was so prominent, was one of many organizational schemes to decentralize
and democratize the church. The Reformation is just one spectacular episode
in a long series of conflicts and reorganizations of political and religious power.
The Catholic side was by no means the lineup of reactionaries that Protes-
tant propaganda made it out to be; movements for reform which antedated
the Reformation continued to proliferate. Some, like the Jesuits, Jansenists,
and Oratorians who figure largely in our narrative of networks, were con-
cerned to revitalize the unitary Catholic Church from inside. Other prominent
individuals, such as Bruno, were freelancers between Protestant and Catholic
camps, promoting schemes for ending religious strife and reuniting Christen-
dom by still more radical doctrinal reform; often they appealed to a liberal
pope as more promising and less fanatical than militant Protestant princes.
Occasional Protestants were picked out by the cosmopolitans as the center for
religious reunification, as in the Rosicrucian movement of the early 1600s, and
the hopes pinned on the Elector Palatine (Yates, 1972).
Here we have an external basis for network reorganization of grand pro-
portions. Between the church and the rival courts were encompassed all the
bases of intellectual life: the old universities as training centers of the church;
the new Protestant universities; rival educational schemes put forward as
Protestant academies or Jesuit schools; papacy, church politicians, and secular
courts alike as patrons for Humanists and freelance intellectuals. The so-called
“stagnation” of philosophy in the late Middle Ages was, sociologically speak-
ing, a chaotic fragmentation of networks in this multi-sided attention space.
The increasing polarization of Reformation and Counterreformation provided
simplification, focusing attention on a few key lines of controversy at the same
time that it greatly increased the level of emotional energy. That is why we
now see the intersection between theology and a scientific topic such as astron-
omy. It is not that astronomy reflected theological positions, for it was not just
Protestants who looked for innovation of the kind exemplified by Copernicus
and Kepler; there are mixtures of traditionalists and innovators on both sides.
The church politics of the Reformation period had again elevated theologians
in the attention space. Theological intellectuals now hit on the slow-moving
developments which were taking place in the cosmopolitan arena of science.
Attention gradually built up, as innovations such as Copernicus’s were trans-
lated from the narrow sphere of technical specialists into the largest arena,
where they became emblems for questions of tradition or change. Astronomy,
and by their preexisting connections mathematics, now became the focus of
attention for the entire intellectual community. Tremendous emotional energy
was generated; competitiveness rose; educated persons everywhere were pulled
into the magnet of recruitment. Technical contests in mathematics, and the
554 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths