The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives

"One cannot talk about mathematics in the 16th and 17th centuries without seeing a Jesuit at every corner," George Sarton observed in 1940. * Sarton, of course, was not the first to recognize the disproportionate representation of members of the Society of Jesus in the scientific enterprise of the early modern period. However, unlike many historians who belittled the discernible numerical strength of the Jesuits on the grounds that they lacked originality and were generally hostile to new i...