It has long been noted that towards the end of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church began to use its instruments of censorship – the Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books – to prosecute magic with increased vigour. These developments are often deemed to have had important consequences for the development of modern science in Italy, for they delimited areas of legitimate investigation of the natural world. Previous accounts of the censorship of magic have tended to suggest that the (...) Church as an institution was opposed to, and sought to eradicate, the practice of magic. I do not seek to contest the fact that ecclesiastical censors prosecuted various magical and divinatory practices with greater enthusiasm at this time, but I suggest that in order to understand this development more fully it is necessary to offer a more complex picture of the Church. In this article I use the case of the Neapolitan magus Giambattista Della Porta to argue that during the course of the century the acceptable boundaries of magical speculation became increasingly clearly defined. Consequently, many practices and techniques that had previously been of contested orthodoxy were categorically defined as heterodox and therefore liable to prosecution and censorship. I argue, however, that this development was not driven by the Church asserting a ‘traditional’ hostility towards magic, but was instead the result of one particular faction within the Church embedding their conception of orthodox philosophical investigation of the natural world within the machinery of censorship. (shrink)

Akin to the mathematical recreations, John Wilkins' Mathematicall Magick (1648) elaborates the pleasant, useful and wondrous part of practical mathematics, dealing in particular with its material culture of machines and instruments. We contextualize the Mathematicall Magick by studying its institutional setting and its place within changing conceptions of art, nature, religion and mathematics. We devote special attention to the way Wilkins inscribes mechanical innovations within a discourse of wonder. Instead of treating ‘wonder’ as a monolithic category, we present a typology, (...) showing that wonders were not only recreative, but were meant to inspire Wilkins' readers to new mathematical inventions. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

This special issue brings to the attention of the scholarly community some of the common features and some of the subtle, but important, differences between Francis Bacon's and Giovan Battista Della Porta's ways of dealing with the reading, selecting, enacting, and recording of recipes. Focusing on questions of genre, intellectual and material context, strategies of research, and strategies of performing recipes, the four papers of this special issue address two major issues. First, they shed new light on the relationship between (...) Della Porta's Magia naturalis and Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum. Second, they show that in the recording of their experimental practices, Bacon and Della Porta depart from the traditional “recipe format” and discover new avenues of experimental research. (shrink)

Robert Hooke’s theory of gravitation is a promising case study for probing the fruitfulness of Menachem Fisch’s insistence on the centrality of trading zone mediators for rational change in the history of science and mathematics. In 1679, Hooke proposed an innovative explanation of planetary motions to Newton’s attention. Until the correspondence with Hooke, Newton had embraced planetary models, whereby planets move around the Sun because of the action of an ether filling the interplanetary space. Hooke’s model, instead, consisted in the (...) idea that planets move in the void space under the influence of a gravitational attraction directed toward the sun. There is no doubt that the correspondence with Hooke allowed Newton to conceive a new explanation for planetary motions. This explanation was proposed by Hooke as a hypothesis that needed mathematical development and experimental confirmation. Hooke formulated his new model in a mathematical language which overlapped but not coincided with Newton’s who developed Hooke’s hypothetical model into the theory of universal gravitation as published in the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687). The nature of Hooke’s contributions to mathematized natural philosophy, however, was contested during his own lifetime and gave rise to negative evaluations until the last century. Hooke has been often contrasted to Newton as a practitioner rather than as a “scientist” and unfavorably compared to the eminent Lucasian Professor. Hooke’s correspondence with Newton seems to me an example of the phenomenon, discussed by Fisch in his philosophical works, of the invisibility in official historiography of “trading zone mediators,” namely, of those actors that play a role, crucial but not easily recognized, in promoting rational scientific framework change. (shrink)

For Henry More, witchcraft served as an empirical confirmation of the existence of immaterial substances. Yet while he takes great care to make his reports as trustworthy as possible and argues against the claim that the effects of witchcraft are only the illusions of people suffering from melancholy, he almost completely ignores the possibility that such effects may be caused by natural magic. In More’s natural philosophical writings, discussions of magic are very much downplayed, as well. This may seem surprising, (...) as a crucial component of More’s metaphysical system is his doctrine of the Spirit of Nature, a sort of world-soul whose action is nonmechanical, vital, and magical. The essay argues that this deeply ambivalent approach to natural magic is due to the fact that More uses traditional magical notions to supplement the shortcomings of mechanicism and at the same time tries to divorce these notions from the potentially problematic background from which they originated. In the end, the essay suggests, More’s ambivalence toward magic is only one manifestation of a much deeper problem wherein he adopts an immanentist position while trying to avoid its more problematic, potentially pantheistic, consequences. (shrink)

This paper offers a caution that emphasis upon the importance of mathematics in recent historiography is in danger of obscuring the historical fact that, for the most part, mathematics was not seen as important in the pre-modern period. The paper proceeds by following a single case study, and in so doing offers the first account of the mathematical writings of Jean Fernel (1497–1558), better known as a leading medical innovator of the 16th century. After establishing Fernel's early commitment to mathematics, (...) and attempt to forge a career as a cosmographer, it goes on to explain his abandonment of mathematics for a career in medicine. The ‘mathematization of the world picture’ is usually explained in terms of the perceived usefulness of mathematics, but Fernel's case shows that for many pre-modern thinkers mathematics was not regarded as a useful pursuit. The paper should serve as a reminder, therefore, that the take-up of mathematics by natural philosophers was by no means inevitable, but had to be carefully managed by early modern mathematical practitioners. The case of Fernel indicates that perhaps he was not the only would-be mathematical practitioner to abandon mathematics in favour of a calling that was more appreciated by contemporaries. (shrink)