Bologna and the Royal Society in the seventeenth century.

Abstract

IN the years after 1660 the new experimental philosophy was introduced into the learned circles of Bologna in a self-conscious, deliberate and organized fashion. The city, politically a part of the Papal States, was at that time experiencing a slow but inexorable social and economic decline (1). Its old and famous university obviously suffered from the effects of this decline and no longer attracted large numbers of foreign students (2). A further check on cultural activity in the city was the control of the Inquisition, so cruel and relentless in the first half of the century as to render the city perfectly orthodox by 1660 (3). Yet there was detectable the influence of Galilean thought despite the unfavourable cultural and political environment of the city. This is particularly attributable to the activity of Cesare Marsili, friend and assiduous correspondent of Galileo (4), and of Bonaventura Cavalieri, an early follower of Galileo, who held the chair of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Bologna from 1629 to 1643 ($). (It is no accident that the first collected edition of Galileo’s works (admittedly incomplete) was published in Bologna in 1650). It was this tradition which, some years later, inspired Marcello Malpighi, Geminiano Montanari, and Giandomenico Cassini (among others) to attempt to disseminate in Bologna the aims, methods of work and organization of the Accademia del Cimento, with which all of these had been in close contact while living for longer or shorter periods in Tuscany, and of which they were corresponding members, and to try to emulate the aims and methods, as they saw them, of the Royal Society of London.