Page - 22 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Introduction22 as a series of heroic intellectual exertions by a select group of visionaries, re- sulting in disembodied theorems thrown out into a socio-cultural void or, at best, mechanically associated with other acknowledged forces of progress. The more recent departures in the field have, instead, questioned the very idea of a revolution in science.60 They established their inquiry into the production, cir- culation, and certification of knowledge in the early modern period on the premise that it is one of so many social and cultural practices influenced, be- sides the pure striving for discoveries of truths about nature, by personal and institutional ambition, networks of communication and patronage, political leverage, and religious affiliation—to mention but a few crucial factors whose exploration has thrown the casting of heroes and villains, protagonists and supporting roles in the familiar story (indeed, the very logic of such a casting) into disarray. In this climate of research, it has become possible to acknowledge the rele- vance of studying areas of early modern natural philosophy that fall outside “science” as (anachronistically) defined in the old master narrative, as well as the contributions of individuals or institutions that clung to, or were slow in abandoning, Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy—including the Society of Jesus, which “stands out of all others as the scientific order without rival in seventeenth-century Catholicism.”61 A typical example of the adoption of a more contextually sensitive approach is the treatment accorded to that cause célèbre of the history of heliocentrism: the Galileo affair. Jesuits, formerly unequivocally condemned as the story’s villains, have been shown to have cul- tivated relations with Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) that were conducive to the development of the new sciences62 (and were particularly close between him and the “modern Euclid,” Christoph Clavius [1538–1612], who established World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). For a criti- cal overview of the literature, see H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historio- graphical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 60 For a few synthetic attempts, see (despite its title) Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Margaret J. Osler, ed., Rethinking the Scien- tific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Katherine Park and Lor- raine Daston, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). But see also Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 2009), where the new approach is employed while keeping the label. 61 William B. Ashworth Jr., “Catholicism and Early Modern Science,” in God and Nature: His- torical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 133–66, here 154. 62 William A. Wallace, Galileo and His Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Gali- leo’s Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).