Between carnival and lent: the scientific revolution at the margins of culture.

Abstract

Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture Paula Findlen (bio) How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about the world! And it is all so novel, too. E. A. Burtt In the half-century since the “Scientific Revolution” became a meaningful description of the transformation of attitudes toward nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it seems to have enjoyed more lives than the Cheshire cat and to have remained as enigmatic. 1 Since its original formulation in the late 1940s, it has been the topic of a lively debate about the origins and character of modern approaches to nature and, more generally, knowledge. The result has been not only increased skepticism that the Scientific Revolution could be reduced to any single narrative, but also a profusion [End Page 243] of narratives about what constituted its fundamental characteristics. As Hayden White observes, “any given set of real events can be emplotted in a number of ways, can bear the weight of being told as any number of different stories.” 2 In the process, the Scientific Revolution, perhaps more than any other area of science studies, has become a testing ground for new approaches to the historical understanding of science and new ways of understanding the process of scientific change. Why should we feel so compelled to tell and retell this particular story in the history of science, when there are so many other episodes worthy of our attention? Surely part of the fascination lies in the sense that the Scientific Revolution is, in many respects, the original story in the history of science. From the sixteenth century onward, humanist natural philosophers—from the anatomist Andreas Vesalius to the astronomer Johannes Kepler—wrote the histories of various sciences in order to publicize the importance of their reformation of knowledge. By the eighteenth century they had become the story, protagonists of a narrative rewritten by new scholarly communities in search of modern ruptures with the past. 3 The crafting of scientific narrative has been a prolonged and self-conscious exercise in which scientists as well as historians have participated over the centuries—all the more so because neither the scientist nor the historian enjoyed distinct intellectual identities until fairly recently (quite often, as the case of the seventeenth-century statesman, historian, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon demonstrates well, they were the same person). Accordingly, we might see the Scientific Revolution as one of the fundamental experiments in narrating the history of science. While the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution has largely been a story of the rise of modern science that takes science in a fairly defined sense as its focal point, cultural approaches to the history of science suggest a variety of other possibilities that explore in greater detail the imagery that early modern Europeans had at their disposal when they attempted to describe nature. Such imagery was [End Page 244] not simply an afterthought to the study of nature; often it was so deeply embedded in the act of seeing and understanding nature that it would be impossible to separate how a particular natural philosopher viewed nature from how he viewed culture. 4 Defining nature and defining culture were complementary activities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If we wish to truly understand what it meant to do early modern science, then we need to think more carefully about what it meant to be early modern. The approach I am suggesting has already had a number of advocates. Several years ago, John Schuster remarked that “the Scientific Revolution consisted of a process of change and displacement among and within competing systems of natural philosophy,” and he recommended that historians look more carefully at the “privileged images, metaphors or models” that defined these different approaches to knowledge. 5 The literature exploring the fundamental cultural themes of the early modern period can be a rich resource for expanding our interpretations of the Scientific Revolution. 6 Since nature was never an isolated subject of study during this period but always part of some larger project, we should examine more closely those features of early modern society that best illuminate the place of...