Between carnival and lent: The scientific revolution at the margins of culture

Configurations

Volumn 6, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 243-267

  Findlen, Paula ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; EUROPE; HISTORY; NATURAL SCIENCE; PHILOSOPHY; SCIENCE;

EUROPE; HISTORIOGRAPHY; HISTORY, 17TH CENTURY; HISTORY, EARLY MODERN 1451-1600; NATURAL HISTORY; NATURE; PHILOSOPHY; SCIENCE;

EID: 0031604333     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.1998.0016     Document Type: Article

References (135)

1. For an introduction to the different histories of the Scientific Revolution, see H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographie Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
2. Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, "De-Centring the 'Big Picture': Tlie Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science," British Journal for the History of Science 26 (1993): 407-432;
3. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, eds.. Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
4. Roy Porter, "The Scientific Revolution: A Spoke in the Wheel?" in Revolution in History, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulâs Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 290-316;
5. and Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
6. Hayden White, Tlie Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 44. In invoking this concept, I am especially interested in the choices made by early modem natural philosophers in describing new ways of seeing nature as well as knowledge.
7. See Nicholas Jardine, The Birth of the History and Philosophy of Science: Kepler's "A Defense ofTycho Against Ursus" with Essays on Its Provenance and Significance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984);
8. and Donald R. Kelley, ed.. History and the Disciplines: Tlie Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modem Europe (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1997).
9. This particular issue has been an underlying premise of much work in the cultural history of science: see esp. Joseph Rouse, "What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?" Configurations 1 (1993): 1-22;
10. and Peter Dear, "Cultural History of Science: An Overview with Reflections," Science, Technology, and Human Values 20 (1995): 150-170. For a broader view of cultural methodologies,
11. see Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Behveen Practices and Representations, Irans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988);
12. and Lynn Hunt, ed.. The Ne\v Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
13. John Schuster, "The Scientific Revolution," in Companion to the History of Modem Science, ed. R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 224-225.
14. James Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), is one of the few examples of recent scholarship to take up this call, emphasizing semiotic approaches to scientific texts.
15. Historians of science have already made good use of the work of sociologists such as Max Weber and Norbert Elias in order to explore such themes as the "Protestant ethic" and the "civilizing process." This essay instead focuses on ways of understanding early modern society that derive more from literary and cultural analysis.
16. Hans Blumenburg, The Legitimacy of the Modem Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), p. 230.
17. Caroline Walker Bynum, "In Praise of Fragments: History in the Comic Mode," in idem. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 25.
18. Claude Gaighebet, "Le combat de Carnaval et de Carême de P. Bruegel (1559)," Annales ESC 27 (1972): 313-345.
19. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modem Europe (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1978).
20. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule," in idem, Society and Culture in Early Modem France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 97-123;
21. Robert Scribner, "Reformation, Carnival, and the World Turned Upside Down," Social History 3 (1978): 234-264;
22. and Martine Grinberg and Sam Kinser, "Les combats de Carnaval et de Carême: Trajets d'une métaphore," Annales ESC 38 (1983): 65-98.
23. Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler, trans. Donald M. Leslie (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 35. While historians of science have not explored the role of the ludic in science, art historians and literary critics have remarked on the potential of this subject:
24. see esp. Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: Renaissance Traditions of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966);
25. Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in tlie Seventeentli Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978);
26. and Barbara Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
27. Discorso contra il Camevale (anonymous), in Ferdinando Taviani, La Commedia dell'Arte e la società barocca (Rome: Bulzoni, 1969), p. 73. This may be the treatise attributed to Giovan Antonio Parlasca in 1608.
28. We should not have expected otherwise from Johan Huizinga, the author of The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and of Erasmus (New York: Scribner, 1924).
29. On Huizinga, see W. R. H. Koops, E. H. Kossman, and Gees van der Platt, eds., Johan Huizinga, 1872-1972 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973);
30. and Anton van der Lern, Johan Huizinga: Leven en werk in beeiden en documenten (Amsterdam: Werelbibliotheek, 1993).
31. Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1950; Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 4.
32. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture Ibid., p. 75. See also pp. 119,134.
33. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture Ibid., p. 180.
34. On Bakhtin, see Katarina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1984);
35. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 1990);
36. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd, eds., Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989);
37. and Amy Mandelker, ed., Bakhtin in Contexts: Across the Disciplines (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1995).
38. The only study that focuses on Bakhtin's approach to the Renaissance is Richard M. Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
39. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (1968; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 4.
40. Rabelais and His World Ibid., p. 66. As these quotes indicate, Bakhtin was more explicitly concerned about the relations between laughter and power than was Huizinga.
41. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
42. Bakhtin, Rabelais (above, n. 18), p. 94.
43. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (above, n. 11), p. 38.
44. Bakhtin. Rabelais (above, n. 18), p. 67.
45. Rabelais Ibid., p. 109.
46. See also p. 101, where Bakhtin equates classical culture with the suppression of the grotesque. Indeed, one can draw some intriguing conclusions when reading Michel Foucault's The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970) in conjunction with Bakhtin's work. Certainly the doctrine of signatures celebrated by Foucault as the paradigmatic expression of Renaissance modes of thought resonates with the grotesque of Rabelais: both celebrate an excessive, exaggerated form of materiality.
47. Antonio Viera, Plaidoyer en faveur des larmes d'Heraclite,
48. as quoted by Jean Delumeau, "The Rejection of Amusement," in idem, 5m and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th-18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), p. 456.
49. Huizinga, Homo ludais (above, n. 14), p. 203.
50. Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 151.
51. Praise of Folly, Ibid., p. 87.
52. Prov. 8:30-31; the original in the Latin Vulgate reads: "Cum eo eram, cuncta componens. / Et delectabar per singolos dies, / Ludens coram eo omni tempore, / Ludens in orbe; / Et deliciae meae esse cum filiis hominum." See Horst Bredekamp, "The Playfulness of Natural History," in idem, Tlte Lure of Antiquity and tlie Cult of the Machine, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton: Markus Weiner, 1995), pp. 63-80;
53. quote on p. 67. See also Paula Findlen, "Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modem Europe," Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 292-331.
54. For a general discussion of changing views of nature, see R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945).
55. Huizinga, Homo ludens (above, n. 14), p. 203.
56. Bakhtin, Rabelais (above, n. 18), p. 122.
57. This subject has been most recently discussed in Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
58. though Shapin does not explicitly emphasize the importance of gravitas to Boyle's philosophical persona. Earlier works have also identified these traits as essential features of seventeenth-century society, but their attempts to tie them too closely to any one discursive formulation limit them. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Alien and Unwin, 1930);
59. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977);
60. and Robert Merton, Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (1938; New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
61. For an interesting new discussion of this subject, see Michael Heyd, Be Sober and Reasonable: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995).
62. Robert Hooke, Micrograpliia (London, 1665),
63. pref. Such language was lifted almost directly from many passages in Francis Bacon where he alluded to the sobriety and severity of the new experimental philosophy; see Paula Findlen, Francis Bacon and the Reform of Natural History in the Seventeenth Century, in Kelley, History and the Disciplines (above, n. 3), pp. 239-260.
64. Boyle also described experimenters as sober and modest men: see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 65.
65. Burke, Popular Culture (above, n. 10), p. 208.
66. Carlo Borromeo, Lettera a Mons. Giambattista Castagna (1571), in Taviani, Commedia dell'Arte (above, n. 12), p. 18.
67. See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986);
68. and David C. Undberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), esp. pp. 136-237.
69. Erasmus, Colloquies, in Walter Gordon, Humanist Play and Belief: Tl:e Seriocomic Art ofDesiderius Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 94.
70. Erasmus, Praise of Folly (above, n. 27), p. 59.
71. I have discussed this in greater detail in Findlen, Jokes of Nature (above, n. 29).
72. Johann Zahn, Specula physico-tnathematico-Mstorica notabilium ac mimbilium sciendonun (Nuremberg, 1696), vol. 2, p. 92.
73. C. H. Josten, A Translation of John Dee's 'Monas Hieroglyphica' (Antwerp, 1564), with an Introduction and Annotations, Ambix 12 (1964): 192. The sport in question regards the multiplicity of shapes formed by the letter B.
74. Giordano Bruno, TlieAsh Wednesday Supper, ed. and trans. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977), pp. 67-68.
75. On the seriocomic aspects of Bruno's philosophy, see Nuccio Ordine, Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass, Irans. Henryk Baranski with Arielle Saiber (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996).
76. Giordano Bruno, Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, trans. Arthur D. Imerti (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1964), pp. 54 (quote), 59 (on Lent).
77. Johannes Kepler, Opera omnia (Frankfurt and Erlangen, 1858-71), vol. 5, p. 477, as translated in
78. Arthur Koestler, The Watershed (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1960), p. 31.
79. Ibid., The Watershed p. 35.
80. Kepler's Somnium, ed. and Irans. Edward Rosen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), p. 65n60.
81. Bruno, Ash Wednesday Supper (above, n. 42), p. ISO; I have modified the translation.
82. Johannes Kepler, Mysterium cosmographicum (Tlie Secret of the Universe), trans. A. M. Ducan, ed. E. J. Alton (New York: Abaris Books, 1981), p. 63.
83. Elsewhere Kepler wrote: The same things do not suit the people and the princes, and these heavenly matters are not nourishment for everyone indiscriminately, but just for a noble mind. . . . Princes usually have something very expensive kept for the dessert course, which they use only if they are satiated, to relieve the monotony (ibid., Mysterium Cosmographicum (Tlie Secret of the Universe) p. 55).
84. Ibid., Mysterium Cosmographicum (Tlie Secret of the Universe) p. 119. For more on this form of mathematical and cosmological play, see
85. S. K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony. Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974).
86. Kepler quotes from Philipp Feselius's Diseurs von der Astrologia iudiciaria in Johannes Kepler, Tertius interveniens, in his Gesammelte Werke (Munich: C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1940), vol. 4.
87. Kepler, Ibid., Gesammelte Werke p. 246, as translated by
88. D. P. Walker, Kepler's Celestial Music, in idem, Studies in Musical Science in tiie Late Renaissance, Studies of the Warburg Institute, 37 (London: Warburg Institute, 1978), p. 56.
89. On the doctrine of signatures, see Massimo Luigi Blanchi, Signatura rerum: Segni, magla e conoscenza da Paraceho a Leibniz (Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 1987); and
90. Paula Findlen, Empty Signs? Reading the Book of Nature in Renaissance Science, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 21 (1990): 511-518.
91. In this respect, we should see Fludd as another proponent of the emblematic worldview described by William Ashworth, and Kepler as a self-critical participant who had begun to make categorical distinctions between culturally generated symbols and symbols that conform to evidence in nature.
92. See William Ashworth, Natural History and the Emblematic World View, in Lindberg and Westman, Reappraisals of the Scientific Rnvlution (above, n. 1), pp. 303-332.
93. Johannes Kepler, Epitome ofCopemican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Amtierst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995), p. 10 (
94. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, p. 254).
95. Johannes Kepler, Harmonke mundi, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, p. 374.
96. Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 16, p. 158,
97. cited in Hallyn, Poetic Structures (above, n. 11), p. 167.
98. This exchange has been the subject of many interesting analyses: see esp. Robert Westman, Nature, Art, and Psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler-Fludd Polemic, in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 179-186;
99. and Brian Copenhaver, Natural Magic, Hermeticism, and Occultism in Early Modern Science, in Lindberg and Westman, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (above, n. 1), pp. 282-286. Both interpretations highlight the different uses of languages and images by Kepler and Fludd, but 1 instead would like to underscore the use of such tools in a shared endeavor: cosmic play.
100. Andreas Libavius, Examen pliilosophiae novae (1615), cited in Owen Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 106.
101. Johannes Kepler, The Six-Cornered Snowflake, ed. and Irans. Colin Hardie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 33.
102. Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13, p. 264, cited in
103. Koestler, Watershed (above, n. 44), p. 82.
104. On December 4, 1623, in the midst of composing his Somnium, Kepler wrote to Matthias Bernegger: More in his Utopia and Erasmus in his Praise of Folly ran into trouble and had to defend themselves. Therefore let us leave the vicissitudes of politics alone and let us remain in the pleasant, fresh green fields of philosophy (Carola Baumgardt, Johannes Kepler: Life and Letters [New York: Philosophical Library, 1951], p. 156). For a fascinating discussion of the theological ramifications of serio ludere in the debates about free will,
105. see Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus' Civil Dispute with Luther (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).
106. Francis Bacon, An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England (1589), in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longmans, 1857-74), vol. 8, p. 77. Italics in original.
107. Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle, and Unity, trans. Jack Lindsay (New York: International Publishers, 1962), p. 60.
108. Francis Bacon, Descriptio globi intellectualis, in Works, vol. 5, pp. 523-524.
109. René Descartes, Preambula, in Tlie Philosophical Writings of René Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. 1, p. 3. Such imagery evokes the ideal of a naked Christ celebrated, for example, by Puritans.
110. Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Natural Philosophy, 2nd ed. (London, 1664), vol. 1, p. 51.
111. For a classic study of paganism in Renaissance thought, see Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: Tlie Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1953).
112. Christopher Wren to William Brouncker, 30 July/9 August 1663 in Thomas Birch, A History of the Royal Society, vol. 1, p. 288,
113. cited in Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (above, n. 33), p. 31.
114. John T. Harwood, ed., The Early Essays and Ethics of Robert Boyle (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 68-69.
115. Joseph Glanvill, Plus Ultra, or the Progress and Advance of Knowledge Since the Days of Aristotle, ed. Jackson I. Cope (1668; Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Fascimiles and Reprints, 1958), pp. 89-90 (italics in original).
116. Boyle, A Free Enquiry Into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature (London, 1686), pp. 15, 10 (italics in original).
117. See Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, "The Making of Robert Boyle's Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature (1686)," Early Science and Medicine 1 (1996): 245-271.
118. For an excellent discussion of a parallel transformation in attitudes toward wonder, see Lorraine J. Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
119. Hooke, Micrographia (above, n. 33), p. 88.
120. Kepler, Six-Cornered Snowflake (above, n. 57), p. 33.
121. For an interesting discussion of Hooke's use of the microscope to redeem nature and its interpreters, see Catherine Wilson, "Visual Surface and Visual Symbol: The Microscope and the Occult in Early Modern Science," Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 85-108.
122. Bacon, Parasceve, in Works, vol. 4, p. 255.
123. Hooke, "A Discourse of Earthquakes" (1668), in The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke (London, 1705), pp. 289, 318.
124. Hooke, "A Lecture Read Feb. 15 1687/8," in The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke ibid., p. 403.
125. Ralph Cudworth, "On Plastic Nature," in The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Gerald R. Craig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 252.
126. Leibniz, Protogaea (1691/92, pub. in 1749), in Paolo Rossi, Tits Dark Abyss of Time: Tlie History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, turns. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 59. Other examples are discussed in greater detail in Findlen, "Jokes of Nature" (above, n. 29).
127. Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris, 1720), p. 28.
128. This episode is briefly mentioned in Lorraine Daston, "The Factual Sensibility," Isis 79 (1988): 464.
129. Bacon, Novum Organum, In Works, vol. 4, p. 166.
130. H. C. Barnard, ed. and trans., Fénelon on Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 65.
131. On the use of play to educate in the eighteenth century, see Stafford, Artful Science (above, n. 11);
132. and James Secord, "Newton in the Nursery," History of Science 23 (1985): 127-151.
133. Galileo to Kepler, Padua, August 19,1610, in Baumgardt, Johannes Kepler (above, n. 59), p. 86.
134. This subject will be treated in greater detail in Paula Findlen, "Galileo's Laughter," in When Science Became Serious (forthcoming).
135. Galileo Against the Philosophers in His Dialogue ofCecco di Ronchitti (1605) and Considerations ofAlimbertMauri (1606), trans. Stillman Drake (Los Angeles: Zeitlin and Ver Brugge, 1976), p. 51.