Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion (review)

This book is a collection of essays originally given in a seminar series at All Souls College, Oxford. The editors, Ian Maclean and John Brooke, are themselves noted experts in the field of the history of science and in the relationships between scientific and religious thought. Here they have collected contributions from other well-known tillers in that vineyard.

Ian Maclean introduces the volume with a short disquisition on various early modern terms associated with novel ideas in religion and philosophy. He demonstrates how the term paradox was used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for novel ideas in terms of contradicting established views or for introducing new data. The term heterodox was a child of paradox. In theology the term heresy had an ancient pedigree and the use of heterodox in that arena related to both erroneous doctrines and to ones about which there was no consensus of belief.

The volume then proceeds in a roughly chronological fashion. Maclean follows his introduction with the first study, in this case of three Italian figures who moved in the worlds of medicine and philosophy: Pietro Pomponazzi, Guglielmo Gratarolo, and Girolamo Cardano. Maclean discerns in all three an "anti-authoritarian attitude" (27), which he relates to their medical training. As we move into the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, David Wootton treats John Donne's religion as a "religion of love" (31), and contends that Donne became a member of the mystical sect known as the Family of Love. Following this, Nicholas Davidson offers an interesting study of Guilio Cesare Vanini. Davidson argues that Vanini was surely a heterodox thinker who, at times, attempted to undermine orthodox ideas in subversive works purportedly written to defend religious orthodoxy. As an example of his heterodoxy and heresy, Vanini seemingly denied the distinction between spirit and matter, which included a rejection of all spiritual beings including God. Davidson agrees with Vanini's contemporaries, "who saw him as a serious threat to orthodox religion" (79).

Now we move into the seventeenth century, the main focus of the essays in this book. These essays can be seen as either upholding or denying assertions concerning the heterodoxy of major philosophical and religious figures. Christoph Lüthy attempts to explode the myth of the irenic Republic of Letters of the early modern era, arguing that many figures of this supposed republic were divided by important confessional issues that they made important parts of a number of their works. William E. Carroll examines Galileo's biblical exegesis and his attempts to reconcile Copernicanism and the Bible. Carroll rightly argues that Galileo's exegetical principles were neither novel nor heterodox, as some modern historians have contended, but part of the long tradition of Catholic biblical interpretation. He couples this with a short attempt to demonstrate that Galileo was still in important ways an Aristotelian natural philosopher. Carroll perhaps goes too far in making the great Italian thinker a traditionalist. Continuing with the theme of Copernicanism and religion, Tabitta van Nouhuys offers an intriguing study of four thinkers from the Netherlands: the Calvinists Van Lansbergen and Voetius and the Catholics Wendelinus and Fromondus. Based on this small sample, this study questions the Hooykaas thesis of a special compatibility of Copernicanism and Calvinism. Nouhuys also does not find much concern with Copernicanism as heterodox by either Catholics or Calvinists and contends that when it was attacked it was part of larger, essentially religious polemic. Finally, the author concludes, "Nor is there any clear-cut relationship between heterodoxy in science and heterodoxy in religion: at times they coincide (Lansbergen), at times they did not (Fromondus, Wendelin)" (168).

Still in the seventeenth century, Margaret Osler dissects the ideas of Gassendi to show that he was not an early modern free-thinking libertine and argues that this designation and legend begins with the World War II scholar René Pintard. On the other hand, Cees Leijenhorst demonstrates that Hobbes was undoubtedly a radical...