Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge Studies in the History of Science)

There are many good books on the history of science from Copernicus forward. There are dependable and exhaustive studies and biographies of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and especially the lionized Newton. However, even for science after Copernicus, too much attention is focused on astronomy, and not enough on terrestrial physics, chemistry, and medicine. For science before Copernicus there are not enough books. The Renaissance, medieval Europe and Islam, late antiquity, and the Hellenistic period all have thinkers, schools and ideas that deserve to be examined and presented.This book is a survey of Renaissance ideas about the natural world. The main figures are Paracelsus (para=beyond, and Celsus is the author of the medical encyclopedia "De Medicina"), William Harvey, and Jean Baptiste van Helmont. The two names that appear the most are Aristotle and Galen. Aristotle has been well documented in English language literature, but for Galen there are fewer books that could be understood by the layperson. One is Mattern's The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire. For a single book on the history of medicine, I suspect that Siraisi's Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice is good, and I plan to read it; I have come across citations of various works by Siraisi in works by authors I respect.Leonardo is mentioned only once in passing. The only reliable book length study of Leonardo's scientific writings is V. P. Zubov's Leonardo Da Vinci. Clifford Truesdell wrote a long essay about the science of Leonardo in Essays in the History of Mechanics, and in this essay he talks about the low quality of much writing on Leonardo: "the common boundless hero-worship of Leonardo as a universal genius of superlative though otherwise vague achievements." There are many bad and successful books about Leonardo, for example Martin Kemp's and Fritjof Capra's. One book that looks like it could be good (which I came across writing this review) is Mark Rosheim's Leonardo's Lost Robots. To write a decent book about machines one would actually need to build machines, which Rosheim seems to have done.Also more could be said in this book about Georgius Agricola, author of "De re metallica", and Agrippa of Nettesheim, the famous occult philosopher. For Renaissance natural magic, I have come across Walker's Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (Magic in History). There are surprisingly few other surveys of science in the Renaissance. Two that I plan to read are Marie Boas Hall's The Scientific Renaissance: 1450-1630 (The Rise of Modern Science) and Paolo Rossi's The Birth of Modern Science.

Decades ago Allen Debus made many important, key contributions to the history of science by demonstrating the central (though marginalized) place of alchemy in the development of many disciplines. This is the most concise and easily accessible of the many texts of his you will read hungrily if you take an interest in the subject. Fair and insightful treatment of many theological, mystical and occult personalities make this book an important milestone in the new direction of historical studies dealing with the so-called "scientific revolution" and its murky "prehistory."

Honestly one of the worst textbooks I’ve ever had. The sentence structure and diction were so unnecessarily difficult that I had to reread a chapter just to understand what this author was trying to convey. Debus, either quit writing or find a competent editor.

I almost never read books about man and nature in the renaisance, and this was one of the best ones I have read, if not one of the very best. Read up!