| Traditionally, the historiography of science marked the century between 1560 and 1660 as a paradigmatic shift. On the early side, scholars were seen as embedded in a traditional, medieval Aristotelian/Ptolemaic mind, and on the other side of the shift we have a revolutionary Pythagorean/Copernican cosmology. The shift also tends to tear natural philosophers from the 'past' as a source for their knowledge about nature. Natural philosophers are seen as having moved away from "the past" in their explanations, preferring to find evidence in experiment and observation. In this way of viewing the past, the East has little role to play in the development of the new European science. For the Islamic world, the result is a flatness of depiction, or, at worst, an unwillingness even to delve its richness. In my view, the master narrative of early-modern history of science has held that two cultures developed along two separate linear paths---Europe with great progress and the Islamic world in decline.; My project explores two overlapping worlds---each a place of travelers, incidental buyers and traders, diplomats, translators, pirates and captives, societies and patrons, and finely attuned sensibilities about global discourse. In the overlapping space European and Muslim astronomers exchanged cultural and intellectual items and ideas concerning nature. Instead of a radical change having cut off the Europeans from both their past and the East, I argue that in the most cutting-edge incidents in astronomy, natural philosophers in fact heavily relied on the past and the East. They worked out explanations for their revolutionary cosmology by restoring items of 'fallen knowledge' (texts, words, numerical data, even geographical coordinates) to a more usable, pure, state. Fervent hopes were pinned on such items, with the expectation that they conveyed secrets of nature from the past. My project offers for description several incidents in which our travelers (specifically ambassadors, missionaries, professors of astronomy, and Sepharadic Jews, among others) looked for purer, ancient, knowledge in the East and their activities in passing transmitted to the Muslim world the new Copernican cosmology. The picture is much softer and hazier (more on the margins) than has been noticed previously. Such marginality and cultural ironies and coincidences make a believable picture of human intellects struggling to answer questions. It is a study of micro-cultural history, where the overlapping worlds existed both through the occasional direct carrier, but, quite importantly, also through a global dialectics. |
