In April 1973 m, Lawrence Lerner and I published an article in Scientific American in which we argued that Giordano Bruno was not a scientist in the Galilean sense of the word. In November 1986. Lerner and I published another article in Scientific American, arguing that a root cause of Galileo’s Trouble with the Inquisition in 1632-3 was not just the formal similarity of The Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems with Bruno’s Ash Wednesday Supper but that the Dolphin emblem on Galileo’s title page caused the Church to think Galileo’s work carried a Brunonian message.
My proposed paper, written after years of work and publications on Bruno’s religious ideas, sums up my understanding of his message to England in 1583-5, as he composed his five Italian dialogues there. The entirety of his message from the first, The Ash Wednesday Supper, to the last, The Heroic Frenzies, was a religious message that transcended the Copernican Theory that was at these works’ base. And, most important, The Ash Wednesday Supper’s proemial poem, « To the Malcontent, » introduced the religious message that Bruno world develop in all five Italian Dialogues. Consequently, this poem, never before fully understood or explained, was an introduction to all five of Bruno’s works, not just one.

This presentation seeks to show how naturalistic attitudes and interests that developed in the sixteenth century were a part of Boyle’s intellectual milieu. Their influence is seen in the evolution of his reflections on natural philosophy. From early in his natural philosophical career, Boyle routinely appealed to the Reformation-era notion of nature as divine text, the elements of which functioned as letters in an alphabet. He framed his inquires in these terms at a time when his forerunners and contemporaries--Bacon, Hartlib, Wilkins, Beale, Wallis, Hooke, and others--were devoting increased attention to the workings of language, cryptography, and the need for a systematic linguistic representation of the world. These factors, taken alongside Boyle’s passion for alchemy and the discourse of secrecy and concealment accompanying this practice, gradually caused him to conceive of the “book of nature” as an encrypted text deciphered by mechanical hypotheses. This metaphor, which quickly became popular with other adherents to the mechanical philosophy, helped Boyle articulate elements of his natural philosophical method in a straightforward way, frame its epistemological limits, and situate it within a broader natural theological context.

William Gilbert (1544-1603), a founder of early modern science in Britain, was the author of De magnete (On the Magnet, 1600), esteemed by many later natural philosophers for its rejection of scholasticism and extensive use of experiment. Since the 19th century, Gilbert has been routinely celebrated as having discovered the fundamental laws of magnetism. In De magnete, he reviews preexisting works, giving slight notice to one Peter Peregrinus (13th c.). In fact, Peregrinus wrote a remarkable tract, Epistola de Magnete (ca. 1268), detailing experiments on magnetic behavior and proposing the earliest dry compass. Over 30 copies are known, including a printed version, testifying to long-term use. Close comparison with De magnete shows beyond doubt that Gilbert plagiarized substantial parts of Peregrinus’ work. Though Gilbert’s Latin is not identical, the methods and materials, order of experiments, and derived “laws” all copy Peregrinus. Why Gilbert believed this would go unnoticed is unclear. Such an episode, however, is important for other reasons. It provides new support for direct connections between medieval and early modern science, an area of some debate. It also poses questions about what constituted “misconduct” at the time and whether similar examples of “borrowing” might have played a larger role in 17th century science.

Diagrams are ubiquitous today, and we learn already at school how to read and make them. Their epistemic status is, however, curiously ill-defined. This was already the case when the term was first introduced from ancient Greek into Renaissance Latin and into the vernacular languages. In the period 1550-1650, the term “diagram” underwent a complex development, as it came to denote three visually similar types of graphic representations which possessed however quite different degrees of epistemic certainty. The term “diagram” referred, first of all, to mathematical constructions with ruler and compass, like the line constructions that in Euclidean geometry accompany mathematical proofs. Diagram of that first type literally possess demonstrative power, as the concluding words QED (“quod erat demonstrandum”) at the end of a geometrical proof indicate. But quickly, the term “diagram” was also applied to schematic representations, for example in the domain of architectural drawings or machine albums. Diagrams of this type don't yield any proof, but at least provide isomorphically accurate information. Thirdly, "diagrams" also referred to geometrical drawings that represented spatial alterations over time. This last type was often applied to innovative ends, but was clearly more problematic, as it neither furnished any demonstrative proof nor represented existing spatial relations.
I will trace the Renaissance development of “diagram” and show which new possibilities of scientific argumentation it offered, but also, to which controversies its multiple status led. My examples of controversies will be taken from the domain of astronomy (Kepler vs. Fludd) as well as magnetism.