Help! I’ve just been savaged by a toothless American bulldog.

I really think that the BBC is trying to piss me off this week. First they dish up the total disaster that was Great Lives “Galileo” on Radio 4. Then they present a highly questionable documentary on Isaac Newton on BBC 4, which, have no fear gentle readers, I will deal with in a later post. Finally Adam Gopnik abuses his position as one of the rotating cast of speakers on Radio 4’s Point of View to insult the critics of his highly dubious New Yorker Galileo essay. Add to this Radio 1’s totally wrong and highly cowardly refusal to play Ding Dong The Witch is Dead followed by some maverick BBC reporters making life very difficult for all student field trips to non democratic countries in the future and I could fall out of love with the Corporation that had nourished my soul since I first started to become aware of sound.

Mr Gopnik! Adam Gopnik chose this Sunday to answer those people who had possessed the infernal cheek to criticise his god given words on the great Galileo Galilei. Did he do so by engaging with his critics? Maybe he did so by producing some evidence to back up those of his utterances that had been deemed false by his detractors. Wrong on both counts. Our internationally renowned wordsmith resorted to the lowest form of riposte, the argumentum ad hominem.

I am conceited enough to thing that I personally was, at least, one of the targets at which his insults were launched, because of my criticism of his previous misrepresentation of John Dee, and having both heard the original broadcast and read the transcript of his talk all I can say is that I feel that I have been savaged by a toothless, arthritic American bulldog that is stone deaf and suffers from cataracts. It doesn’t really hurt and one feels slightly embarrassed at having to bat the poor demented creature away but its drool, which as all dog owners know if very slimy and gooey, is difficult to get out of one’s clothes.

So how does Mr Gopnik go about insulting his critics? He doesn’t do it directly but hides it behind even more waffle about Galileo, which only compounds his errors from the original article.

He starts of his talk with the following world-weary complaint of the plagued author:

When you write for a living, over time you learn that certain subjects will get set responses. You’re resigned to getting the responses before you write the story.

[…]

…you will get many letters and emails from what we call the cracked (and I think you call the barking)…

[…]

The oddest response, though, is if you write making an obvious point about an historical period or historical figure, you will get lots of letters and emails insisting that the obvious thing about the guy or his time is completely wrong.

By now you should be getting the drift, it is inconceivable that Mr Gopnik is wrong about anything, he obviously has god like powers and is omniscient, so it follows that his critics are not just wrong they are barking mad.

Now just in case you think that our god like author is only talking about those who are genuinely cracked he makes very clear that he isn’t:

Now these letters and emails come more often from the half-bright, some of them professional academics, than from the fully bonkers or barking.

You can tell the half-bright from the barking because the barking don’t know how little they know, while the half-bright know enough to think that they know a lot, but don’t know enough to know what part of what they know is actually worth knowing.

We now finally arrive at the grounds for our sterling authors woes his essay on Galileo. This time he choses to base his story around the myth of Galileo throwing balls off the Tower of Pisa. He sort of half admits that it might not be true. It’s actually a complete load of rubbish. However he doesn’t think that that matters because “it’s a legend that points towards the truth”. This shows that Gopnik neither understands Galileo nor physics. The story is a load of rubbish because it wouldn’t produce a result that confirms the laws of fall, it would instead confirm Aristotle’s view, which Galileo knew full well and which is why he would never had tried it. Galileo was not stupid.

Gopnik now goes into hagiographic modus:

In 1632 Galileo wrote a great book – his Dialogue On Two World Systems. It’s one of the best books ever written because it’s essentially a record of a temperament, of a kind of impatience and irritability that leads men to drop things from towers and see what happens when they fall.

The Dialogo is indeed a fine piece of polemic carefully constructed to cover the yawning gaps in the science that it contained. In those parts where Galileo sticks to his undoubted strengths as an experimental scientist it is about men who design carefully thought out, skilfully constructed and studiously carried out experiments and not about impatient and irritable idiots who throw things off towers.

Having led us away from his lament about the crackpots who make his life so difficult he now returns to stick the knife in to those barking critics who dared to contradict the master.

In that essay I wrote about Galileo I compared him to John Dee, the famous English magician, alchemist and astrologer, who was one of his contemporaries who was also a consultant to Queen Elizabeth I, and who read everything there was to read in his time and knew everything there was to know in the esoterica of his time – but didn’t know what was worth knowing.

Notice how he carefully avoids crediting Dee with being a Renaissance mathematicus, which he indubitably was, and one of the leading mathematical practitioners in Europe in the third quarter of the 16^th century. Also notice the subtle piece of invention at the end, “but didn’t know what was worth knowing”. This is a claim of Gopnik’s own creation and is in no way backed up by the historical facts about Dee.

He knew a lot about Copernicus, for instance, but he also spent half his life trying to talk to angels and have demons intervene to help him turn lead into gold.

Here we have a lovely example of rhetorical bait-and-switch. Dee might have known a lot about Copernicus but that knowledge was worthless because he talked to angels. In fact Dee and his group, Thomas Digges, John Feild (sic), Robert Recorde, Gemma Frisius etc, played an important and highly significant role in the propagation and dissemination of the Copernican heliocentric hypothesis, something that Gopnik with his black and white vision of the history of science is apparently incapable of understanding. Or more probably he can’t acknowledge because to do so he would have to admit that he is wrong and as we already know he can’t be wrong because he’s omniscient.

Now Mr Gopnik descends to the level of sneering condescension a sure sign that he has run out of real arguments and has to rely on argumentum ad hominem:

Well, it turns out that John Dee the magician and astrologer has his admirers – indeed his web pages and his fan clubs and his chatboard, just like Harry or Liam or Justin – and they took up the cause of the old alchemist with me. How dare you knock John, his fans, some of them half-bright, some of them just a little, well, barking, insisted. Wasn’t he a formidably erudite man particularly on just those subjects – stars and orbits and falling objects – that Galileo cared about too? Why shut him out of the scientific creed.

The only sentence worth noting in this gratuitous piece of slime is the final question, “Why shut him out of the scientific creed?” Gropnik’s answer is illuminating as it displays his total ignorance of the history of science:

Well, that was the point I was making. And it seems to me worth making again – and then again and then again. It just can’t be made too often.

The scientific revolution wasn’t an extension in erudition. It involved instead what we might call a second-order attitude to erudition – and if that sounds fancy, it just means the human practice of calling bull on an idea which you think is full of it, and being unafraid to do so.

Dee was a learned man – too learned a man, in fact, in whose head all kinds of stuff lodged, some obviously silly and some in retrospect sane, but impacted together like trash in a dump heap. Above all, his work is filled with supernatural explanations – with angels and demons and astrological spells.

There are two salient points to be made here “the scientific revolution […] means […] calling bull on an idea which you think is full of it, and being unafraid to do so”. Ignoring for the moment the fact that the majority of historians of science no longer believe in a thing called the scientific revolution Gopnik’s characterisation of what happened to science in the seventeenth century is totally and fundamentally wrong. Modern science emerged throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from an incredible jumble of rational, semi-rational, moderately weird and totally bat-shit insane ideas, concepts and theories. I would suggest that Mr Gopnik should avoid the works of Johannes Kepler who contributed considerably more to the development of modern science than Galileo (and yes I’m prepared at anytime to defend that claim). Kepler’s contributions to science emerged in a pot pourri of Renaissance ideas and theories that at times make even Dee’s conversations with angels seem almost rational. I shall come to Newton’s alchemy in a minute.

We return to Dr Dee:

Dee was a learned man – too learned a man, in fact, in whose head all kinds of stuff lodged, some obviously silly and some in retrospect sane, but impacted together like trash in a dump heap. Above all, his work is filled with supernatural explanations – with angels and demons and astrological spells.

Again we catch Gopnik making things up. Dee’s work was in no way, “impacted together like trash in a dump heap.” I challenge Mr Gopnik to search Dee’s mathematical writings on cartography, navigation and astronomy for the angels and demons. I will personally buy him a pint of his favourite beverage for every single one he finds. I know that I won’t actually have to open my wallet because unlike Mr Gopnik I have studied John Dee’s mathematical work and I know what I’m talking about.

Galileo, emphatically did not believe in magic. Galileo has no time for supernatural explanations of any kind – indeed, when he goes wrong, as he did when he rejected the idea that the Moon causes the tides, it’s because he resists the right explanation because it just sounds too strange or magical.[1]

I suggest that Mr Gopnik never reads Galileo’s Il Saggiatore, the polemic pamphlet containing his famous quote about the book of nature. Here he would find his hero vehemently defending the completely irrational Aristotelian theory of comets against the reasonably correct theory of Grassi based on observation just to score rhetorical points, a low point in the writings of the Tuscan polymath. This is just one example of several; Galileo was by no means as rational and scientific as Gopnik would wish him to be.

History has taught us that science didn’t just happen in a burst. Alchemy and astrology evolved slowly and over time into chemistry and astronomy.

Wow! Gopnik actually got something right for a change.

Galileo even made a buck in his youth by casting horoscopes for rich people.

You can almost hear the subtext screaming “But he didn’t believe in it, not my Galileo!” Just for the record Galileo was a professional teacher and practitioner of astrology and all of the available evidence suggests very strongly that he also believed in it.

There were no bright lines. Indeed sometimes science slipped back into astrology and alchemy and superstition and the occult. It’s well-known that Isaac Newton spent a lifetime searching for the Philosopher’s Stone.

Again Gopnik either doesn’t know what he is talking about or he is being deliberately misleading. Galileo in no way marks the end of astrology or alchemy as mainstream branches of knowledge in the seventeenth century so what we have is not a case of slipping back. Astrology first lost its academic and scientific status around 1660 and alchemy went on being acceptable, albeit in a strange secretive manner, into the beginnings of the eighteenth century. In fact I once wrote a short piece about the alchemical correspondence between Newton, Boyle and Locke. As I pointed out in another post on the entanglement of science and pseudo-science Newton’s very serious study of alchemy played a very significant role in the development of his universal theory of gravity. But that of course cannot be because as Gopnik informs us alchemy is bull and that has nothing to do with real science.

The closing paragraphs of Gopnik’s piece are a pathetic pleading for his version of science against the esoteric of the cracked and barking. It is straight out of the neo-positivist’s handbook of nineteenth century rationalism which I cannot be bothered to waste you time dismantling

Mr Gopnik if people criticise what you have written about the history of Renaissance science you might do well to open your ears and listen to what they have to say. If you did so then you might just learn something. However instead of listening you decided to insult your critics and to make stuff up to justify the false claims you made in the first place. If you are going to pontificate about the history of science in the Early Modern Period then might I suggest that you go away and learn something about it first before you start shouting your mouth off. Even better why don’t you write something about art instead? I’ve head that’s a subject that you might actually know something about.

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[1] I was planning on tackling Galileo’s claims on his reasons for rejecting a lunar tides theory in this post but as it is already far too long and still growing I think I’ll save that for a separate one.

What was when modern?

Darin Hayton has a short post discussing a review of John Hessler’s A Renaissance Globemaker’s Toolbox, a new book about the cartographical endeavours of the Renaissance mathematicus Johannes Schöner.  As well as being the addressee of Rheticus’ Naratio Prima, the first published account of Copernican heliocentricity, Schöner played a very central roll in the history of globe making as well as the evolution of cartography in the sixteenth century and it is with this aspect of his life that the new book is concerned. Schöner put together a private bound volume of cartographical material that he used for his own work. This volume contained, amongst other things, the only known copy of the first map to name the newly discovered western continent America, Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map of the world, that was purchased by the Library of Congress for ten million dollars in 2003. In his latest book Hassel analyses all the cartographical material contained in Schöner’s “toolbox” to develop a picture of how he worked. I might write more about this book when I’ve read it, I ordered it today, but here I’m concerned with one troubling paragraph of the review to which Darin has already drawn attention in his post. The reviewer, John Wilford, wrote at the end of his piece the following:

Nothing in the book points up more clearly Schöner’s pivotal place in a world in transition from the medieval to the modern than his residual interest in astrology and his awakening curiosity when he apparently heard reports of a new theory being formulated by a Polish Catholic cleric. A brilliant young student of Schöner’s, Georg Joachim Rheticus, went to see Copernicus in 1539 and learned more about the Earth orbiting the Sun. Rheticus then composed a short treatise, written in the form of a letter to his teacher, “most illustrious and learned” Johannes Schöner.

In his post Darin comments on this paragraph thus:

Schöner’s interest in that “new theory being formulated by a Polish Catholic cleric” probably owed more to his interest in astrology and making astrological prognostications than the modernity we see in Copernicus’s theory. Along with his prognostications and calendars, Schöner also wrote books on astrology before and after Copernicus’s De revolutionibus was published, notably his Opusculum Astrologicum in 1539 and De iudiciis nativitatum Libri Tres in 1545. Schöner might also have been the author of a horoscope cast for Copernicus. Judging from the table of contents, Hessler spends some time assessing Schöner’s astrology. Schöner’s interest in astrology shouldn’t diminish our interest in him, but it should, perhaps, prompt us to wonder about the labels “modern” and “medieval” and the work they do for us…

Darin criticism is right on the button and in what follows I would like to expand upon it somewhat and expose what I see as a common misconception concerning the history of astrology.

Darin is perfectly correct when he surmises that any interest that Schöner had in the work of Copernicus was almost certainly motivated by his very active interest in astrology and it should be noted that Schöner’s “brilliant young student”, Georg Joachim Rheticus, who famously undertook the arduous journey to Frauenburg to visit Copernicus did so after spending several months in Nürnberg studying astrology under Schöner. The central section of Rheticus’ Naratio Prima consists of an excurse on what he sees as a confirmation of an astrological cyclical theory of history, popular at the time amongst Renaissance scholars, delivered by Copernicus’ theory of the precession of the equinoxes. However I see a major problem in Wilford’s labelling of Schöner’s astrology as medieval.

Schöner’s astrology is Renaissance astrology and it is for various reasons a very different beast to medieval astrology. His astrological practice cannot and should not be seen, as Wilford wishes us to do so, as a residual left over from earlier times but as the, for the sixteenth century, central and actual activity of the working Renaissance mathematicus; Schöner’s astrology was modern.

European horoscope astrology, there are other sorts that I won’t discuss here, began life in Greece sometime in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, combing elements of earlier Egyptian and Babylonian systems of prognostication. Its fortunes waxed and waned over the following centuries and reached a zenith in the work of Ptolemaeus in the second century CE. From here like all the other sciences of antiquity, and its adherents certainly regarded it as a science, it went into decline, almost disappearing completely in the Early Middle Ages. Although it should be pointed out that those works of astronomy from antiquity that remained known in this period such as Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii and Microbius’ Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis are strongly astrological.

With the first major revival of learning at the beginning of the High Middle Ages, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the rise of the European universities astrology enjoyed a rather dubious reputation. It stood in conflict with the dominating Catholic theology. Horoscope astrology with its seemingly deterministic prognostications appeared to contradict the central Church tenet, the belief in free will.

With the advent of Humanist Renaissance in the fifteenth century astrology enjoyed a major revival centred around astro-medicine, or as it was also known iatro-mathematics, a discipline that like astrology had its roots in fourth century BCE Greece. This form of medicine believed that the causes and cures of diseases were controlled by celestial influences and that a medicus must study the horoscopes of both the patient and the disease to determine the correct course of treatment. Chairs of astrology were established at the Northern Italian humanist universities and also in Cracow in Poland, later in other parts of Europe. By the end of the century astrology was the central discipline studied and practiced by the Renaissance mathematicus. This revival in the fortunes of astrology was also made possible because the new astrologers interpreted horoscopes as being indicative and no longer deterministic. That is a horoscope indicated a possible course for the future but one that could be altered by the subject of the horoscope if he took the right actions. Actions defined by the astrologer, of course, for a further fee.

In the sixteenth century at the start of the Reformation Philipp Melanchthon, who was responsible for the curricular of the Lutheran Protestant schools and university, established chairs for mathematics in all of the Protestant educational establishments to further the study of astrology of which he was a passionate adherent. Johannes Schöner professor for mathematics at the Egidian Oberschule in Nürnberg was one of the first of those appointees. Favoured for his already excellent reputation as an astrologer. Far from being a medieval residue Renaissance astrology, as practiced by Schöner, was a cutting edge academic discipline and for its time the epitome of modern.

Astrology was also not in the process of dying off following Schöner’s own demise in 1547 it continued to be a central field of study for the cartographers and astronomers who created the modern disciplines over the next hundred years. Both Gemma Frisius and Gerard Mercator, who are regarded as two of the principle founders of modern cartography and who were both highly influenced by Schöner’s work, were highly respected practicing astrologers. Rheticus the midwife of Copernican heliocentricity who became a medicus practicing astro-medicine in Cracow in the later part of his life gained a European wide reputation for his astrological prognostica. Michael Maestlin, Kepler’s teacher, and Tycho Brahe, his most significant employer, who each made important contribution to the evolution of the new astronomy were both practicing astrologers who regarded astrology as central to their astronomical research. Kepler himself, probably the most important of the modern astronomers, was also a passionate believer in celestial influence even if he rejected the traditional horoscope astrology and wished to replace it with one of his own devising. Finally even Galileo Galilei, supposedly the first really modern “scientist” taught astrology to the medicine student at the University of Padua a discipline that he himself obviously believed in as evidenced by the horoscopes that he drew up for his own family. This list of sixteenth and early seventeenth century astrologers is of course not exhaustive but merely an indication of just how deep the study and practice of astrology was embedded in the work of a Renaissance mathematicus.

Astrology first went into decline and lost its social and academic status in the second half of the seventeenth century with the general decline of the scholastic Aristotelian philosophy and with it the Renaissance belief in the micro-cosmos/ macro-cosmos philosophy, the fundamental justification for celestial influence and astrology.

Returning to the starting point of this post I hope I have made clear with my brief exposition of the history of European horoscope astrology that Schöner’s “residual interest in astrology” in no way indicates his “pivotal place in a world in transition from the medieval to the modern” as there was nothing medieval about his astrological activities for they were in themselves a sign of modernity in the sixteenth century.

A little learning is a dangerous thing

“A little learning is a dangerous thing


Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: 


There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,


And drinking largely sobers us again. 


Fired at first sight with what the muse imparts,


In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts 


While from the bounded level of our mind 


Short views we take nor see the lengths behind 


But more advanced behold with strange surprise,


New distant scenes of endless science rise!”

In a recent New Yorker essay Adam Gopnik delivered up his view of Galileo Galilei. The essay is long and meandering and I don’t intend to do a complete analysis but there is one central point of Gopnik’s that I do wish to discuss. He gets off to a lousy start by calling Galileo “The founder of modern science”. I’ve already dealt with this elsewhere and don’t intend to repeat myself here. However Gopnik returns to the theme towards the end of his essay with proof! He begins with the following:

Contemporary historians of science have a tendency to deprecate the originality of the so-called scientific revolution, and to stress, instead, its continuities with medieval astrology and alchemy. And they have a point. It wasn’t that one day people were doing astrology in Europe and then there was this revolution and everyone started doing astronomy. Newton practiced alchemy; Galileo drew up all those horoscopes. But if you can’t tell the difference in tone and temperament between Galileo’s sound and that of what went before, then you can’t tell the difference between chalk and cheese.

Those historians of science can make their claims but Gopnik, a literary critic/humourist/art critic [please choose the appellation for Gopnik that best fits your prejudices or lack of them: see comments] knows better! He has read a book!

The difference is apparent if you compare what astrologers actually did and what the new astronomers were doing. “The Arch-Conjuror of England” (Yale), Glyn Parry’s entertaining new biography of Galileo’s contemporary the English magician and astrologer John Dee, shows that Dee was, in his own odd way, an honest man and a true intellectual. He races from Prague to Paris, holding conferences with other astrologers and publishing papers, consulting with allies and insulting rivals. He wasn’t a fraud. His life has all the look and sound of a fully respectable intellectual activity, rather like, one feels uneasily, the life of a string theorist today.

Now I have read the same book and although that book is excellent it, in my opinion, suffers from a major deficiency that I actually discussed on twitter a while back with Ted Hand (@t3dy) a historian of alchemy. However before we turn to Parry’s book and its deficiency let us see how Gopnik uses it to justify his belief in Galileo’s modernity.

The look and the sound of science . . . but it does have a funny smell. Dee doesn’t once ask himself, “Is any of this real or is it all just bullshit?” If it works, sort of, and you draw up a chart that looks cool, it counts. Galileo never stopped asking himself that question, even when it wasn’t bullshit but sounded as though it might well be. That’s why he went wrong on the tides; the-moon-does-it-at-a-distance explanation sounds too much like the assertion of magic. The temperament is not all-seeing and curious; it is, instead, irritable and impatient with the usual stories.

So there we have it. Galileo may have been a practicing astrologer but he was also a questioning scientist whereas his near contemporary John Dee was just a gullible pseudo-scientist. Case closed. Galileo is different. He is the founder of modern science as claimed. Gopnik 1 historians of science 0.

Unfortunately for Gopnik reading one book on Dee, no matter how good, isn’t enough. He has fallen head first into the error illustrated by the famous quote from Alexander Pope with which this post is headed, “a little learning is a dangerous thing”. If instead he had drunk deep of the springs of Dee scholarship he would not have so confidently labelled Dee chalk to Galileo’s cheese.

What is Parry’s deficiency and why is Gopnik wrong?

To understand the problem we have to look at how John Dee’s image has changed over the centuries. In the 16^th century Dee was a highly respected member of the European scientific community highly involved in mathematics, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, cartography, navigation and history. By the middle of the 17^th century his star was fading fast and he was largely forgotten then Meric Casaubon published the so-called Angel Diaries, Dee’s supposed conversations with angels through the medium Edward Kelly. Through this publication of previously unknown material Dee became the archetypal Renaissance magus in the popular imagination, a dabbler in magic probably in league with the devil.

This remained the public persona of Dee right up to the beginning of the twentieth century and he became a notorious trans-continental figure turning up as the essence of sorcery in several works of fiction. In the twentieth century, however, historians began to investigate and re-assess the real historical John Dee and the role that he played in European Renaissance culture. What emerged was a very different figure from the archetypal Renaissance magus. The last forty or fifty years has seen the publication of many academic papers and a series of monographs containing biographical studies of Dee, illustrating various aspects of his highly complex character. Glyn Parry’s The Arch Conjuror of England: John Dee is the latest such biography to be published.

Parry’s book, which is excellent and highly recommended for those interested in the subject, is a well researched and minutely documented study of the role played by alchemy and magic in the European royal courts of the sixteenth century, in particular the court of Elizabeth I of England, structured around the life story of John Dee. This is not the first such study but follows in the tradition of R. J. W. Evan’s excellent Rudolph II and his World: A study in intellectual history, 1576–1612 and Bruce T. Moran’s equally excellent The Alchemical World of the German Court: Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle of Moritz of Hessen (1572–1632) both of which also feature John Dee, albeit in a less central role, who was active on both courts. Both books are regarded as classics and standard works on the role of the occult in Renaissance culture and Parry’s book is a more than worthy companion but there is a minor and important difference. Both Evan’s and Moran’s books were marketed as academic books written for specialists and although Parry’s volume is equally academic his publishers have seized upon Dee’s public popularity and marketed it as a popular book. They have also, and this is the crucial point, marketed it as a biography. This marketing strategy has led Gopnik to the belief that having read Parry’s book he now knows all about John Dee but unfortunately he is highly mistaken.

Parry actually only deals with one aspect of Dee’s multi-faceted nature, his activities as a magus almost completely ignoring Dee the mathematicus and it is here that Gopnik walks straight into a trap of his own making. If instead of just reading Parry’s book he had done some basic research on Dee he would have discovered that Dee and Galileo are by no means so far apart as he would like to think.

Several times in his book Parry alludes to the fact that mathematics plays a very central role in Dee’s whole philosophy but never bothers to elucidate what or why, concentrating instead on Dee’s occult activities leading Gopnik to a totally false picture of Dee the mathematical scientist. Early in his book Parry explains that after graduating from Cambridge Dee paid two visits to the University of Leuven, in the Spanish Netherlands, one short and one substantially longer to study under Gemma Frisius and Gerard Mercator. Parry discusses the astrology that Dee studied under the two Netherlanders but makes no mention of the mathematics. In fact Frisius was one of the leading teachers of the cutting edge mathematical sciences of the age and Dee came back to Britain with the best mathematical education available anywhere in the world at the time. He introduced into Britain, which lagged far behind the rest of Europe in the development of the mathematical sciences, the newest procedures in mathematics, astronomy, cartography and navigation as well as bringing with him the newest terrestrial and celestial globes and astronomical instruments from the workshops of Frisius and Mercator. On his early journeys through Europe Dee also got to know and to learn from other leading European mathematical practitioners such as Pedro Nunes in Portugal and Federico Commandino in Italy.

In his house in Mortlake Dee set up a research centre for the mathematical sciences, which contained the largest private scientific library in Europe, including at least two copies of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus, where other interested scholars could and did come to learn and discuss the latest in mathematical knowledge. Dee’s foster son Thomas Digges wrote and published one of the first works on Copernican astronomy in English, which contained the first published partial translation of De revolutionibus into the vernacular. Another acolyte of Dee’s John Feild (sic) published, at Dee’s urging, the first ephemeris based on Copernicus’ work. Dee himself wrote the extensive preface to Henry Billingsley’s English translation of The Elements of Euclid. This preface is an important early work on the philosophy of mathematics. Dee corresponded on mathematical topics with many of the leading mathematicians and astronomers in Europe including a correspondence with Tycho Brahe on the problems of determining the parallax of moving celestial bodies, i.e. comets, a topic at the cutting edge of contemporary astronomical research. Dee was also a close friend and colleague of Thomas Harriot the greatest of English Renaissance mathematicians whose scientific discoveries easily rivalled those of Galileo but because he never published anything remained unknown and unacknowledged.

His English language preface to Billingley’s Euclid was not a one off but is symbolic for one of Dee’s most important contribution that of co-founder of the so-called English school of mathematics. As already mention in the second half of the sixteenth century England lagged behind the rest of Europe in the mathematical sciences. The first person to undertake series efforts to correct this deficit was Robert Recorde who wrote and published a series of textbooks in English covering the mathematical sciences including Copernican astronomy. After Recorde’s death Dee brought out several revised and expanded editions of those textbooks. The two of them started a tradition of English mathematics that stretched through the second half of the sixteenth century all the way through the seventeenth century up to Newton, which encompasses such important figures as William Oughtred, Seth Ward, John Wallis, Christopher Wren and even Newton himself.

Far from being the naïve magician that Gopnik imagines him to have been John Dee was acknowledged and recognised as one of the leading European mathematical practitioners in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. Whose mathematical heritage echoed all the way through the seventeenth century and the creation of modern science.

Contrary to the commonly held myth Galileo did not invent modern mathematical science but built his research on a solid foundation a Renaissance mathematical advances that goes back all the way to Georg Peuerbach and Regiomontanus in the middle of the fifteenth century. One of the Renaissance mini-giants on whose shoulders Galileo and his contemporaries constructed their contributions to the evolution of modern science was John Dee. Far from being the contrast obsolescent model to Galileo’s shiny new show room model as Gopnik would have us believe John Dee, in his own way, contributed as much to the creation of modern science as Galileo himself.

Pseudo-science, proto-science, pre-science or just plain science?

Having posted my recent article on the history of pseudo-science and science I went off to bed. Whilst I was wrapped in the arms of Morpheus an interesting little debate was taking place on my twitter stream. One of the participants thought that astrology and alchemy in the Early Modern Period should be considered as proto-sciences and not pseudo-sciences whereas his companion preferred the term pre-sciences. Their objection to the use of the term pseudo-science certainly has historical validity but if we are searching for a non-anachronistic substitute then as I answered in the morning, when I read their little debate, one should simply refer to them both as sciences. This discussion actually has a deeper meaning and I thought it might be of interest to take a closer look at the objections to the use of pseudo-science and my, for many people provocative, suggested solution.

The discussion that follows is, on a very superficial level, one on the philosophy of science, which some people, I think largely correctly, consider to be nothing other than epistemology. I should state that although I studied philosophy of science formally for ten years and informally for much longer I do not consider myself to be in anyway an authority in this area so if you wish to blast my arguments to smithereens in the comments please feel free to do so.

My twitter friends were of course perfectly correct to object to the label pseudo-science being applied to astrology and alchemy as practiced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However I was using the term in the sense in which it is used currently by Skeptics and other self-appointed defenders of the purity of science. In fact my whole point was that in earlier times these disciplines had not been decried but taken seriously and had thereby made substantial contributions to the evolution of the sciences. My twitter friends had realised this and were suggesting alternative terms based on their belief that astrology and alchemy aren’t really sciences but were treated as such in the Early Modern Period and thus proto- or pre-science. This raises visions of Thomas Kuhn’s pre-paradigmatic disciplines suggesting that because astrology and alchemy never developed paradigms they never succeeded in becoming sciences, unlike for example physics. I think this view is wrong.

I have provocatively labelled our two esoteric disciplines sciences as they were conceived in the period under discussion and here we have, in my opinion, the crux of the matter; the meaning of the term science is not and never has been cast in concrete but has itself changed over the centuries.

The current meaning of the term as understood by most people today, that is a study of nature governed by some form of logical scientific method, only really emerged in the nineteenth century, earlier it meant something rather different.

Science is the English translation, via the French, of the Latin term scientia, which was in the Middle Ages the standard translation in the works of Aristotle and others of the Greek term episteme in turn usually rendered in modern English as knowledge. The term first appears in English in the thirteenth century and according to Deborah Harkness in her The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (2007) (an excellent read) was in common usage in the Elizabethan period.

For Aristotle episteme of the natural world was ideally derived deductively from predetermined axioms; common sense statements that could be accepted by all without further proof, a very different concept of scientific knowledge to our modern one.

There is a modern debate as to whether scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge or just one of several that I do not intend to go into here (or ever for that matter; that way lies madness!) However in the Early Modern Period it was freely acknowledged that there were different forms of knowledge with differing justifications. At the top of the pile was religious knowledge, which was revealed knowledge, revealed through God’s word in the Bible. This was in everyway superior to mere empirical knowledge. In fact as I pointed out in an earlier post Galileo’s famous two books argument, the book of God and the book of Nature, was a sneaky attempt to raise empirical knowledge to the same level as religious knowledge.

In the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth century empirical knowledge was not justified in the first instance by repeatability but by personal testimony. A natural philosopher would give a list of those who had witnessed his discovery, the higher the social status of the witnesses the higher the justification of the knowledge. Although this situation gradually changed throughout the seventeenth century we still find strong examples of its use. When Pascal published the results of sending his cousin up a mountain with a barometer he did so with a list of those who had witnessed the experiment. Galileo who is often credited, wrongly, with having invented modern science sent out his telescopes not to astronomers but to bishops and aristocrats because their testimony carried more weight than that of the astronomers.

Both astrology and alchemy were considered to be epistemic disciplines, that is deliverers of knowledge. The justification in this case was philosophical and can be found in the concept of micro-cosmos/macro-cosmos. This philosophical axiom was particularly prevalent in the Renaissance and was the belief that the earth was a miniature model of the heavens and that through celestial influence the heavens in some way controlled what happened on the earth. In an extension of this philosophy the human body was an even smaller model of the cosmos producing a sort of Russian doll effect. This philosophical concept occurs in almost all schools of Greek philosophy and was taken over by the scholastics in the Renaissance.

Astrology was supposedly a way of determining this celestial influence whereas alchemy, in its Renaissance form, and natural magic were supposedly ways of controlling or manipulating that influence.

The collapse of these Renaissance esoteric sciences came about largely because the micro-cosmos/macro-cosmos philosophy was abandoned towards the end of the seventeenth century thus withdrawing their epistemic status. This is not something that happened overnight for example as I’ve written before although Isaac Newton completely rejected both astrology and natural magic he accepted alchemy as an epistemic discipline as did both John Locke and Robert Boyle.

Humanity’s interest in the so-called pseudo-sciences has not always been bad for science.

In a recent piece on her excellent Guardian Science blog, The H Word, my #histsci soul sister Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt asked, “Is there a rising tide of irrationality?” summarising her opinion with the following subtitle:

Despite claims that pseudoscientific views are on the rise, history shows that belief in things like astrology or the paranormal have always been with us and are likely to remain

Being my usual provocative self I thought I would take the time to point out that not only has the belief in things like astrology and the paranormal always been with us but that this belief has over the centuries made a not insubstantial contribution to the evolution of the so-called legitimate sciences. What follows is not intended to be an exhaustive survey of the subject but an indicator that humanity’s interest in the apparently non-rational has not necessarily been so disastrous as the members of the so-called Skeptical Community would have us believe.

As Ms Higgitt specifically mentions astrology I thought it would make for a convenient starting point. Some form of astrology or more generally a belief in celestial influence was the main driving force behind the development of astronomy from its beginnings in the prehistoric mists of time up to the beginning of the eighteenth century CE. Most if not all astronomers in antiquity were also astrologers a fact best illustrated by the fact that the author, Ptolemaeus, of the definitive account of technical astronomy in antiquity, his Syntaxis Mathematiké, was also the author of the definitive technical account of astrology, his Tetrabiblos.

We find this connection flowering in the Early Modern Period where the principle founders of the new astronomy – Gmunden, Peuerbach, Regiomontanus, Apian, Rheticus, Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo et al. – were all practicing astrologers. (The first person in the comments, who claims they only did it for the money gets to clean my bike for the next twelve months) In fact we know that the principle motivation for the majority of them in improving astronomy was to provide a more accurate apparatus for delivering the raw data for astrology. It is first the generation of astronomers active in the latter part of the seventeenth century – Cassini, Newton, Flamsteed, Halley et al. – who abandoned astrology for astronomy qua astronomy, although both Cassini and Newton were motivated to take up the subject by an early interest in astrology.

During the Humanist Renaissance the strong interest in astro-medicine or, as it was know, iatro-mathematics led to the establishment, for the first time, of dedicated chairs for the study of the mathematical sciences at the mediaeval universities.

During the Early Modern Period attempts to establish astrology as an empirical science led to the emergence of the science of meteorology and also made major contributions to a modern fact based approach to history. All in all not a bad record for the most ridiculed of pseudo-sciences.

Sticking with the “A”s we move on to alchemy. Often ridiculed as complete nonsense in reality alchemy made some major contribution, along side astrology, to the evolution of the sciences in the Early Modern Period.

Most difficult to determine is alchemy’s contribution to the development of its first cousin chemistry as the two disciplines were entwined in a close embrace well into the eighteenth century. What is certain is that most of the equipment and the methodology that became standard fare in the chemistry laboratory were developed over the centuries by alchemists.

Paracelsus has been called the father of pharmacy, a term, that regular readers of this blog will know, I detest. However it is a historical fact that the science of pharmacy as we know it has its origins in the activities of the Paracelsian iatro-chemists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose activities were based on a modified alchemy developed by their guru Theophrastus.

Alchemy also played a surprising role in the history of physics in the work of the seventeenth century’s most infamous alchemist, Isaac Newton. To quote I. Bernard Cohen probably the greatest of all Newtonian scholars:

Thus Newton’s acceptance of forces [and also action at a distance] as fundamental entities was conditioned to a significant degree by his studies of alchemy.[1]

In fact Newton’s rejection of the then dominant mechanical philosophy for an alchemy inspired physics of invisible forces acting at a distance led to the Principia being rejected by both the Cartesian and the Leibnizian physicists as occult (read pseudo) science.

Staying with old Isaac for a brief moment, as I have blogged in the past, he and other Bible chronologists, millennialists to the core (and you can’t get more pseudo than that!), in their endeavours to establish the date of the apocalypse made significant contributions to the development of modern historical methodology.

Should anybody jump to the conclusion that with the successful completion of the so-called scientific revolution this unholy alliance between the one pure doctrine of science and its distinctly unsavoury sister the occult had finally come to an end they would be mightily mistaken.

For example in the nineteenth century Vitalism, Naturphilosphie and Mesmerism, all three of which would be decried as pseudo-scientific today, all played important and significant roles in the scientific debates of the period pushing forward the development of various scientific disciplines.

Even the twentieth century was far from immune from the influence of highly dubious subjects within the evolution of the sciences. When he died the scientist, science communicator and novelist, Arthur Koestler left money in his will for the establishment of a chair for the investigation of the paranormal, an act that caused a major outcry within the scientific community. However throughout the twentieth century investigations of supposed paranormal phenomena such as telepathy, telekinesis, out of body experiences etc. have contributed to experiment design and evaluation, the development of statistical evaluation of experiments and made general contributions to the development of the cognitive sciences.

Should anyone believe that twentieth century physics is immune from woo they should read up on the history of the heuristics employed by those who developed the standard model, rational is something else.

Of course I’m not advocating the pursuit of pseudo-science or in anyway supporting those who try to sneak pseudo-science into the school curriculum but as a historian of science I do have problems with the often almost hysterical attitude of the Skeptical Community towards what they see as the demonic forces of woo. On one occasion when discussing the role that astrology played in the evolution of modern astronomy I was told by a leading German Skeptic, who was at that time a physics post doc at my local university and is still deeply involved in science communication, that I should not say such things in public because I would give people a false impression of science. As a historian of science I can only say that it is the supporters of Dawkins, Mayer et al who with their gospel of scientism who give people a false impression of science. Science has evolved over the centuries along a strange and convoluted path and will almost certainly continue to do despite the best efforts of the Hordes of Pharyngula and their ilk to place it in a straightjacket.

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[1] Isaac Newton The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, A new translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman assisted by Julia Badenz Preceded by A Guide to Newton’s Principia by I. Bernard Cohen pp. 57 – 58

The pocket diary: A great Renaissance invention

The other day Kate Morant, author of the interesting Halley’s Log Blog, tweeted the following question on my twitter stream:

Help! My iPhone diary’s become corrupted. By month ok, but by list all the apptmts randomly reassigned to diff dates. Any tips?

Being the friendly and helpful chap that I am, I tweeted back:

Buy a pocket diary (a great Renaissance invention) and a pencil.

Now I have already written about the origins of the pencil, another great Renaissance invention, in an earlier post so I thought it would be nice to write something about the scientific origins of the pocket diary.

Most people know that the printing of books with moveable type was (re)invented by Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg in Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century. (Moveable type printing had been invented twice before in China, eleventh century, and in Korea, thirteenth century) What most people don’t know is that one of Gutenberg’s first pieces of commercial printing was a single sheet wall calendar, which also counts as the earliest known printed scientific publication. Those not in the know are probably thinking why is a calendar a scientific publication?

In the Renaissance one of the dominant forms of medicine was astro-medicine, that is medical diagnosis and treatment based on astrological phenomena. Calendars contained the phases of the moon and other astronomical information, such as planetary conjunctions, to help physicians determine the auspicious and inauspicious days for treatments such as bloodletting and cupping. The importance attached to this information can be judged by the fact that many towns and districts employed a mathematician as an official calendar maker, whose function was to deliver this astronomical data for the physicians, barbers and surgeons of the town.

Astronomers and astrologers also produced and used ephemerides, which are more complex tables giving the daily positions of all the heavenly bodies. In the 1470s Regiomontanus set up the first scientific publishing house in Nürnberg and amongst other astronomical and astrological texts published the first printed ephemerides and astronomical/astrological calendars in book form. The calendars were simplified versions of the ephemerides with a reduce amount of data. Both publications proved immensely popular and were quickly copied by many other printer publishers.

We have several well-attested examples of astronomers and astrologers using their ephemerides to note important occurrences in the margins at the relevant date. For example the Nürnberger astronomer/astrologer Johannes Schöner recorded the birth of his children in the margins of his ephemerides.

At some point an enterprising printer publisher came up with the idea of binding empty pages into their book form astrological medical calendars between the printed pages providing a space were the users could make their notes instead of having to use the margins. This simple novelty caught on and the pocket diary was born. A vestigial reminder of the origins of the pocket diary can be seen in the phases of the moon that are still included in almost all diaries. These are not there so you remember to go out and marvel at the full moon but to help you to determine the correct day to indulge in a bit of bloodletting to cure the fever that accompanied that dose of flu you picked up at the office party.

The other professor of mathematics at Wittenberg.

Anybody who knows a bit about the history of astronomy in the early modern period or who has wasted their time and money reading Dava Sobel’s last perversion of the history of science will know that Copernicus was finally persuaded to publish his De Revolutionibus by Georg Joachim Rheticus who was professor of mathematics at the University of Wittenberg. To be precise he was appointed professor for the lower mathematics, i.e. arithmetic and geometry, by Phillip Melanchthon in 1536. In the same year Melanchthon appointed Erasmus Reinhold, who was born on 22^nd October 1511, professor for the higher mathematics, i.e. astronomy and music. Like his colleague Rheticus, Reinhold made a significant, but less well-known, contribution to the reception of Copernicus’ heliocentricity.

Reinhold was the son of Johannes Reinhold, a tax collector, from Saalfeld in Thüringen. He entered the University of Wittenberg as a student in the winter semester 1530/31 graduating MA in 1535 and as already noted above being appointed professor in 1536. He remained in Wittenberg the rest of his life serving terms as dean of the faculty of arts and as rector of the university. He died in 1553 probably of tuberculosis. He was respected as a practicing astronomer and was considered and excellent teacher.

To understand Reinhold’s contribution to heliocentricity one first has to consider the function of mathematical astronomy. Since at least the first algebraic astronomical models of the Babylonians up to the seventeenth century the main function of mathematical astronomy was to supply accurate predictions of the positions of celestial bodies and the occurrence of celestial phenomena such as lunar and solar eclipses; this data then being utilised by astrologers, navigators, cartographers and others. The mathematical models of the cosmos produced by Ptolemaeus and others described and traced the movement of the various heavenly bodies, in order to make the positional predictions those movements had to be turned into data tables showing the weekly/daily/hourly positions of those bodies; these list of data are known as planetary tables or ephemerides. Various sets of tables that had been calculated for the geocentric models were already in existence and their inaccuracies were one of the major driving forces behind moves to reform mathematical astronomy throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of which Copernicus’ De revolutionibus was one result. Copernicus had not calculated planetary tables for his heliocentric model and this task fell to Erasmus Reinhold.

Using modified versions of the models supplied by Copernicus, in his magnum opus, Reinhold calculated the first ever set of heliocentric planetary tables, financed by and dedicated to Albrecht Duke of Prussia, they were titled the Prutenicae Tabulae Coelestium Motuum, which translates as the Prussian Tables of Celestial Motion. They were originally destined to be published by Johannes Petreius, who had published De revolutionibus, but he died before they were finished and so the first edition was published by Ulrich Morhard in Tübingen in 1551. Morhard’s widow produced a reprint of the first edition in 1562. A second edition was edited by Michael Maestlin, Kepler’s teacher, in Tübingen in 1571. A third edition was published in Wittenberg in 1585.

The tables were eagerly awaited by the sixteenth century astronomical community, irrespective of whether they believed in heliocentricity or not, with the hope that Copernicus’ new mathematical models would deliver more accurate predictive data than the older tables based on the geocentric models. Unfortunately this proved not to be the case. In some aspects the new tables were better than their predecessors, in others about the same and in some even worse. This failure to deliver was due to the fact that the data on which the Copernican models were constructed was the same defective or inaccurate data as that on which the earlier geocentric models had been constructed. It also severed to slow down the acceptance of a heliocentric cosmology.

The inability of both the geocentric and the heliocentric planetary tables to deliver accurate celestial predictions is what started off a young Tycho Brahe (who died 24 October 1601) on his twenty-plus years programme of astronomical observation in order to obtain a new accurate set of basic data on which to construct planetary orbit models. It was using Tycho’s vast collection of data that Kepler was able to construct his elliptical heliocentric astronomy. The tables that Kepler then calculated using his models and Tycho’s data, the Tabulae Rudolphinae or Rudolphine Tables named after the German Emperor römisch-deutsche Kaiser Rudolph II who financed them, finally did the trick. Compared with all of their predecessors the Rudolphine Tables were extremely accurate and they were the major factor in persuading people to adopt a heliocentric cosmology and in fact a Keplerian elliptical world view and not a Copernican one as is often falsely claimed.

Not a martyr for science.

Those who still mistakenly subscribe to the White-Draper hypothesis of a war of religion against science, and these days it is mostly gnu atheists and their ilk, invariably produce lists of the martyrs of science, those considered to have fallen in the war. Almost without fail those lists include the sixteenth century Spanish mathematicus and physicus Michael Servetus (Span. Miguel Serveto) who was born 29^th September 1511 and was burnt at the stake as a heretic in Geneva 27^th October 1553, for once by the Calvinists and not the Catholics. Servetus was an active Protestant theologian who amongst other radical theses denied the holy trinity, which led to his being imprisoned by the Inquisition in Vienne in France. He managed to escape and fled to Geneva where he was again incarcerated, tried for heresy on the basis of his most recent publication, Christianismi Restitutio, found guilty and sentenced to death, being as I stated above burnt at the stake. This is a very clear case of religious persecution and has nothing to do with science so why is he frequently listed as a science martyr? This is because the Restitutio as well as being a book on theology also contained an important medical discovery.

Servetus had led a fairly normal scholarly existence for the Renaissance, wandering around Europe studying bits of this and bits of that at various centres of learning until he ended up studying medicine in Paris in the 1530s. Paris was one of the leading centres for medical studies at the time and Servetus studied under the same set of excellent teachers as his contemporary Andreas Vesalius. He was an excellent student but became embroiled in a dispute involving his activities as an astrologer and was forced to leave Paris, settling in Vienne as a medical practitioner. It was here in 1553 that he ran foul of the Inquisition.

Servetus’ original contribution to medicine was the discovery of the small or pulmonary blood circulation. In antiquity Galen, the leading medical authority, had thought that blood flowed from the right ventricle to the left ventricle through microscopic holes in the septum or central wall in the heart. This theory was still accepted as gospel in the 16^th century and Servetus hypothesised instead that the blood flows out of the right ventricle through the lungs and back into the left ventricle, pulmonary circulation. This was of course a very important step towards understanding blood circulation in general. However it is important to note that Servetus’ discovery remained without influence because nobody knew about it. Condemned as heretical, by Catholics, Calvinists and Lutheran Protestants alike, his Restitutio was like its author committed to the flames with only three copies surviving the immolation and remaining hidden and unread. Although his work had no direct influence on the history of medicine his fate is a good example of two important frequent occurrences in the history of science, firstly discoveries get lost and secondly discoveries are very often made independently by more than one person.

The discovery of pulmonary circulation actually got lost at least twice and Servetus was not its first discoverer. Pulmonary circulation had already been discovered in the thirteenth century by Ala-al-din abu Al-Hassan Ali ibn Abi-Hazm al-Qarshi al-Dimashqi, known as Ibn al-Nafis, and published in his Commentary on the Anatomy of Canon of Avicenna a text that simply disappeared and was first re-discovered in the twentieth century. Somehow this was a discovery that didn’t want to be made. However pulmonary circulation was discovered independently for a third time, and this time demonstrated empirically, by Realdo Colombo, Vesalius’ successor as professor of anatomy in Padua, in 1559 and this time it remained discovered.

It’s silly questions time again: “Was Newton a scientist or a sorcerer?

Back in May the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones asked, “Is Leonardo da Vinci a great artist or a great scientist?” making, as I pointed out at the time, a serious category mistake. Something must be in the drinking water at the Guardian because now Stuart Clark on the Guardians Science Blogs is asking “Was Newton a scientist or a sorcerer?” making, you guessed it, a serious category mistake. As my Internet friend Tom Levenson, who is himself something of a Newton expert, pointed out on twitter Gotta stop with “Scientist and/or sorcerer” nonsense. Newton never saw himself in those terms… In fact Tom’s tweet says it all but for those not in the know, who might want to learn more, I will elaborate.

For all those at the back who haven’t been paying attention Newton cannot have been a scientist because the term was first coined by William Whewell in 1833 and did not come into common usage until around 1870. There are those who will immediately say that Newton thought like a modern scientist so it doesn’t matter if the term is anachronistic he was one, so there. The problem with this claim is that it’s based on a very limited knowledge of Newton, his life, his work and the way he thought. Put very simply Newton did not think like a modern scientist, which brings us to the second prong of Stuart Clark’s dichotomy.

Clark calls Newton a sorcerer because he was a practicing alchemist, which displays an immense ignorance of the world of seventeenth century thought on his part. A sorcerer is a practitioner of magic in fact a practitioner of black magic and that is a very, very different thing from an alchemist. What follows is a brief outline as to why Clark’s appellation is so inappropriate (with apologies to all serious historians of alchemy, astrology and natural magic for a totally inadequate explanation of these disciplines in the early modern period).

In the early modern period there are three so-called occult (occult just means hidden or concealed) sciences: astrology, natural magic and alchemy all of which found their legitimacy in the micro-cosmos macro-cosmos philosophy. This cosmology says as above so below or the world we live in is a reflection of the heavens. Astrology investigates the connections between the heavens and the earth and tries to define the heavenly or celestial influences. Both natural magic and alchemy are methods that try or at least hope to directly influence or manipulate those influences. Practitioners of all three disciplines distance themselves clearly from demonic or black magic that tries to manipulate nature through demonic powers. A sorcerer is a user of demonic magic.

Newton rejected both astrology and natural magic and is also on record as not believing in witches or ghost so I think we can safely say he also rejected demonic magic, so he definitely wasn’t a sorcerer. He was however a convinced alchemist. This was not a mild side-line or passing fantasy as some commentators on Clark’s post would like to believe, the study of alchemy was his main occupation six months of the year for about thirty years. Also this was not after he ceased doing scientific work as many sources would have you believe but parallel to his main period of scientific activity between 1666 and 1696 when he gave up academia to move to London and the Royal Mint. It is important to understand that for Newton and his fellow alchemists, which included Robert Boyle and John Locke, alchemy was an epistemic discipline that is a branch of knowledge like optics or mechanics.

So Newton was neither a scientist nor a sorcerer so what was he? We have already seen he was a committed alchemist, what else?

Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge so it is safe to call him a mathematician. To find out what he was we can look at his two principle publications The Optics and Principia. The Optics is basically a book on geometrical optics, which was then still a sub-discipline of mathematics, in fact Newton in his roll as professor lectured on optics, so this can safely be subsumed under his roll as mathematician. The Principia is actually titled Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica or in English The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, all of which tells us that Newton was a natural philosopher. So we have mathematician and natural philosopher. However the title of his main work tells us that he was a representative of a fairly new breed of academic the mathematical natural philosopher. Newton wasn’t the first of this genus, which had slowly evolved since sometime in the High Middle Ages, Galileo, Kepler, Borelli and Huygens being other examples from the seventeenth century.

Maybe we could restate Clarks question as “Was Newton a mathematical natural philosopher or an alchemist?” but should we do so we would be again doing Newton an injustice. We are back to the reason that Newton did not think like a modern scientist. For Newton his theological studies (that I haven’t dealt with here) and his alchemical studies were an integral part of his natural philosophical investigations, in fact they were at the very heart of those investigations so to present these two aspects of his work as a dichotomy would be totally false.

In his blog post Clark quotes a footnote from Richard Westfall one of the deans of Newton studies:

“My modes of thought are so far removed from those of alchemy that I am constantly uneasy in writing on the subject … [Nevertheless] my personal preferences cannot make more than a million words he wrote in the study of alchemy disappear.”

He then goes on to quote novelist Rebecca Stott:

“Westfall admitted to wishing that he could make those million words disappear.”

This is a complete misrepresentation. It was one of Westfall’s doctoral students Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs who wrote the definitive account of Newton’s alchemical studies The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, or the Hunting of the Green Lyon and also the definitive account of how his alchemy fitted into his approach to knowledge The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought. Both books are highly recommended for anybody who wishes to know more about Isaac the Alchemist.

For an excellent short account of the misrepresentation of Newton’s alchemical activities I recommend this post from last year by Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt at he blog Teleskopos: Newton and alchemy: a constant surprise?

Addendum: As Ian Hopkinson correctly pointed out on Twitter Newton is of course a Fig Roll.

The Virgin Queen was in reality John Dee in drag.

The rumbling you can hear in the background is the HISTSCI HULK playing skittles with some skyscrapers. He’s all riled up and wants to place a big green foot in Carole Jahme’s butt and propel her into publishing purgatory. What has Ms Jahme done to provoke the wrath of the big green HISTSCI destroyer? Damon Albarn’s so-called Opera Dr Dee is being revived in London and Ms Jahme wrote an introductory preview posted last Monday on the Guardian’s website. This preview is unfortunately a mixture of exaggerations, half-truths and fantasies that is a blot on the Guardian’s reputation for good journalism. Now it could be argued in her defence that several of the false claims made in her article are also made in the video interview with the director of the piece Rufus Norris and the Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Marek Kukula at the head of the article and that they are also to blame for this piece of shoddy journalism. However there is a thing in writing in general and in journalism in particular that seems to be going out of fashion called fact checking, something that Ms Jahme apparently can’t be bothered to waste her time on. I did consider letting the big green monster loose on her but didn’t fancy the job of cleaning up the carnage so I’ve decided to expose some of Ms Jahme’s worst history of science sins myself.

Before I deal with any detail from the article I would like to address the premise given by Norris for the opera itself. He, and Albarn in previous interviews, create the impression that Dee is somehow a neglected figure, particularly as a mathematicus (which is what he was), I beg to differ. There are at least eight monographs that deal with large parts or the whole of Dee’s biography as well as several monographs that deal with wider contexts of Elizabethan culture that have Dee as a central figure. A couple of these works deal explicitly with Dee as a Renaissance scientific figure. There is also a volume of academic papers on Dee as well as academic annotated editions of his principle works. Already in the 1930s, as modern history of science was beginning to emerge, historians of astronomy, geography and navigation devoted quite a considerable amount of attention to Dee. There are articles on Dee in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, the New Oxford dictionary of Biography and in the Internet at MacTutor and on Wikipedia, some of them quite substantial. I do not think Dee has been neglected, in fact I can’t think of another scientific figure of his stature who has been covered in anything approaching the expansive extant to which Dee has been. This brings us to the next problem, what is Dee’s scientific stature. Just as it is easy to underestimate Dee’s importance and influence in the development of the mathematical sciences in late sixteenth century England it is also possible to overestimate them and in my opinion both in the video and the article this is done. Dee played a role as a teacher and facilitator along with Robert Recorde, Leonard Digges, Thomas Digges, Thomas Harriot, Edward Wright and others in introducing the mathematical sciences into Britain but he made no original contributions to the mathematical sciences himself. He is not a Kepler, Galileo, Descartes or Huygens and he is certainly not one of the giants on whom shoulders Newton stood as claimed by Norris in the interview. Dee is an important figure but he is no more important than at least a dozen of his contemporaries who have received not even ten per cent of the scholarly attention that Dee has.

John Dee

Now to Ms Jahme who tells us that:

Dee was a larger-than-life magus figure. He was probably the inspiration for Christopher Marlowe’s character Doctor Faustus, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Shakespeare’s Prospero.

We’ve been here before as the opera was premiered in Manchester but it is worth re-examining these claims. Marlow’s Faustus is of course based on the real life German magus Dr Johann Georg Faust whose fictionalised life story was a sixteenth century best seller. Ben Johnson’s The Alchemist is a satire on alchemy and alchemists in general, of which Dee was only one of many, and whilst Dee is not name-checked in the piece his medium Edward Kelly is. The claim that Dee is Prospero is old and there is no evidence to support it. Frances Yates one of the real experts for sixteenth century alchemy and magic thinks that Prospero is Giordano Bruno but addresses the claim for Dee pointing out that Dee and Bruno share many key characteristics. I think Prospero is probably a composite figure with elements of Bruno, Dee, Faust, Kelly, Robert Fludd, Cornelius Agrippa, Oswald Croll and a dozen other less well-known contemporary hermetic figures. Instantly identifying Prospero with Dee is in my opinion an act of hagiography and a failure to recognise just how widespread hermeticism was at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries.

Ms Jahme informs us that:

Dee taught Raleigh and Drake “the perfect art of navigation” for calculating longitude from lunar distance observation, which helped facilitate the establishment of the British Empire.

Dee was certainly one of the mathematical practitioners teaching navigation and cartography to English sea captains in the sixteenth century along with Thomas Digges, Harriot, Wright and others but he did not teach Drake or Raleigh. I don’t actually know who, if anyone, taught Drake but if it had been Dee I’m sure I would have read about it in my studies and I haven’t. Raleigh and his ship’s captains were of course instructed not by Dee but by his friend Thomas Harriot who even accompanied the ill fated expedition to establish a colony on Roanoke Island in Virginia, as a sort of scientific officer. Dee instructed Martin Frobisher and other captains of the Muscovy Company in their attempts to discovery either a North-West or a North-East passage to China.

There is more to come Ms Jahme continues with the following:

Infamous in his lifetime, Dee was a risk-taker and exceptional scholar. With his eye on the court he rejected the comfort of university tenure at Cambridge, preferring to collate and categorise his data independently. A serious bibliophile, his private library became the largest in Britain. Dee charted the movement of the planets and in his early career toured Europe giving talks on astronomy – a form of science outreach that was entirely new.

We have here four claims of which two are true, one shows a complete lack of understanding of sixteenth century intellectual culture and one is complete rubbish. The first sentence and the statement about Dee’s love of books are both correct. The statement about university tenure is quite frankly bizarre. It seems to assume that Mediaeval Cambridge was like a modern university. Dee had a fellowship at Trinity but after graduating MA he left the university, as he apparently did not wish to study for a doctorate. Accepting a life as fellow and under-reader in Greek would have been tantamount to giving up before he started, not the comfort of university tenure but a dead end in badly paid futility. However it is the final sentence that this time takes the prize for wrongness. Jahme has exaggerated and misinterpreted a moderately false statement of Norris’ and made a real mess out of it.

In the period of his life that he dedicated to the study of the mathematical sciences Dee made three trips to the European continent; these were not lecture but study tours. Such tours were common practice in the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance with young scholars travelling from university to university to study manuscripts not available in their home university libraries and to meet, study under and discuss or dispute with other scholars. Norris says that this was unique for an English mathematical practitioner at this time and although rare it was not unique. Henry Savile, who would later use his fortune to found the chairs for geometry and astronomy in Oxford, is a contemporary of Dee’s who also undertook such a study tour of the continent. Norris also claims that this was a lecture tour and it is this that Jahme falsely makes unique. On his first trip of only a few months in 1547 Dee studied in Louvain under Gemma Frisius and Gerald Mercator. He returned to Louvain for further studies in 1548 and staid until 1550. Here I would like to correct another of Norris’ false statements. He claims in the video interview that Dee’s range of subjects mathematics, astronomy, astrology, geography, cartography, navigation and history was unusually wide and unique. This is simply not true. This is the normal range of study of the Renaissance mathematicus and is exactly what Dee would have studied with Frisius and Mercator in Louvain. When he left Louvain Dee went to Paris were he did indeed lecture, not on astronomy, but Euclidian geometry. Again this is not out of the ordinary, the visiting scholar demonstrating his own learning to his hosts, nothing new or unusual here. His third trip abroad in 1562 to 1564 was to visit other scholars such as Gesner in Switzerland or the Italian mathematician Commandino with whom he published the translation of a Greek mathematical text.

He was opposed to a tiered system of education where those without classical scholarship were held back, so when his translation of Euclid’s mathematics was complete he made the arcane information accessible to non-university-taught artisans and craftsmen. In his General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Arte of Navigation, he advocated the usefulness of mathematics as a “Publick Commodity”.

In the above quote Jahme has got something right for a change. Dee, following Robert Recorde, is one of the founders of the so-called English School of Mathematics; a group of mathematical practitioners who made their knowledge available in the vernacular. However Dee, unlike Digges for example, also wrote extensively in Latin for an educated public. The paragraph does however contain one serious error. Although Dee wrote his very famous preface for the first English translation of Euclid’s Elements, the translation itself was not by Dee but by Henry Billingsley.

We now come to what I regard as the weirdest claim made by Jahme:

His students include Francis Bacon, promoter of the “scientific method”, and the astronomer Thomas Diggs, who believed the universe to be infinite.

Thomas Digges was not only Dee’s student but also his foster son and he was indeed the first modern astronomer to propose an infinite universe. Although Dee was instrumental in spreading knowledge of Copernican heliocentricity in England he does not appear to have been a totally convinced Copernican. Digges, however, was a totally convinced Copernican who also published the first ever partial translation into the vernacular of De revolutionibus. Now I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on either Dee or Bacon but I have read an awful lot about and by both of them and I have never ever come across the claim that Bacon was a student of Dee’s. If we look at this rationally it also seems highly unlikely. Dee was absolutely convinced that mathematics was the most important discipline of all and was the number one propagator of the works of Copernicus in Britain. Bacon rejected both mathematics and heliocentricity so it does no appear very likely that he was Dee’s student. I will happily admit that I haven’t really researched this properly but a quick search revealed that Dee mentions Bacon just once in his diary. The then 21 year old accompanied somebody else who was visiting Dee in Mortlake in 1583. Bacon never mentions Dee at all in his voluminous writings! I did stumble across one website that actually claimed the fact of Dee’s absence from Bacon’s writings as proof that Bacon was Dee’s disciple! On that basis I could prove literally anything!

It is to the enigmatic Dr John Dee that we must look for the origins of Britain’s contribution to modern Western science, yet Dee has been largely left out of the history books – why?

Both of the claims made in the quote above are simply false and two wrongs definitively do not make a right. This post is already over long but there are two short claims made by Ms Jahme that I wish to include before I close my demolition of her pitifully bad piece of history of science journalism. She writes:

In 1600, astronomer Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for daring to say the sun was a star.

And a few lines further on:

Within Dee’s lifetime Copernicus’s sun-centric theories would be strengthened by Galileo’s discoveries.

Giordano Bruno was not an astronomer and he was burnt for his religious opinions and not for his cosmological ones. The reports are not totally in agreement but Dee died in either 1608 or 1609. Galileo first published his telescopic discoveries in 1610 so not in Dee’s lifetime.

It would appear that one qualifies as a history of science writer these days when one is good at making things up so I’ve decided to stop being a pedant and to go with the flow. My next work will be the sensational discovery that Elizabeth the Virgin Queen was in reality Renaissance magus John Dee in drag! Remember you read it here first.