Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. by David Lindberg; Robert S. WestmanReview by: Paula FindlenThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 861-862Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2542449 .

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Book Reviews 861

Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. David Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 551 pp. $59.50.

In the introduction to this volume, the editors offer readers a glimpse of what they describe as "the new history of science." The thirteen essays comprising this important collection attempt to redefine discrete aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century medicine and science, and to reevaluate the concept of the scientific revolution itself. The explicit historiographic agenda of the volume is apparent from the outset. The editors have chosen a selection of topics that are representative rather than comprehensive, reflecting the diversity of this field of study as it has emerged in he wake of scholars such as Herbert Butterfield, A. Rupert, Marie Boas Hall, and Thomas Kuhn.

Longue duree or petites histoires? One overarching theme of the volume concerns the nature of historical process. This lies at the heart of David Lindberg's survey of the emergence of the "scientific revolution" as a historical entity, reevaluated in light of the concept of "novelty" in contemporary sources. Lindberg's general essay sets the stage for a specific redressal of the "newness" of various scientific practices, as reflected in the language of the period. Sensitivity to contemporary evaluations informs most of the essays in the volume. It is particularly evident, for example, in Gary Hatfield's valuable critique of misreadings of the place of metaphysics in divergent natural philosophies, in Ernan McMullin's investigation of the permutations of scientia, in Michael Hunter's rereading of the antithetical relations between science and atheism in seventeenth-century England, and in Michael Mahoney's discussion of the relations between algebra and the calculus as mathematical languages. Most forcefully Brian Copenhaver, like Hatfield, calls for great precision in historians' use of early modern terminology in this unraveling of various strands of hermetic, magical, and occult philosophies. As Alan Gabbey queries in his study of mechanics, was there one revolution or many?

Center and periphery: A second pattern informing the nature of the reappraisals concerns the extent to which the historiography of the scientific revolution is bound to specific disciplinary practices. Many essays extend the culture, if not the concept, of the scientific revolution to areas such as medicine, natural history, chemistry, mechanics, and the occult sciences, absent from the Kuhnian model or formerly evaluated as lacking the proper revolutionary credentials. Harold Cook and William Ashworth convincingly establish points of intersection between medicine, natural history, natural philosophy, and history, underscoring the connections between ostensibly diverse scientific and cultural practices; this is paralleled in Jan Golinski's valuable critique of Butterfield's thesis about the postponed revolution in chemistry and the dangers of constructing a compensatory mode, to write chemistry into the scientific revolution, which effaces the nuances of the chemical and mechanical philosophies and their different audiences.

Other essays push the boundaries between the scientific and the nonscientific. Robert Westman's study of the preface of De revolutionibus argues for the interdependence between poetic and scientific structures and their ability to impact each other in a world of ambiguous and mutating categories. A similar point is made by William Ashworth in his portrayal of the emergence of natural history from a textually

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862 The Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXII no. 4 / 1991

grounded tradition to an experiential practice as a development contiguous with the reorientation of antiquarian and historical pursuits. William Eamon's essay on the place of secrets in early modern culture suggests how the explosion of a seemingly marginal literary genre like the "books of secrets" illuminates some of the fundamental political and philosophical tenets of early modern science, namely the introduction of openness as a desideratum among proponents of the new philosophy.

Text and Context. All the essays argue for a broadened conception of the scientific culture of the period. This is variously defined as an intellectual problem (what counts as science?) and a locational one (where does it count and for whom?). To a lesser extent, the volume redresses the relationship between social structure, institutional settings, and scientific practice. In his synthetic treatment of science in the universities, John Gascoigne, drawing upon secondary studies and a prosopography of natural philosophers and university careers (based on the DSB), develops a composite portrait of the place of medicine and the sciences in the university, and the importance of the university in training and employing natural philosophers. Despite the stated concern with the sociology of the scientific revolution, with the exception of the universities, the locations in which science was practiced are curiously absent. Save for limited remarks by Golinski and Westman on patronage and audience, the context is more implied than discussed. Given the explosion of literature on the social and cultural reorientation of science in the early modern period, it seems a curious omission, particularly since several contributors have been so sensitive to this aspect elsewhere.

Taken as a whole, this volume offers more examples of than answers to the historiographic debates that continue. However, the explicit impetus for the project was not to be proscriptive but to query where the field has gone since its inception. Certainly the essays collected in this volume indicate the vitality that the scientific revolution continues to enjoy among historians of science, who, for the most part, have narrowed their questions, broadened the context in which they define them, and refined the techniques with which they generate answers. While readers looking for a new composite image of what characterized sixteenth- and seventeenth- century science will remain unsatisfied, those in search of an introduction to recent directions in this field will enjoy the Rabelaisian cacophony of conceptual and methodological possibilities that the volume unleashes.

Paula Findlen .................. University of California, Davis

Hamlet. Warner Bros., 1990. Screenplay by William Shakespeare, Christopher DeVore, and Franco Zeffirelli. Directed and Produced by Franco Zeffirelli. Running Time: 140 minutes.

Film can multiply the dimensions of drama; but by too densely specifying things better suggested, it can rob drama of its very soul. Franco Zeffirelli's drastically cut, luxuriouly visualized Hamlet makes something stupefying of Shakespeare's play.

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