The Cambridge History Of Science, Volume 3. Early Modern Science

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SCIENCE volume 3 Early Modern Science Volume 3 offers a broad and detailed account of how the study of nature was transformed in Europe between ca. 1500 and ca. 1700. Chapters on how nature was studied, where, and by whom cover disciplines from astronomy and astrology to magic and natural history, sites of knowledge from the laboratory and the battlefield to the library and the marketplace, and types of knowers, from university professors and apothecaries to physicians and instrument makers. Separate sections on “The New Nature” and “Cultural Meanings of Natural Knowledge” address the impact of the new natural knowledge on conceptions of nature, experience, explanation, and evidence and on religion, art, literature, gender, and European self-definition, respectively. Contributions are written in clear, accessible prose, with extensive bibliographical notes, by noted specialists. The volume offers to scholars and general readers a synoptic overview of the research on early modern science that has challenged the traditional view of the “Scientific Revolution” while emphasizing profound but diverse changes in natural knowledge during this key epoch in European history. Katharine Park is Samuel Zemurray, Jr., and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science and of the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. In addition to Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998), she is the author of Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (1985) and The Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (2006). Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Honorary Professor at the Humboldt-Universit¨at zu Berlin. She is the author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (1998, with Katharine Park), Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen: Zur Geschichte der Rationalit¨at (2001), and Images of Objectivity (2006, with Peter Galison). Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SCIENCE General editors David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers volume 1: Ancient Science Edited by Alexander Jones volume 2: Medieval Science Edited by David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank volume 3: Early Modern Science Edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston volume 4: Eighteenth-Century Science Edited by Roy Porter volume 5: The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences Edited by Mary Jo Nye volume 6: The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences Edited by Peter Bowler and John Pickstone volume 7: The Modern Social Sciences Edited by Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross volume 8: Modern Science in National and International Context Edited by David N. Livingstone and Ronald L. Numbers David C. Lindberg is Hilldale Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has written or edited a dozen books on topics in the history of medieval and early modern science, including The Beginnings of Western Science (1992). He and Ronald L. Numbers have previously coedited God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (1986) and Science and the Christian Tradition: Twelve Case Histories (2003). A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has been a recipient of the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, of which he is also past president (1994–5). Ronald L. Numbers is Hilldale and William Coleman Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he has taught since 1974. A specialist in the history of science and medicine in America, he has written or edited more than two dozen books, including The Creationists (1992) and Darwinism Comes to America (1998). A