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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Introduction
Allied with Francis Bacon’s proposal that a properly organized and properly conducted science could increase the power of the English state was his observation that a new vitality in the sciences had coincided with the Protestant Reformation:
When it pleased God to call the Church of Rome to account for their degenerate manners and ceremonies, and sundry doctrines obnoxious and framed to uphold the same abuses; at one and the same time it was ordained by the Divine Providence that there should attend withal a renovation and new spring of all other knowledges.
This was, of course, a Protestant view of the matter. But it raises the question whether a celebration of the sciences might have been one means of differentiating Protestant cultural values from those of Roman Catholicism. And if – as many historians have argued – there were connections between Protestantism, capitalism, and the rise of science, we have to ask what form these connections took. If the sciences were less subordinate to theology at the time of Newton than at the time of Copernicus, had the Reformation in religion created favorable conditions for a reformation in science?
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