Technology Used in the Renaissance Era

Introduction

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the French humanist Louis Le Roy surveyed the discoveries and inventions of his age and concluded that

Despite the widespread enthusiasm with novelty that is evident during the period, Renaissance natural philosophy, as the study of nature was then called, was by no means a matter of “out with the old, in with the new” Classical antiquity still mattered deeply to natural philosophers both as a source of information about nature and as a methodological guide. Most scientists were also humanists, and were inspired by the humanist ideal of reviving classical culture as a model for contemporary life and letters. Consequently, natural philosophy retained its traditional bookish flavor well into the Renaissance, even if eventually reading the “book of nature” gained more importance than reading ancient books. The new was relatively comfortably folded into the old, novelty assimilated into the familiar until, eventually, the classical envelope burst. The accumulation of novelties in the heavens and new worlds that Europe's cosmographers and explorers discovered made it seem unlikely that any single cosmology could comprehend the universe. At the end of the Renaissance, skeptics such as Montaigne could write that “philosophy is but sophisticated poetry,” while in 1611 the English poet John Donne reflected that “new Philosophy calls all in doubt …'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.” What began as a humanist recovery of classical science ended not only with the overthrow of the ancient cosmos but also with widespread doubt about the classical way of knowing nature.

Traditional accounts of the relationship between humanism and science stressed fundamental incompatibilities between the two movements. Earlier generations of historians of science portrayed the relationship between science and humanism as a collision of two different worlds, one literary, rarified, and tradition-bound, the other empirical, practical, and innovative. Lynn Thorndike, in his monumental History of Magic and Expcrimcntatl Science, characterized humanism by “its emphasis on style rather than science, and show rather than substance.”1 Instead of valuing innovation and progress, he asserted, the humanists complacently looked backward to a Golden Age unsurpassed by subsequent generations.

More recently, this negative assessment of Renaissance humanism has been revised in favor of a more balanced interpretation. Modern scholars have shown that earlier historians of science failed to do justice to the complexity of the humanist movement and seriously distorted the character of Renaissance science. In the first place, humanists did not confine themselves to strictly literary studies.

They applied their critical methods to scientific texts with as much enthusiasm as they did to a treatise by Livy or a poem of Horace. Moreover, because they advocated an active civic life in opposition to the medieval contemplative ideal, the humanists turned their attention to writings on the practical arts as well as to the literary and scientific works of antiquity. They wrote on specialized subjects ranging from metallurgy to distillation and edited ancient treatises on engineering and technology. Ancient learning was thus deployed to serve modern needs. Humanists argued forcefully ...