| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Kenneth J. Howell. God's Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. 2002. Pp. viii, 319. $39.95.

In 1616, the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition announced its judgment of the system of the universe published by Nicholas Copernicus in 1543. In a ringing endorsement of the unity of knowledge, it condemned the doctrines that the sun rests and the earth moves as formally heretical because they were contrary to scripture, and absurd or rash in philosophy because opposed to Aristotelian cosmology. Kenneth J. Howell provides a fine survey of ways in which early modern thinkers held their faiths and philosophies together against the challenges of Copernicanism. 1

Howell stresses that the problem of reconciliation hit hardest those who interpreted biblical accounts and astronomical systems realistically: an obvious point, but worth signaling because respectable epistemologies then existed for compartmentalizing knowledge. Exegetes who practiced the technique of accommodation (interpreting awkward passages, like those in which God walks and talks, as fictions accommodated to rude understandings) could explain Joshua's order to the sun to stop as more suited to the philosophical attainments of his people than the correct Copernican command, "Earth stand Thou still." Symmetrically, Aristotelians often found it convenient to dismiss the details of planetary motions that disagreed with their cosmology as mere mathematics, useful for describing appearances but not for founding a philosophy. . . .

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