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Library Catalog No. DTP2000(reissued 21 August 2012) |
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The Growth of Science. Originally issued in 2000 by Brown University’s Renaissance Women Online project. |
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by Deborah Taylor-Pearce |
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e-Copyright © 2004–2016 < http://she-philosopher.com/library.html > |
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The Growth of Science
Since the late 17th century, critics have recognized that a scientific revolution occurred in Europe, c.1550–1700. Although historians of science continue to debate dates, causes, protagonists, disciplinary boundaries, and overall meaning, there is consensus that “a revolution in the ways educated Westerners viewed nature, both physical and human” accompanied growth of the “new and internationally circulated science” that begins with Copernicus (1543) and culminates in Newton’s Principia (1687) and Opticks (1704).[1]
Prior to the 16th century, the Church monopolized science and scholarship in Europe. Although law and medicine remained vigorous and popular fields of study, by the early 15th century, scholastic natural philosophy and mathematical science had ossified. Scholastic science would yield no new insights, and as a body of theory or investigatory method, it was inaccessible and not especially appealing to a wide audience grappling with the new technical problems created by nascent commercial capitalism. Thus it was the secular revival of classicism, associated with printing and the spread of literacy and education among the laity, that led to a renewed intellectualism in the early-modern period. The Renaissance humanists’ rediscovery of Graeco-Arab literature and learning — and the reports of European explorers and warriors describing exotic new and old worlds — introduced fresh visions of being and knowing that challenged the scholastic canon (constructed around Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen) and inspired the Scientific Revolution.[2]
While some advances occurred in established academic disciplines (anatomy, astronomy, theory of motion), many English new sciences (e.g., chemistry and other sciences concerned with the properties and reactions of matter) developed outside the universities. In particular, Renaissance developments in practical mathematics — integrally bound up with the growth of trade, exploration, and colonization — predate the intellectual shifts in natural philosophy that we associate with scientific revolution (i.e., its embrace of mathematics, mechanism, experiment and instrumentation during the 17th century).[3] In the 1540s, John Dee (1527–1608) complained that he had to learn his mathematics on the Continent since England lacked the requisite expertise; but by the end of the 16th century, English mathematical science was a thriving industry, with a burgeoning print culture and an instrument-making center newly established in London. This was not the doing of university scholars, but of shipwrights, land-surveyors, gaugers, diallists, gunners, architects, engineers, artists, tradesmen and -women, almanack-makers, printsellers, stationers, and upwardly-mobile artificers newly prospering from the conspicuous consumption of merchants and gentlemen in the late 16th century. While some of those who advanced the mathematizing of instrument-making, astronomy, navigation, surveying, and cartography were from the landed classes, such as Leonard Digges (1510–1558), and we find country parsons and squires involved in increasing numbers after 1600, the center of English mathematical advance and activity was London, and the bulk of applied mathematicians drew from “the common sort.” Robert Anderson (fl. 1661–1705) was typical: a silk-weaver by trade, he was a self-educated expert on gauging, stereometry and gunnery, who self-financed experiments conducted on Wimbledon Heath with guns and mortars, published his detailed observations on the fall of heavy bodies, and engaged in printed mathematical controversies at the turn of the 17th century.
Regardless of class or educational background, all those engaged in practical mathematics were autodidacts, since formal instruction in applied mathematics was not available in England until late in the 17th century. Unlike schools on the Continent with their more balanced liberal arts curricula, English school education focused on Latin grammar and verbal exercises.[4] The point of a university education was not to train natural philosophers, but to improve the reason and fancy and carriage of gentlemen, such that “they may become Rationall and Gracefull Speakers, and be of an acceptable Behaviour in their Countries.”[5] Thus, the mathematician William Gascoigne (1612?–1644) — a gentleman’s son, inventor of the micrometer, improver of the perspective glasses carried by officers in the Civil War, and an early influence on the Cavendish Circle (one of many informal networks advancing the growth of scientific culture) — complained that he finished his studies in London and Oxford without ever knowing what a proposition in geometry meant. And the aristocrat chemist, Robert Boyle (1627–1691), learned Euclidean and Cartesian algebraic geometries not at school, but from his new assistant for chemical experiments, Robert Hooke (1635–1702, first Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society). In part, this mirrored cultural prejudices associating mathematics with demonology, thus rendering it unsuitable for Christian gentlemen. And it followed prevailing opinion that, to quote Francis Bacon, “long and close intercourse with experiments and particulars” impaired “the dignity of the human mind.” Only after extensive popularization of Newton’s formidable theories did mathematics become culturally respectable, although throughout the 17th century, a growing awareness of its utility for the governing classes is apparent.
To the mathematician-craftsmen of Tudor and Stuart England, buoyed by the empirical success of their instruments and their continuing penetration of many different trades, English learned science was largely a sterile and ineffectual enterprise. While it is now generally held that “the main thrust of the Scientific Revolution was in the mathematical and physical sciences,” we must remember that early-modern participants considered the achievements of physicians and naturalists and other empiricists as on a par with late-17th-century advancements in learned astronomy and physics. Certainly, the dramatic growth of scientific culture during the 17th century cannot be understood without including transformations in medicine, agriculture, and natural history, as well as in sciences (e.g., aerostatics, hydrostatics, and metallurgy) of import to the age’s embryonic industries, especially those associated with mining, navigation and warfare.[6] The English new science movement was from the beginning broad-based, capturing the imagination and labors of a wide range of individuals bent on “improving” (a watchword for “this inquisitive age”) selves, land, manufacture, and empire. An intense curiosity about the processes of nature infused early-modern culture. Already by the later Middle Ages, scientific ideas about the human body and medicine had been absorbed into popular culture.[7] By the end of the 16th century, natural science was no longer the exclusive prerogative of academicians. Numerous authors interpreted scientific knowledge for a popular audience, producing an astonishing diversity of natural science books: encyclopedias, guides to specific sciences and practical arts, works on the plant and animal worlds, books on scientific geography, medical books, and treatises on the body, mind, and soul. The Third Universitie of England, as Sir George Buck titled the agglomeration of London schools in 1615, offered popular instruction in the latest theories in anatomy, astronomy, geometry, physiology, natural philosophy, music, and medicine, along with instruction in such practical arts as arithmetic and surveying. By the early 17th century, attending scientific lectures was a hobby cultivated by many London citizens, including women of the middling classes.[8] Even the esoteric theories of Renaissance neoplatonism drew a wide audience, as illustrated by the peregrinating Dr. John Everard (1575?–1650?), a learned divine who left his situation in Cambridge to bring Hermetic philosophy “to the lowest of men ... tinkers, cobblers, weavers, and poor beggarly fellows that came running.” By mid-17th century, scientific themes were a staple of polite conversation, and manuals on speaking well — such as Robert Basset’s Curiosities: Or The Cabinet of Nature (1637) — modeled dialogues on such topics as why stars appear to fall. Indeed, the notion of a public science is central to any understanding of the production of scientific knowledge during the early-modern period.[9]
The expansiveness of natural inquiry during the Renaissance attracted a wide variety of persons to declaiming publicly about physical reality and the means of uncovering natural knowledge.[10] As university training was not then a prerequisite, the pursuit of natural knowledge was open to any who took the initiative, from the topmost rungs of the social hierarchy to the very bottom. As numerous polemicists for the new science pointed out, anyone who was by nature inquisitive and diligent could be trained to do it — even women and children, or the American Indian who “is naturally curious and very ingenious, which they show in all their works and imitations.”[11] John Gerard’s bestselling Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597, 1636) enthused early on about the new opportunities available to men lacking “great titles and degrees”: as in the military, argued Gerard, a man may advance himself in the “Schoole of Science” and “confidently account of, at the least, his name to be immortall.” The natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673) was just one of many to take advantage of opportunities and act on this belief. (See Appendix: Margaret Cavendish’s Scientific Works.)
The ferment of the new science caused some anxiety. Conservative theologians, alarmed by the many “curious braines [who] will not leave off plodding and practizing of profound problems,” warned against common men “seking after the secret counsels of God.”[12] But the most prominent English critic, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), was more enterprising: his Great Instauration was designed to harness the energies of an expansive new science movement to the service of the state.[13] Bacon’s authoritarian vision of technical expertise in the hands of a group of reformed men, who set policy and charitably dispense truth and know-how as part of a broader millennarian strategy, had widespread appeal. Throughout the 17th century, Baconians of diverse stripes would interpret this vision, in more or less democratic ways, according to a plurality of interests. But even with formal incorporation after the Restoration, the production of scientific knowledge was only minimally organized during our period, and the institutional machinery necessary to professionalize science did not develop in England until the 19th century.
“The Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge” was founded c.1660 and formally chartered in 1662 (revised 1663). From the beginning, the scientific society sought legitimation and institutional stability by associating itself with the ruling class and cultivating “the hegemonic ideal of the gentleman amateur.”[14] Rather than courting its natural constituency in the middling classes, the Society’s earliest fellows were drawn mostly from the professional and landed classes, many of them men associated with government and the court. Merchants, tradesmen, and professional scholars were proportionately rare. Those “mechanical capricious persons” much maligned by F.R.S. John Evelyn (1620–1706) were excluded, as were surgeons, apothecaries, reformers (albeit past associates) such as Samuel Hartlib, and women.[15] The largely volunteer character of the early Society and its exclusive clientele resulted in a more nominal than active membership. Meetings were often poorly attended (Robert Hooke complained to his diary of delivering papers to an audience of six), and the Society’s experimental program was miscellaneous in the extreme. As first modeled by the Royal Society, collaborative knowledge-seeking amounted to little more than unselective fact-gathering, in accord with members’ confused activities and divergent interests.[16] There was little here to impress outsiders, and for many years, the Royal Society was a favorite butt of ridicule. Satires escalated along with reports of members’ whimsical experiments, drawing laughter even from the Society’s most powerful patrons. Despite all the promotional rhetoric emanating from the Royal Society in its early years, and despite an all-out campaign differentiating the Society’s brand of new science from the unsavory practices of mechanics and women, alchemists, astrologers, and other threatening or subordinate groups, the new science was not yet accepted by England’s educated elite. This would take a tremendous popularization effort at the turn of the century, relying on the Newtonian synthesis for its vision and force. From Newton’s theories (mostly the less-mathematical third book of the Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica), writers and lecturers and publishers and clergy constructed a new Philosophica Britannica, with its promise of unfettered progress, expanding empire, and a return to Eden, all predicated on the empirical manipulation and control of nature.
As we have seen, it is difficult to discuss science during the early-modern period without using umbrella terms (“scientific revolution,” “new science,” “applied mathematics,” “mechanism,” “Baconianism”). Yet the umbrella terms conceal perhaps more than they reveal. And they foster a habit of binary thinking — mechanist/vitalist, ancient/modern, experimentalist/rationalist — that is anachronistic and misleading.[17] Early-modern intellectuals and events seldom arrange neatly into our umbrella categories. In an age marked by the upheavals of Reformation-Rebellion-Restoration and the Thirty Years’ War, alliances and world views shifted as issues and circumstances changed. Thus, Walter Charleton (1620–1707) — royal physician, President of the Royal College of Physicians, affiliate of the Royal Society from its Oxford Circle days, and a pivotal member of the Cavendish Circle — is known to historians as “the intellectual barometer of his age,” having at one time or another subscribed to almost every philosophical opinion current during his lifetime. An early advocate of alchemical-magical philosophies, and a follower of Robert Fludd, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Jean Baptiste van Helmont (several of whose works he translated), Charleton underwent a radical conversion c.1654 to mechanical philosophy, reinvented himself as a follower of Copernicus, Descartes, Harvey, and atomism, and became the first to translate and popularize Gassendi’s ideas in England. Charleton was not unique in this. Given a climate in which the conflict of ideas flourished, even during the period of consensus and consolidation c.1650–1690, it is best to avoid grand claims that assume polarized or fixed standpoints for 17th-century thinkers.
Not only do umbrella concepts like “institutionalized science” — especially when opposed to terms like “emancipatory science” or “feminist science” — short-circuit difficult problems in philosophy of science, they also obscure our understanding of early-modern scientific culture and its margins.[18] Many — such as “my Lady” with her cordials, and the “herb-women” in Newgate Market or Covent Garden — whom we now locate on the fringes of the scientific enterprise were at the time part of what Tony Davies has aptly called an “organic intelligentsia,” characterized by its intricate nexus of educational, professional and family relationships.[19] If we are to understand the early-modern scientific milieu, and women’s changing role within it, we are going to have to learn much more about the outreach and influence of informal intellectual networks like the Cavendish Circle, and begin tracing inter- and intra-family connections within diverse new science communities. To the extent that women’s labors and knowledge base were intentionally assimilated or rejected by contemporary scientists, these too must be considered an influential force in the development of science.[20]
There is now a large body of literature suggesting that the Scientific Revolution negatively impacted women. Provocative arguments have been made that the growth of a male-dominated science displaced women from powerful roles in nursing, medicine, and midwifery; that the birth of (masculine) physics led to the death of (feminine) nature; that new technologies, designed by men as tools for objectification and domination of the natural world, have a masculine face; that science is a male-defined intellectual space, inimical to women’s lives and interests; that the command-and-control metaphors of science reenact patriarchal relations (a male scientist rapes/violates/objectifies/dominates the female body). While there is some truth to our received picture of a new science gendered male, there is much that it does not explain. A growing number of scholars now argue, like Okruhlik, that women’s relation to scientific revolution “cannot be understood simply in terms of changing ontologies” (e.g., from organicism to mechanism), “or transformations of dominant metaphors” (e.g., from nature as all-powerful mother and historical actor to nature as exploitable resource and inert machine), or “the simple exclusion of certain psychological and epistemological attitudes alleged to be characteristic of women.”[21]
The task of recovering the early-modern women of science has only just begun, yet already we’ve learned enough to know that women’s fingerprints are all over the new science. We need now to uncover more evidence of actual practice, so that we may consider anew the ways in which women’s perspectives, values, and material culture influenced scientific and technological advance. Remembering that our tools do not simply control us — we also resist and redesign them with our different ways of practicing technology — we must look carefully at early-modern women’s appropriations of new technologies and instruments, drugs and cosmetics, and at the “reinforcement politics”[22] of these. For example, the mercury barometer, first designed on revolutionary scientific principles to study altitude, and only later “the action or operation of the air,” entered ordinary domestic life at the end of the 17th century as a fashion guide for women who used it to choose their toilettes and to decide on operations of husbandry in the kitchen garden. Consequently, experiments and discoveries concerning “the nature of the air” — and resulting contributions to human knowledge — were not simply restricted to the Royal Society’s Robert Hooke, the most prolific inventor of his age. As Patricia Phillips has amply demonstrated,[23] the gender division of labor in the early-modern period made women well-suited to science and, by and large, the culture had little problem with this until the prestige of science changed. The “demise of science as a female interest” occurred with science’s professionalization and newfound social status in the 20th century. It was not the legacy of the “she-philosopher” or the Scientific Revolution.
NOTES
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