Introduction: The Word and the World

Abstract

Galileo’s recantation before the ecclesiastical authorities in 1633 of his defence of the Copernican theory of a heliocentric universe is an iconic scene in the saga of putative conflict between religion and science, though it is also a scene whose meaning has been the subject of much debate.1 The ‘emergence of science’ in the late Renaissance is a story that has often been told in such dramatic terms as the sloughing off of dogma and turgid scripturalism by anti-authoritarian thinkers heroically struggling for intellectual liberty. While Thomas Kuhn famously and proficiently muddied the waters in terms of the pace of the ‘Scientific Revolution’, and while other scholars have presented a more complex relationship between the two protagonists, science and religion, the picture remains, by and large, one of dawning clarity, in which a biblical myopia is replaced with a view of the world less textually hidebound, with science cast as the enlightened man emerging from Plato’s cave.2KeywordsNatural WorldSixteenth CenturyScientific RevolutionNatural PhilosopherLiteral InterpretationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.