ABSTRACT
In the second half of the twentieth century, the study of the scientific revolution itself underwent a revolution. As early as the eighteenth century, European thinkers decided that something crucial emerged in the period stretching between Copernicus and Newton, but had trouble describing exactly what. Few now share the Enlightenment’s confidence in “an unambiguous triumph of rationality over obfuscation,” or regard our own scientific knowledge as “a neutral and inevitable product of progress” (Dear 2001: 2). We can still find a hardy perennial version of the tradition in a body of contemporary fiction that narrates stories about the triumphant defeat of medieval superstition and scholastic inertia. Nicolaus Copernicus remains a canonical figure in this saga, and does duty as the hero of John Banville’s prize-winning Doctor Copernicus, published in 1976, the first in a trilogy of novels, with additional volumes on Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. Banville draws on conventional historiography when he invokes two well-worn metaphors (fortifications and tides) to describe the young Copernicus’s first glimpse of the Cracow Academy at the end of the fifteenth century: the college “had reminded him of nothing so much as a fortress, for it was, despite its pretentions, the main link in the defences thrown up by scholasticism against the tide of new ideas sweeping in from Italy, from England, and from Rotterdam” (Banville 2000: 35). Copernicus not only sets his face against the medieval past, but must also stave
off the grubby reality of the present, which threatens to contaminate the purity of his vision and disembodied fixation on the heavens. Specialists tell us that the Copernican system, when it did not meet with condemnation on religious grounds, became subject to various attempts to reconcile it with Aristotelian physical theories and reintegrate it into a Christianized natural philosophy (Gaukroger 2006: 125-26). Followers of Copernicus had little trouble blunting the edge of his theories, accommodating heliocentrism and descriptions of planetary motion with religious belief, because his ideas emerged from the matrix of
late scholasticism and spoke its language. Banville nevertheless prefers to give us a quasi-mythic portrait of an aloof, transcendent genius instead of the versatile public figure recorded in the historical archive, diligently engaged in economic, legal, medical, and ecclesiastical pursuits. With Quicksilver (2003), the first volume of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle,
another novel trilogy, a writer best known for cyberpunk shoulders the burden of fictionalizing the scientific revolution. Quicksilver includes among its sprawling cast of characters notables such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, and Newton. When one character advises another to “consider the future of the revolution,” by which he means an epistemological insurrection or uprising (“You speak and think in a language that did not exist when you and Sir Isaac entered Trinity”), he pronounces as a traditional historian of science avant la lettre (Stephenson 2003: 46). Stephenson’s protagonists float above their societies, behaving as our postmodern contemporaries do and participating in a celebrity culture that reduces the novel of ideas to chat-show banter. The revolution he invokes admittedly entails no “single dramatic moment of apocalypse,” since one cannot point to “the Moment It All Happened” (864). Yet this historical novel very much depends on the narrative constructed by two of the distinguished historians Stephenson acknowledges as his sources, A. Rupert Hall and Richard S. Westfall, who published scholarship after World War II that sealed the significance and singular identity of the scientific revolution for decades. In a bibliographical essay annexed to his revisionist The Scientific Revolution,
Steven Shapin describes the “Great Tradition” in historiography, exemplified by Hall and Westfall, as marked by
robust confidence that there was a coherent and specifiable body of early modern culture rightly called revolutionary … that it had an ‘essence,’ and that this essence could be captured through accounts of the rise of mechanism and materialism, the mathematization of natural philosophy, the emergence of full-blooded experimentalism, and for many, though not all, traditional writers, the identification of an effective ‘method’ for producing authentic science.
