The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 1: Sources of the Scientific Revolution

Renaissance Humanism

Humanism, the intellectual movement associated with the Renaissance, also played an important role in the genesis of the scientific revolution. The movement originated in Italy in the fourteenth century and spread to the rest of Europe in the fifteenth century. Humanists studied the texts of ancient writers, both pagan and Christian, rather than the disciplines of logic and natural philosophy which dominated the medieval university curriculum.

Contrary to some modern uses of the term "humanist," Renaisance humanists were not anti-Christian. Humanists emphasized original texts rather than commentaries, and whole works rather than taking selected statements out of context, as had been the scholastic method. Humanists were largely responsible for the revival of the knowledge of ancient Greek in the West.

Humanistic study was accompanied by efforts to search out surviving manuscripts of ancient Greek and Latin works from libraries and make them public, eventually through print. Most early modern natural philosophers had some humanistic education, and humanistic Latin was an important medium of scientific communication through the seventeenth century. The humanistic revival of ancient Greek opened people’s eyes to philosophical alternatives to Aristotelianism such as Platonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism. Although science never rivaled rhetoric and ethics as a primary concern of humanists, humanists were interested in ancient scientific texts.

There is a long list of Greek scientific authorities studied by humanists, including Ptolemy in astronomy, astrology, and geography, Euclid, Archimedes and Apollonius in mathematics, Strabo in geography, Theophrastus and Dioscorides in botany, and Galen and Hippocrates in medicine.

Although Roman writers were not accorded the same intellectual authority as Greeks, there were also important natural-philosophical aspects to the study of Pliny the Elder in natural history, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, the epic poets Lucretius and Ovid, the engineer Frontinus, and the medical encyclopedist Celsus.

By the sixteenth century, a lot of what humanists did was editing classical texts, and especially recovering the exact meaning of ancient texts in their ancient contexts. Given all the corruptions introduced by the copying and recopying of manuscripts over the centuries, and the differences between different manuscript traditions, humanist editors of scientific texts had to know some science to reconstruct their meaning.

In publishing and translating these texts, humanists made contributions to natural knowledge, and several early modern scientists were also skilled editors of ancient texts in the humanist tradition. The Italian mathematical humanist Federigo Commandino (1509-1575) translated many Greek mathematical works into elegant Latin, greatly contributing to the advance of mathematics.

Many early botanical works were concerned with identifying plants described by ancient botanists, and sometimes Renaissance botanists apologized for including descriptions of plants unknown to the ancients! Scientists and humanists also shared some prejudices. Humanists scorned the Arabs and medieval scholastics as barbari–barbarians–a belief shared by many scientists. Although there were humanistic Aristotelians, generally humanists were less impressed by Aristotle than by his great rival, Plato, a far superior literary author (at least judging by the texts that have survived.)

Many early modern scientists, including Galileo, shared this preference for Plato, whose philosophy was more compatible with a mathematics-based approach to nature than Aristotle’s. Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution discusses the impact of humanism on science and related topics on pages 65-80.

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