, 250, 256–257, 307, 328–329
Regiomontanus, Johannes (Johannes Müller von Königsberg), xii,
95, 225
Renaissance, viii, 129, 132, 138, 146–148, 182, 189, 204–206, 214,
219, 236, 244–246, 260, 288, 290, 307, 315, 320, 357
republic of letters, 157
retrograde motion, xii, xv, 79, 88, 96–97, 227, 246
Rheticus, Georg Joachim, 228
rhetoric, xii, 54, 104–106, 109, 124, 148, 169, 217, 312, 335, 340–
342
Ricci, Matteo, 171–172
Riccioli, Giovanni Battista, xv, 232–233
Roman Empire, viii, 18, 22, 25–27, 103–104, 114–115, 119, 139, 146
Rome, x, xii, xv, 13–14, 22, 27, 33, 89, 108, 111–115, 146–148, 151,
163, 170, 216, 230, 248, 254–256, 273, 300
Royal College of Physicians, the, 261, 294–297
Royal Society of London, the, ix, xvii, 170, 261, 335–339, 344–356,
362, 368, 371, 380–381
Ruffner, J. A., 363

Salerno, 127, 277–278

Salomon’s House, 207, 334
Sarpi, Paolo, 245, 248, 254
Saturn, xi, xii, xiv, xv, 80, 87, 95, 188, 201, 226–227, 234–235, 248–
249
saving the phenomena, vii, 83, 86–88, 99, 317
Schall, Johann Adam, 172
Scheiner, Christoph, 249
scholasticism, 132
scientia, xvi, 166, 174, 190, 204, 315–316
Scientific Revolution, the, 53, 99, 203
scriptures, the, 22, 141–145, 159, 178, 194, 249, 252
Sefer HaZohar, 185
Sefer Yetzirah, 184, 193–194
Sefirot, the, xiv, 185–186
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 108, 170
Sennert, Daniel, 294
Severinus, Peter (Peder Sørensen), 293
Siger of Brabant, 141
silk, 118, 154, 161–165, 169, 173, 282
silver, 26, 150, 163–165, 173, 199–201, 292
simple machines, xiii, xvi, 153, 313–317
Simplicius, 83
sky dome, xi, 70
sky, the, xi, xiii, 1, 17–18, 65, 69–71, 74–79, 92, 150, 173, 231, 315
Socrates, 35, 46–47, 54
Solomon, x, xiv, 6, 25, 31, 130, 185–186
solstices, xi, 73–78, 82
soul, the, 24, 28, 58, 125, 169–171, 190, 324
species, 53, 66, 127, 132, 164, 184, 196, 238, 298
Sprat, Thomas, xvii, 337–342, 345
Sprenger, Jacob, 181
stadion, 92
standardization, 154, 157
stars, x, xii, xv, 20, 60, 69–94, 106–107, 165, 180, 201–202, 218–
223, 226, 230, 235, 239–240, 244–246, 291
steam engine, the, 345
Stoicism, 25, 103, 108, 273
structure, x, xiv, xvi, 2, 13–18, 21–22, 30, 38, 46, 67, 104, 111, 114,
121, 123, 145, 151–152, 197–199, 246, 262, 298–301,
304–305, 320, 336, 367, 370
Sumerian, 130
Sun, the, x, xi, xiii, xv, xviii, 20, 51, 63, 70–73, 76, 93, 117, 178, 218–
236, 239–356, 361–368, 380
syllogism, 56, 273
Sylvius, Jacobus (Jacques Dubois), 302
symmetry, x, xvi, 5, 317, 319–320
Syrians, the, 104, 130

Takiyüddin (Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma’ruf al-Shami al-Asadi),

xiii, 135
Tartaglia, Niccolò Fontana, ix, xvi, 166, 174, 244, 315–319, 357
Techne, 45, 83, 149, 265, 346
Tehran, xiii, 128
telescope, xv, xvii, 233, 245–253, 258–259, 337, 345–346, 351
Tempier, Etienne, 141
Tertullian, 25–27, 111–113, 130, 217
theologians. See theology
theology, 30, 119, 125, 144–148, 170, 181, 190, 205–206, 215–216,
246, 250, 253–255, 333–336
theoria, 83–85
Thirty Years’ War, the, 328
Thomas of Aquino (Thomas Aquinas), viii, xvii, 99–100, 143–145,
174, 244, 259, 335–339, 345, 380
Thomism, viii, 143–145
Thomson, George, 296–297
Toledo, 127–129, 277
tools, x, xii, 6, 12, 28–33, 45, 65, 96–99, 118–119, 124, 179, 224,
273, 291, 308, 324, 353
Torah, the, 142, 178, 184–185
Torricelli, Evangelista, xvii, 343
Trota, 278, 288
trust, 61, 107, 110, 118, 121, 165, 203, 211, 217, 289, 302, 334
truth, the, xvi, 3–5, 26, 34, 37–38, 41, 46, 50, 56, 121, 127, 141–145,
194, 209, 252–253, 291, 303
Tusi Couple, xiii, 133–134
two-truth doctrine, the, 141
Tycho. See Brahe, Tycho

Ulugh Beg (Ulugh Bey), 134

Umayyad, 128, 130
unconscious, the, 3
universal. See universality
universality, xi, 7–8, 37, 41–42, 114, 172–173, 176, 196, 326
universe, the, 67, 106, 110, 196, 221–229, 295
universitas, 120–122, 246, 335
University of Paris, the, 125, 141, 144, 310

vacuum, xvii, 36, 147, 341–347

van Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius, 296
van Helmont, Jan Baptist, ix, 194, 210, 294–296, 300
Varro, Marcus Terentius, 105–109
velocity, xii, xvii, 36, 62, 79, 82, 85–90, 96–99, 133–134, 143, 221–
226, 234, 241, 309–312, 321, 323, 326, 328, 341, 356–357,
366–369
angular, xii, 82, 88, 96–98, 222, 225, 234, 241
Venice, xv, 146–147, 161, 166, 230, 244–247, 290, 334
Venus, xii, xv, 87, 201–202, 226–227, 230, 235, 248–249
Verbiest, Ferdinand, 172
verge and foliot, xiii, 116
Verrocchio, Andrea del, 147, 302
Vesalius, Andreas (Andreas van Wesele), ix, xvi, 302–305
Vespucci, Amerigo, 161–162, 167, 175
vita activa, 148, 217–219
vita contemplativa, 148
Vitruvius, xvi, 14–15, 108, 152, 313
Vivarium, 113
Viviani, Vincenzo, xvii, 343
von Andernach, Guinther, 302
von Guericke, Otto, 345

Wallis, John, 336

Ward, Seth, 336
weight, x, xiii, xvi, 13–17, 61, 116, 151, 265, 295, 309, 311–317, 319,
321, 342
specific, 314
Wilkins, John, 335–336, 350
Willis, Thomas, 336, 350
Witelo, Erazmus Ciołek, xiv, 136, 190–191
Wren, Christopher, 351, 368

Xu Guangqi, 172

Zeno of Citium, 49–50, 56, 67, 102

Zeno of Elea, 102
Zeno’s paradoxes, 49, 67
Zheng He, 160
Zodiac, the, xii, 89, 202
Zosimos of Panopolis, 198