The New Science and Jesuit Science

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Mathematics and Modesty in the Society of Jesus: The Problems of Christoph Grienberger

   • Michael John Gorman

   Pages 1-120

3. The Grounds for Conflict: Grienberger, Grassi, Galileo, and Posterity

   • Mordechai Feingold

   Pages 121-157

4. Additio ILLA Non Videtur Edenda: Giuseppe Biancani, Reader of Galileo in an Unedited Censored Text

   • Francesco Paolo de Ceglia

   Pages 159-186

5. Two Jesuit Responses to Galileo’s Science of Motion: Honore Fabri and Pierre le Cazre

   • Carla Rita Palmerino

   Pages 187-227

6. Jesuit Mathematical Practice in Portugal, 1540–1759

   • Henrique Leitão

   Pages 229-247

7. The Celestial Pilgrimages of Valentin Stansel (1621–1705), Jesuit Astronomer and Missionary in Brazil

   • Carlos Ziller Camenietzki

   Pages 249-270

"One cannot talk about mathematics in the 16th and 17th centuries without seeing a Jesuit at every corner," George Sarton observed in 1940. * Sarton, of course, was not the first to recognize the disproportionate representation of members of the Society of Jesus in the scientific enterprise of the early modern period. However, unlike many historians who belittled the discernible numerical strength of the Jesuits on the grounds that they lacked originality and were generally hostile to new ideas, Sarton correlated numerical strength with significance. Hence his plea for collecting the papers of that industrious historian of Jesuit science, Henri Bosmans, was quite refreshing. Yet Sarton's appeal went unheeded, and not only with respect to Bosmans' papers. The perception of the Jesuits as plodding pedagogues and obscurantists remained as ingrained as ever, virtually sanctioning the disregard of their activities. Such neglect meant that the exact nature of the Jesuit contribution to the Scientific Revolution remained sketchy at best; only recently - owing to a long-overdue examination of the Order's archives and of published texts - have new contours begun to emerge. Striking in this reassessment is a more nuanced appreciation of the Jesuits' interaction with "modernity" and a far greater recognition of the Jesuit contribution to the two poles of modern science: the mathematization of natural philosophy and experimental science.

• Etch
• Factor
• Galileo Galilei
• Mathematica
• Natural
• Volume
• boundary element method
• cognition
• evolution
• mathematics
• perception
• philosophy
• scientific revolution
• sketch
• society

• Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, USA

  Mordechai Feingold

Policies and ethics