| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Margaret J. Osler, editor. Rethinking the Scientific Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. xii, 340. Cloth $69.95, paper $24.95.

The "Scientific Revolution," both the phrase and the concept, is a token of the success of the history of science as a discipline. A glance at almost any world or western civilization textbook will reveal a chapter with that title or devoted to the change in the understanding of nature from Nicholas Copernicus to Isaac Newton, indicative of the broad acceptance within the historical profession of the idea of an early modern revolution in science. The apparent power of the concept is reinforced by the difficulty historians of science are having giving it up, despite persistent questions about its validity among specialists. Thus, Steven Shapin's The Scientific Revolution (1996) confidently proclaims that there was no such thing. Editor Margaret J. Osler has assembled a collection of studies that continue the reexamination of this "single most important unifying concept in the history of science" (p. 3). She frames the collection with the notion of a canon in the traditional "great story" of the emergence of modern science, a canon comprised of a canonical list of heroic individuals, such as Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Newton, and a canonical set of subjects, such as astronomy, physics, and mathematics. . . .

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