Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes by Craig Martin (review)

Craig Martin's study sheds light on a subject area that has received relatively little attention within wider interpretations of the processes of the 'scientific revolution', and the place of Aristotelianism within these. Yet, as Martin persuasively argues, scholarly meteorology - concerned with the causes of meteorology rather than its predictive potential - had unique dimensions which makes it a particularly valuable as a lens through which to analyse the transition of these processes across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Martin considers 'renaissance meteorology', as it is termed here (somewhat misleadingly given that it involves mostly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian works), a field that can demonstrate carefully nuanced positions, suggesting the vibrancy and renewal of Aristotelianism from within a conservative tradition. This, he argues, was in part a consequence of the strong contemporary interest in understanding such meteorological phenomena within religious, political, and practical contexts.

In Chapter 1, Martin examines the epistemology of renaissance meteorology. He argues that because nature was too uncertain, scholars concurred that demonstration would not be possible in this domain - only possible or rhetorical statements could be made. This solution resolved the difficulty that contemporaries' own observations and experiences contradicted some of Aristotle's statements. They concluded that Aristotle himself had been conjecturing. This view also supported those Catholic scholars who were keen to assert the gap between divine and human knowledge, as well as potential knowledge. Only tentative conclusions could thus be drawn about meteorology.

In the second chapter, Martin investigates whether scholars considered there was nonetheless a deeper meaning to meteorological phenomena. Aristotle offered little assistance: he had not ruled out the possibility of formal and final causes but had restricted his analysis to material and efficient causation. Here, religious persuasions were the key. Despite the limits of human knowledge, most Catholic scholars were convinced that such events must have a purpose. A few, such as Pomponazzi, were not certain such events were part of a divine plan, leaving room for the possibility that they were accidents of material excess, as Aristotle had surmised. For Lutherans, such phenomena were instead universally accepted signs of God's wrath. Indeed, that these were portentous signs of an impending apocalypse only proved the righteousness of their own faith position.

In Chapter 3, we see such intellectual and religious positions tested by the particular political and social contexts of the Ferrarese earthquakes of the early 1570s. Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, commissioned a series of learned publications to refute the pope's claim that the earthquakes were divine retribution for the Duke's failure to acquiesce to papal plans. Scholars were forced to negotiate their ideas anew in response to widespread public interest combined with specific political goals. This context, Martin suggests, generated politically astute forms of writing about meteorology as an intellectual proposition - not least the employment of Ciceronian dialogue through which a variety of ideas could be rehearsed and no conclusion advanced too firmly. This format also affirmed renaissance meteorology as a subject about which little conclusive knowledge could be formed, whether by scholars interested in Aristotle, antiquarianism, or geology, and the unknowability of God's purpose. Such doubt about divine meaning of the events satisfied Alfonso's political purposes.

The events in Ferrara had pushed scholars to look beyond Aristotle to find explanations in emerging fields and technologies. Martin's fourth chapter examines the use of chymical, mineralogical, and balneological ideas, as well as experiences with gunpowder and engineering, in shaping new insights in learned meteorology. The influence of moderns and ancients, from Seneca and Pliny to Paracelsus, are present in the suggestions that new substances (sulphur and bitumen among them) helped explain such phenomena, even if the acceptance of Paracelsan ideas was fairly limited. These are demonstrated in the analyses made of the 1646 blood rain in Brussels, which highlighted the ways Aristotelianism was being recast from within.

This investigation leads...