The following essay is divided in three parts. First, while sharing in principle Harrison's hypothesis of an affinity between the sixteenth-century Reformation and early modern science, it questions the connection between the latter and the Weberian “disenchantment of the world.” Second, it suggests a broader group of possible actors than that envisaged by Harrison in referring to virtuoso collectors and their cabinets of curiosities who are rather marginalized in Harrison's narrative. And third, it highlights the physico-theology of the second half (...) of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond as an important temporary fusion of religion/theology and science at a time when the new science was still striving for social and religious respectability. (shrink)

The following essay is divided in three parts. First, while sharing in principle Harrison's hypothesis of an affinity between the sixteenth‐century Reformation and early modern science, it questions the connection between the latter and the Weberian “disenchantment of the world.” Second, it suggests a broader group of possible actors than that envisaged by Harrison in referring to virtuoso collectors and their cabinets of curiosities who are rather marginalized in Harrison's narrative. And third, it highlights (in agreement with Harrison) the physico‐theology (...) of the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond as an important temporary fusion of religion/theology and science at a time when the new science was still striving for social and religious respectability. (shrink)

Considerable historiographical controversy surrounds the question of why and how Copernicus decided to overturn the prevailing Earth-centered representation of the heavens. This essay summarizes some key elements of an explanation first laid out in The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order (2011) and subsequently expanded with further evidence in Copernicus and the Astrologers (2016). Copernicus’s defining problem situation is to be found in his involvement in a culture of astrological prognostication during his student days in Bologna (1496–1500). Just before (...) Copernicus’s arrival in the fall of 1496, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s attack on the foundations of astrology appeared from a prominent Bologna publisher. This publisher also produced several of the prognostications authored by Domenico Maria di Novara, in whose house Copernicus lodged. Among Pico’s many charges was a claim that astrologers do not agree on the order of the planets. Although the word “astrology” appears only once in Copernicus’s extant writings, it is certain that he was aware of Pico’s account of the astrologers’ disagreements on the matter of planetary order. The Copernican Question sets forth an inference about how and why Copernicus turned to heliocentrism that claims to be not only plausible but also the likeliest to correspond to what actually happened. (shrink)