| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

William R. Newman. Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 250. Cloth $75.00, paper $30.00.

The Scientific Revolution is a core element of most grand narratives of the emergence of modern science from medieval scholasticism. Despite attempts to create a more nuanced picture of the remarkable transformation of knowledge of nature in this period, many introductory textbooks maintain the basic plot lines established fifty years ago by what has been termed the "whig" interpretation of history. This positivist and internalist approach prioritized changes in the exact sciences and identified the roots of modern science in the development of experimental methods, the quantification of physics, and a new way of conceptualizing matter and change that Robert Boyle called "mechanical philosophy." Boyle, in this view, took a necessary and decisive step away from scholastic Aristotelian natural philosophy, with its sterile metaphysics and reputed reluctance to value laboratory experience. Isaac Newton then joined Boyle's experimental philosophy and corpuscular theory to Galilean and Cartesian mathematics and mechanics and created a mathematical approach to physics that reoriented the study of nature away from the world of common sense observation and made it rigorously hypothetical, measurable, and testable.

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