This book provides a comprehensive account of knowledge of the natural world in Europe, c.1500–1700. Often referred to as the Scientific Revolution, this period saw major transformations in fields as diverse as anatomy and astronomy, natural history and mathematics. Articles by leading specialists describe in clear, accessible prose supplemented by extensive bibliographies, how new ideas, discoveries, and institutions shaped the ways in which nature came to be studied, understood, and used. Part I frames the study of 'The New Nature' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Part II surveys the 'Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge'. Part III treats the study of nature by discipline, following the classification of the sciences current in early modern Europe. Part IV takes up the implications of the new natural knowledge for religion, literature, art, gender, and European identity.

'Undoubtedly this hefty volume is a necessary addition to the libraries of early modern scholars and to the bibliography of any course covering science in the early modern period.' British Journal for the History of Science

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Honorary Professor at the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. She is the author of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (with Katharine Park, 1998) and Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen: Zur Geschichte der Rationalität (2001). Katharine Park is Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science and of the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University, Massachusetts. She is the author of Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (1985), and Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human Dissection (2007). Her work has appeared in Isis, The Renaissance Quarterly, and Renaissance Studies, and many periodicals.