6 - The Book of Nature and the Books of Man

Summary

Whether the early modern period witnessed a genuine “scientific revolution” and the systematic pursuit of knowledge about the world via “scientific method” remain questions of vigorous debate. Steven Shapin famously began his survey of the Scientific Revolution with these words: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” Historians have debated vociferously over when, where, and whether a genuinely scientific ethic, as we moderns would understand it, emerged in early modern Europe. Many of the recent scholarly treatments of the Scientific Revolution have tended to find fewer traces of modernity among early modern scientific knowledge and practice than they have identified means by which practitioners sought to reconcile their methods and findings with long-standing, preexisting traditions.