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1 results

  • Chapter 15 - Science

  • from Part II - Approaches
  • Edited by Kristina Bross, Washington University, St Louis, Abram Van Engen, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book:
    A History of American Puritan Literature
    Published online:
    24 September 2020
    Print publication:
    15 October 2020, pp 292-309

  • Summary

    Focusing on the examples of astrology, astronomy, and cometography, this essay investigates the historical intellectual connections between the so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, religious reformism, and metaphysics. It argues that it was the strong voluntarism, in particular the strong belief in the sovereignty of divine providence, that Calvinism inherited from late medieval metaphysical nominalism that led to the rise of modern empiricism, the breakdown of Ptolemaic cosmology, and the ancient science of astrology, thus preparing the way for a new heliocentric and mechanistic understanding of the universe.