1. Medieval and Early Modern Science
Renaissance ?
Revolution?

2. The world sailed round, the largest of Earth’s continents discovered, the compass invented, the printing-press sowing knowledge, gun-powder revolutionising the art of war, ancient manuscripts rescued and the restoration of scholarship, all witness to the triumph of our New Age
Jean Fernel, 1545, as quoted in Boas (1962) 13.

3. Scientific Revolution has been applied to the years 1500-1700
A key moment when a specific way of looking at the natural world i.e. ‘modern science’ began to take shape. However ……
Natural Philosophy
Not concerned with discoveries but explaining the entire existing system of the world.

4. Their knowledge and practices covered diverse fields:
Navigation, Mining, Medicine, Botany, Pharmacology, Geology, Alchemy, Astronomy, philosophy, theology and law.
Peter Dear says the term ‘scientific revolution’ should be reserved for the seventeenth century when it is clear they were doing something radically new.

5. Natural philosophers of 16th c
Natural philosophers of 16th c. merely sought to ‘correct’ mistakes and ‘renew’ ancient wisdom.
Maria Boas, The Scientific Renaissance (1962) first coined the phrase.
Peter Dear refined it – 15th/16th c. restitution of natural knowledge.
“This phase personified by Nicolaus Copernicus and Andreas Vesalius, may be best conceptualised as a ‘Scientific Renaissance’ (Dear 2001)” (Kumin, 2009, )
The 17th c. – one of innovation

6. The Renaissance
A rebirth or revival.
The humanistic revival of classical art, architecture, literature, and learning that originated in Italy in the 14th century and later spread throughout Europe.
The period of this revival, roughly the 14th through the 16th century, marking the transition from medieval to modern times.

7. Humanism
A system of thought that rejects religious beliefs and centres on humans and their values, capacities, and worth.
The study of the humanities; learning in the liberal arts.
A cultural and intellectual movement of the Renaissance that emphasized secular concerns as a result of the rediscovery and study of the literature, art, and civilization of ancient Greece and Rome.

8. Copernicus - heliocentric rather than geocentric view of the universe
Copernicus - heliocentric rather than geocentric view of the universe. This rejected the ‘bible’ of astronomers, the Almagest (Ptolemy after 8-161).
In his On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (1543) his stated aim was to improve the situation by scrutinising the views of all ancient philosophers and astronomers.

9. Humanism – 14th c. cultural movement – devoted to ‘reinvigorate their own society through the practices of the ancients’ (The Renaissance).
The anatomist, Vesalius, was a key figure in the history of the scientific renaissance. He pushed a return to practical anatomy to check whether ancient medical writers such as Galen (129-c.200) had been correct in their descriptions of the human body. (Galen had only dissected apes)

11. "Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp" by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1632.

12. Francis Bacon
Novum Organum (1620) New Method – ‘Inductive reasoning’. Findings based on accumulating data.
e.g. Students succeed better when studying at Goldsmiths. Collect data from students of other colleges and compare.
Aristotle and others followed deductive reasoning- if a premise is true then the conclusion cannot be false. All men are mortal. John is a man. Therefore, John is mortal.

13. Galileo
1633 trial in Rome. His work discussed Copernican and Ptolemaic ideas of cosmology. Galileo supported his old claims by brand new ‘discoveries’ made with an improved telescope. The ancient theory that no changes occurred in the heavenly sphere was flawed. Galileo’s daily observations had revealed blemishes and irregularities on the surfaces of the sun and moon from which he deduced that changes did occur in the celestial sphere and that the Aristotelian doctrine of the heavens must be wrong.

14. Descartes on hearing of the trial moved from Catholic France to the Protestant Low Countries.
Mechanism – all physical phenomena could be explained by mathematical and mechanical concepts. The natural world worked like machine, in that change was brought about by, and could be explained, in terms of the intermeshing of bodies like cogwheels in a clock.

15. Ptolemy’s Geographia (2nd c. ) was translated in 15th c
Ptolemy’s Geographia (2nd c.) was translated in 15th c. and first printed in 1475
Euclid’s Elements (c.300BC) printed in 1482

16. 14th c. ms of Euclid’s Elements translated from an Arabic text by Adalard of Bath (12th c.)

17. Mercator – World Map 1569
Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendate Accommodata (New and more complete representation of the terrestrial globe properly adapted for use in navigation)
The aim was
"to spread on a plane the surface of the sphere in such a way that the positions of places shall correspond on all sides with each other, both in so far as true direction and distance are concerned and as correct longitudes and latitudes."

18. Scientific Revolution
‘Nothing distinguishes the ‘new science’ of the seventeenth century more clearly than its proponents’ claim that it was ‘new’. Natural philosophers increasingly aimed for a clean break with the past. Although ancient texts continued to be enormously important, they no longer served as signposts to a lost golden age, as in the sixteenth century.
(Kumin, 2009, 198)

24. Ghirlandaio Fresco 1480

25. The Great Comet of 1577
Woodcut by Jiri Daschitzsky, 1577

26. The Science Renaissance

27. Heliocentric rather than geocentric view