Science in the Renaissance was predominantly an extension of medieval traditions of natural philosophy but also included a radical revolution in the European understanding of the Earth's geography and produced new ideas and methods in anatomy, mathematics, and astronomy. The collection of ancient scientific texts began in earnest at the start of the 15th century and continued up to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the invention of printing allowed a faster propagation of new ideas. Some scholars have argued that the era was scientifically backward because Renaissance humanists were excessively deferential to ancient authorities or because they favored human-centered subjects like politics and history over study of natural philosophy or applied mathematics. More recently, however, scholars have acknowledged the positive impact of the rediscovery of lost or obscure texts and the increased focus on the study of language and the correct reading of texts, while also emphasizing how the invention and rapid spread of the moveable type printing press and the encounter with the Americas served as necessary preconditions for the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century.
Renaissance humanism
Renaissance humanism was a "movement to recover, interpret, and assimilate the language, literature, learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome",Burke, P., "The spread of Italian humanism", in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, ed. A. Goodman and A. MacKay, London, 1990, p. 2. which asserted "the genius of man ... the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind".As asserted by Gianozzo Manetti in On the Dignity and Excellence of Man, cited in Clare, J., Italian Renaissance. The scholar, poet and Catholic priest Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters in the 14th century is often credited with initiating the movement. In Italy, the humanist educational program (whose subjects came to be known as the "humanities") won rapid acceptance, and by the mid-15th century many of the upper classes had received humanist educations. Some of the highest officials of the Catholic Church were humanists (with the resources to amass important libraries), and there were several 15th-century and early-16th-century humanist popes.They include Innocent VII, Nicholas V, Pius II, Sixtus IV, Alexander VI, Julius II and Leo X. Innocent VII, patron of Leonardo Bruni, is considered the first humanist pope. See James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (New York: Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition, 1990), p. 49; for the others, see their respective entries in Sir John Hale's Concise Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1981).
The science historian A. Rupert Hall writes that "there are important reservations to be made concerning Renaissance humanism as a force making for innovation in science":
Science historian Herbert Butterfield makes a similar point about the deference Renaissance humanists showed to ancient authorities:
Important developments
Printing
From a single print shop in Mainz, Germany, around 1440, the movable type printing-press had spread to around 270 cities in central, western and eastern Europe and had already produced more than 20 million volumes by the end of the 15th century.Febvre, Lucien; Martin, Henri-Jean (1976). The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800. London: New Left Books. Quoted in: Anderson, Benedict. Comunidades Imaginadas. Reflexiones sobre el origen y la difusión del nacionalismo. Fondo de cultura económica, Mexico, 1993. . pp. 58f. Printing made scholarly books much more widely accessible, but most of the initial demand for the new printed books during the Renaissance was for the works of long-dead authors rather than living scholars.
By the late 16th century, however, the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, where facts were few and far between, had begun to give way to a printing culture where living scholars could compare their own observations with those of other (living) scholars."Printing made it possible for Brahe to survey a wide range of publications (there were over a hundred on the comet of 1577, though many were merely astrological prognostications) and demonstrate that the four best observers had produced results compatible with his own. It also ensured that Brahe's new system was quickly known throughout Europe, so that his arguments could be tested against the nova of 1604 and the comets of 1618. Printing created a community of astronomers working on common problems with common methods and reaching agreed solutions." Wootton, David. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Penguin, 2015). pp.197-198. That shift decisively transformed natural philosophy into a collective and cumulative enterprise where reliable and documented facts rapidly proliferated, creating the intellectual scaffolding for the Scientific Revolution and a secure foundation for new scientific knowledge.
Geography and the New World
In the history of geography, the key classical text was the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy (2nd century). It was translated into Latin in the 15th century by Jacopo d'Angelo. It was widely read in manuscript and went through many print editions after it was first printed in 1475. Regiomontanus worked on preparing an edition for print prior to his death; his manuscripts were consulted by later mathematicians in Nuremberg. Ptolemy's Geographia became the basis for most maps made in Europe throughout the 15th century. Even as new knowledge began to replace the content of old maps, the rediscovery of Ptolemy's mapping system, including the use of coordinates and projection, helped to redefine the overall field of cartography as a scientific pursuit rather than an artistic one.
The information provided by Ptolemy, as well as Pliny the Elder and other classical sources, was soon seen to be in contradiction to the lands explored in the Age of Discovery. The new discoveries revealed shortcomings in classical knowledge and opened the European imagination to new possibilities."...before Columbus discovered America in 1492 there was no clear-cut and well-established idea of discovery; the idea of discovery is, as will become apparent, a precondition for the invention of science....the discovery of America disproved a central claim about the world which had been generally accepted before 1492...This was a crucial precondition for the astronomical revolution which followed." Wootton, David. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Penguin, 2015) . xiv + 769 pp. In particular, Christopher Columbus' voyage to the New World in 1492 helped set the tone for what would soon after become a wave of European expansion. Thomas More's Utopia was inspired partly by the discovery of the New World. Most maps developed prior to this period grossly underestimated the extent of the lands separating Europe from India on a westward route through the New World; however, through contributions of explorers such as Ferdinand Magellan, efforts were made to create more accurate maps during this period.
Alchemy and chemistry
While differing in some respects, alchemy and chemistry often had similar goals during the Renaissance period, and together they are sometimes referred to as chymistry. Alchemy is the study of the transmutation of materials through obscure processes. Although it is often viewed as a pseudoscientific endeavor, many of its practitioners utilized widely accepted scientific theories of their times to formulate hypotheses about the constituents of matter and the ways matter could be changed. One of the main aims of alchemists was to find a method of creating gold and other precious metals from the transmutation of base materials. A common belief of alchemists was that there is an essential substance from which all other substances formed, and that if you could reduce a substance to this original material, you could then construct it into another substance, like lead to gold. Medieval alchemists worked with two main elements or "principles", sulphur and mercury.
Paracelsus was a chymist and physician of the Renaissance period who believed that, in addition to sulphur and mercury, salt served as one of the primary alchemical principles from which everything else was made. Paracelsus was also instrumental in helping to put chemical practices to practical medicinal use through a recognition that the body operates through processes which may be seen as chemical in nature. These lines of thinking directly conflicted with many long-held traditional beliefs, such as those popularized by Aristotle; however, Paracelsus was insistent that questioning principles of nature was essential to continue the general growth of knowledge. Hall describes him as a "picturesque ranter" whose "mystical conception of nature [was] entirely alien to that of natural science."
Despite its frequent basis in what may be considered scientific practices by modern standards, numerous factors caused chymistry as a discipline to remain separate from general academia until near the end of the Renaissance, when it finally began appearing as a portion of some university education. The commercial nature of chymistry at the time, along with the lack of classical basis for the practice, were some of the contributing factors which led to the general view of the discipline as a craft rather than a respectable academic discipline.
Astronomy
The astronomy of the late Middle Ages was based on the geocentric model described by Claudius Ptolemy in antiquity. Probably very few practicing astronomers or astrologers actually read Ptolemy's Almagest, which had been translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th century. Instead they relied on introductions to the Ptolemaic system such as the De sphaera mundi of Johannes de Sacrobosco and the genre of textbooks known as Theorica planetarum. For the task of predicting planetary motions they turned to the Alfonsine tables, a set of astronomical tables based on the Almagest models but incorporating some later modifications, mainly the trepidation model attributed to Thabit ibn Qurra. Contrary to popular belief, astronomers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance did not resort to "epicycles on epicycles" in order to correct the original Ptolemaic models—until one comes to Copernicus himself.
Sometime around 1450, mathematician Georg Purbach (1423–1461) began a series of lectures on astronomy at the University of Vienna. Regiomontanus (1436–1476), who was then one of his students, collected his notes on the lecture and later published them as Theoricae novae planetarum in the 1470s. This "New Theorica" replaced the older theorica as the textbook of advanced astronomy. Purbach also began to prepare a summary and commentary on the Almagest. He died after completing only six books, however, and Regiomontanus continued the task, consulting a Greek manuscript brought from Constantinople by Cardinal Bessarion. When it was published in 1496, the Epitome of the Almagest made the highest levels of Ptolemaic astronomy widely accessible to many European astronomers for the first time.