The Scientific Revolution
Making Knowledge in the Early Modern World
The Scientific Revolution fundamentally changed the way we think about nature. This course traces the rise of modern science through ideas, objects, and institutions from 1450 to 1750. We start in the Age of Encounters, when Europeans wrestled with the world’s scale and diversity, and end at the height of the Enlightenment. In the intervening centuries, natural knowledge took on dramatically new shapes at the hands of people such as Leonardo da Vinci, Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and Carolus Linnaeus. These thinkers proposed radically new ways to understand the cosmos. Their empiricism depended on new and improving tools and institutions to gather and organize observations. By focusing on the things and places behind the innovations, we will study the cultural and social dimensions of science.
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