There was a time when ‘The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century’ was a vital, wonderfully innovative concept that inspired a stimulating narrative of how modern science came into the world. Half a century later, what we now know as ‘the master narrative’ serves rather as a strait-jacket — so often events and contexts just fail to fit in. As a result, ‘The Scientific Revolution’ has turned into a concept either rich in vague association while near-empty in precise content, or outright rejected. The concept abundantly fails to satisfy any longer, no even half-way plausible replacement has as yet come forward, and the search for it has meanwhile been abandoned. Authors of the numerous books that keep appearing on the subject serve the needs of the class-room rather than setting up an innovative, in-depth inquiry.
Even so, the master narrative did capture an intuition of some measure of coherence underlying all those innovative investigations of nature’s properties that animated so many 17th century practitioners. In my conference lecture I shall explain in what manner I have taken up the challenge of rethinking that intuition. I regard the near-universal skepticism that now reigns among historians of science over the very possibility of replacing the master narrative with something radically different and better as just a case of premature resignation. Taking into account what half a century of excitingly novel historical research has yielded, I claim to have uncovered a significant amount of coherence underlying all these innovative 17th century concepts and practices — not only predominantly mathematical-experimental or speculative-philosophical, but also empiricist-experimental.

Key to my account is a vision of the Scientific Revolution as made up of six distinct yet narrowly interconnected, revolutionary transformations, each of some twenty-five to thirty years’ duration. This vision enables me to explain how modern science could come about in Europe rather than in any of the other advanced civilizations at the time, notably China and the Islamic world. It also enables me to explain how about half-way into the 17th century a vast crisis of legitimacy could arise and, in the end, be overcome, due to a concatenation of developments partly fortuitous, partly specific to a European civilization coming more and more into its own.

The book in which I set forth all this and much more is entitled ‘How Modern Science Came Into the World. A Comparative History’. Comprising c. 800 pages, it is due to appear this fall with Amsterdam University Press. It challenges the profession of historians of science to reconsider one of its key events from the ground up. Building forth on my earlier The Scientific Revolution. A Historiographical Inquiry (1994), it takes the latest researches duly into account, while seeking to connect these in innovative ways. Above all, the book is meant as a constructive effort to break up all-too-deeply frozen patterns of thinking about the history of science.
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