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The Scientific Renaissance 1450-1630
By Marie Boas Hall Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 1994 Marie Boas Hall
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-14499-3
CHAPTER 1
THE TRIUMPH OF OUR NEW AGE
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.
These words of a French physician writing in 1545 might have been those of any renaissance intellectual trying to characterise his age. Happily unaware of our modern consciousness that history is a continuous process, and that each new development has its roots in the past, men in the fifteenth century claimed complete emancipation from their mediaeval ancestors, proud to believe that they were founding a new stage in history which would rival that of classical antiquity in brilliance, learning and glory. As a sign and symbol of their success they could point proudly to two areas of discovery : the exploration of the intellectual world of the ancients by scholars, and the exploration of the terrestrial world by seamen. Two technical inventions aided men in their search for new worlds : the printing-press and the magnetic compass. The first was a product of the fifteenth century, the second had been introduced into Europe nearly two centuries before ; neither was devised by scientists, yet science somehow participated in both, and gained in importance as scholarship and practical geography each flourished in their different ways.
Nothing is more paradoxical than the relation of science and scholarship in the fifteenth century. This was the time when a man could become famous in wide intellectual circles for his profound pursuit of the more arid reaches of philological scholarship, or for the rediscovery of a forgotten minor work of a Greek or Roman author. Humanism had already stolen from theology the foremost place in intellectual esteem. The term humanism is ambiguous ; it meant in its own day both a concern with the classics of antiquity and a preoccupation with man in relation to human society rather than to God. Most humanists were primarily concerned with the recovery, restoration, editing and appraisal of Greek and Latin literature (theological literature not being entirely excluded) ; they regarded themselves as in rebellion against scholasticism, the intellectual discipline of the mediaeval schools, which they saw as concerned with logic and theology rather than with literature and secular studies. Far from rebelling in turn against this literary and philological emphasis, which seems superficially more remote from science than the scholastic curriculum with its all-embracing interest in the works of God, the fifteenth- century scientist cheerfully submitted to the rigidity of an intellectual approach which was rooted in the worship of the remote past, and thereby strangely prepared the way for a genuinely novel form of thought about nature in the generation to follow.
Scientists were ready to adopt the methods of humanism for a variety of reasons. As men of their age, it seemed to them as to their literary contemporaries that the work of the immediate past was inferior to that of natural philosophers of Graeco-Roman antiquity, and that the last few centuries were indeed a " middle age," an unfortunate break between the glorious achievements of the past and the glorious potentialities of the present. Humanists were anxious to recover obscure or lost texts, and to make fresh translations to replace those current in the Middle Ages, sure that a translation into correct (that is, classical) Latin direct from a carefully edited Greek text would mean more than a twelfth or thirteenth century version in barbarous (that is, Church) Latin, made from an Arabic translation of the Greek original, and full of strange words reflecting its devious origin. Scientists agreed that to understand an author one needed correct texts and translations ; and that there were many interesting and important scientific texts little known or not at all understood in the Middle Ages. Scientists were very ready to learn Greek and the methods of classical scholarship, and to enroll themselves in the humanist camp. So the English physicians Thomas Linacre (c. 1460—1524) and John Caius (1510—73) saw the restoration and retranslation of Greek medical texts as an end in itself, a proper part of medicine, for the Greeks had been better physicians than themselves. So, too, the German astronomers George Peurbach (1423—69) and Johann Regiomontanus (1436- 76) happily lectured at the University of Vienna on Vergil and Cicero, drawing larger audiences and more pay than they could hope for as professors of any scientific subject ; they were nevertheless able and influential professional astronomers. Scientists of the fifteenth century saw nothing "unscientific" about an interest or competence in essentially linguistic matters, and in editing Greek scientific texts they saw themselves aiding both science and humanism.
Indeed, science was not, as yet, a recognised independent branch of learning. Scientists were mostly scholars, physicians or magicians. The practising physician had always been in demand ; with the increase in epidemic disease which had begun with the Black Death in the fourteenth century and continued with the appearance of syphilis and typhus in the late fifteenth, there was more need for him than ever. A physician, especially one with a fashionable practice, was often a very wealthy man, and the professor of medicine held the best paid chair in most universities, to the envy of his colleagues. The success of a physician had nothing to do with his knowledge of anatomy or physiology, for the art was still almost entirely empirical; but the practising physician had, if he chose, abundant opportunity for medical research and discovery, either literary or practical.
A slightly less respectable scientific profession—but one which was sometimes very lucrative—was that of the astrologer. For many reasons—as complex and diverse as the psychological shocks of the great plagues of the fourteenth century, the shattered prestige of the Church consequent on schism and heresy, the increased tempo of war, the wider attention paid to observational astronomy, the popularisation of knowledge through increased education and the role of the printing-press—belief in the occult flourished exceedingly in the fifteenth century and showed little sign of decrease in the sixteenth. This was the height of the witchcraft delusion, especially in Germany. It was a great age of magic and demonolatry : the age of Faust. Astrology, previously almost the private domain of princes (especially in the Iberian peninsula, where every court had its official astrologer) was made available to the masses, again partly through the medium of the printing-press. (It also transferred its centre to Germany.) There was soon an enormous demand for ephemerides (tables of planetary positions), the essential tool of proper astrology : Regiomontanus, after he ceased lecturing on classical literature, devoted himself to their production. And every striking celestial occurrence—the conjunction of planets, the appearance of comets (especially plentiful in this period), eclipses and new stars (novae) —called forth a flood of fugitive literature scattered far and wide by the printing- press, prognosticating not merely for princes but for the masses as well. Even the illiterate enjoyed the advantages of being assured by astrologers that the future held as certain doom as the past, that famine, pestilence, war and rebellion would continue to dominate the Earth; for crude but vivid woodcuts portrayed both the heavenly bodies which presaged disaster and the inevitable and all-too-familiar disaster itself. Amid the calamities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, astrologers could hardly fail in their prognostications, as long as they made them dire enough.
Mystic science was, in this period, the most widely known : astrology catered for the masses by whom it was so readily understood that in the popular mind astrologer and astronomer were one. The alchemist's dream, too, was widely known. Almost unheard of in Western Europe before the thirteenth century, alchemy became the preoccupation of more and more learned and semi-learned men in the Renaissance ; yet, rather curiously, it was often viewed with scepticism, as it had been by Chaucer's pilgrims. And now nascent experimental science was popularised as natural magic, properly the study of the seemingly inexplicable forces of nature (like magnetism, the magnification of objects by lenses, the use of air- and water-power in moving toys), more generally the wonders of nature and the tricks of mountebanks. Mathematics contributed its share to magic in the form of number mysticism, useful for prognostication.
Non-mystical aspects of science were also increasingly popularised, and turned to useful ends. Scholars were beginning to be proud to boast that they had mastered the secrets of a craft, believing that knowledge would thereby be acquired such as was not to be found in books. They repaid the debt by spreading knowledge of applied science. As in the Middle Ages, all literate men now knew something of astronomy, if only in its humbler aspects : the astronomy of time-keeping and the calendar. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries astronomers developed a further interest in practical applications and began to make attempts, ultimately successful, to introduce astronomical methods of navigation to reluctant and conservative seamen. Mathematical practitioners, half applied scientist, half instrument-maker, became common, and provided a new profession for the scientist. New maps and new exploration made geography an ever more popular subject. Map-makers flourished more on the proceeds of the beautiful and colourful maps sold to the well-to-do than on the profits from the manufacture of seamen's charts, but both were produced in quantity. Algorism, reckoning with pen and paper and Arabic numerals (modern arithmetic), instead of the older practice of using an abacus and Roman numerals, had been known to scholars since the introduction (in the twelfth century) of the Hindu-Arabic numerals ; but it was the sixteenth century which saw the production of a spate of simple and practical books on elementary arithmetic. These, mainly in the various vernaculars, were the contribution of mathematicians to merchants, artisans and sailors.
Much of the rediscovered Greek theoretical learning was also soon made available to the non-learned, as a process of translation from Latin to the vernacular succeeded the first stage of translation from Greek to Latin, by which the learned had been made free of the new literature by the more learned. Indeed, one aspect of humanism was the popularisation of ancient learning. To be sure, the humanist theory of education, designed to produce gentlemen, was an aristocratic ideal (though in fact it aimed at creating gentlemen, not merely at training gentlemen born). But humanism battered its way into scholastic strongholds only by adroit and clever propaganda which won sympathy from powerful forces outside the learned world of the university. To secure support from public opinion necessitated the creation of a limited but ever widening audience ; and as this audience increased, it began to demand the enjoyment of humanism without its tediums. Hence the flood of translations, making science (and literature) available in a language the layman could read.
Soon, following the example of his humanist predecessors, the scientist tried to make his learning easily available to the ordinary man. To this end, the sixteenth-century scientist burned with the (somewhat premature) desire to teach the ignorant artisan how to improve his craft through better theory or more knowledge. For this purpose an increasing number of simplified manuals were written, like those of the English mathematician Robert Recorde : The Grounde of Arts (1542, on arithmetic), The Pathway to Knowledge (1551, on geometry), and The Castle of Knowledge (1556, on astronomy) ; in the process, vernacular prose was much improved. Scientists were, in this period, very ready to learn from craftsmen ; having learned what the craftsman could teach them, they naturally became convinced that they had much to teach him in turn. They were constantly disappointed to find this more difficult, when the craftsman failed to show himself eager to be taught.
The heroic stage of humanism belongs to the period before 1450 : it was in 1397 that the Greek diplomat Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1355—1415) began those lectures on Greek language and literature which had seduced clever young Florentines from their proper university studies and made them vehemently enthusiastic for Greek letters. The early fifteenth century had seen an avid international search for manuscripts of Greek and Latin authors previously forgotten, neglected or unknown. Though the major interest of the humanists was naturally in the literary classics, they took all ancient learning as their province, and scientific works were cherished equally with literary ones, always providing that they had not been studied in earlier centuries. In 1417 the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini was as pleased with his discovery in a "distant monastery" of a manuscript of Lucretius (little read in the Middle Ages, but to become immensely popular in the Renaissance) as he was with the manuscripts of Cicero that he found at the monastery of St. Gall. Guarino of Verona, hot in pursuit of Latin literature, was happy in finding the medical work of Celsus (in 1426) unknown for over 500 years. When Jacopo Angelo returned from Constantinople with manuscripts for baggage, only to be shipwrecked off Naples, one of the treasures he managed to pull to shore was Ptolemy's Geography, mysteriously unknown to the Christian West that had revered Ptolemy's work on astronomy for three centuries ; he had already translated it into Latin (1406) so that it was ready for the public.
By the mid-fifteenth century this great and exciting work of collection and discovery was, of necessity, ended : the monasteries of Europe had been thoroughly pillaged, and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 meant, as the humanists lamented, the end of the richest source of supply for Greek texts. One of the strangely persistent myths of history is that the humanist study of Greek works began with the arrival in Italy in 1453 of learned refugees from Constantinople, who are supposed to have fled the city in all haste, laden with rare manuscripts. Aside from the essential improbability of their doing any such thing, and the well-established fact that the opening years of the fifteenth century had seen intense activity in the collection of Greek manuscripts in Constantinople, there is the testimony of the humanists themselves that the fall of Constantinople represented a tragedy to them. Characteristic is the cry of the humanist Cardinal Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II), who wrote despairingly to Pope Nicholas in July, 1453, "How many names of mighty men will perish! It is a second death to Homer and to Plato. The fount of the Muses is dried up for evermore."
Cut off from the possibility of finding new manuscripts, humanists now turned from physical to intellectual discovery, from finding manuscripts to editing and translating them in ever more thorough, critical and scholarly a fashion, establishing the canons of grammar and restoring corrupt and difficult manuscripts to what was hopefully believed to be the state in which the author had left them. Here again the humanists showed a surprising impartiality, to the advantage of science. No one could be considered to have finished his apprenticeship to humanism unless, as his masterpiece, he produced a creditable Latin translation of a Greek original : the author chosen might be a medical or scientific one, especially in the sixteenth century when the supply was running short. Thus Giorgio Valla (d. 1499), a perfectly ordinary literary humanist, counted among his treasures two of the three most important manuscripts of Archimedes ; he also owned manuscripts of Apollonios and of Hero of Alexandria, and made partial translations of these and other scientific texts which appeared in 1501 as part of his encyclopedic work, On Things to be Sought and Avoided (De Expetendis et Fugiendis Rebus). Guarino, discoverer of Celsus, translated Strabo's Geography into Latin, along with purely literary texts. Linacre was long better remembered for his share in introducing Greek studies into England than for his encouragement of medical learning through new translations of Galen and the foundation of the Royal College of Physicians (1518), but contemporaries found this mixture of activities quite natural.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Scientific Renaissance 1450-1630 by Marie Boas Hall. Copyright © 1994 Marie Boas Hall. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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