Introduction 5East, the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome, the Islamic Middle
Ages, and the Latin Middle Ages. These chapters seek to bring to the tradi-
tional story about the rise of Western science the renewed historiographi-
cal sensitivities of the most recent scholarship.
The next three chapters (5–7) deal with basic historical divisions of
the knowledge of nature and, in particular, those that have been of en-
during importance in the West: natural history, the mixed mathematical
sciences, and natural philosophy. These disciplines will have already made
their appearance in the earlier chapters; accordingly, chapters 5, 6, and
7 will focus mainly on the meanings of these categories in the modern
period—that is, from the sixteenth century onwards. Natural philosophy,
which provided the basic rubric for the study of nature right up to the end
of the nineteenth century, proved too large a subject for a single chapter
and for this reason, while it is the particular focus of chapter 7, the preced-
ing chapters on natural history and mixed mathematics will also discuss
natural philosophy and its relation to the historical and mathematical ap-
proaches. These three chapters together deal with what used to be called
the scientifi c revolution and its immediate aftermath.
A third perspective is to consider historical understandings of what is
excluded by particular approaches to the study of nature. Some exclusion-
ary principles are more or less neutral and refl ect relatively innocuous
divisions between theoretical and applied knowledge and, in the modern
period, the boundaries between increasingly differentiated professions.
The issue of the division between theoretical knowledge of nature and its
various practical applications has been discussed since antiquity.^9 A cen-
tral feature of such discussions has been the relative status of the purely
theoretical in relation to the applied. Typically, the former has been ac-
corded the higher status, but the case has also been made that the study of
nature has value only insofar as it can be useful. The specifi c cases under
consideration in chapters 8 and 9 are medicine and technology and their
relations to “pure science.”
Other exclusionary principles are more ideologically loaded. They re-
fl ect not so much professional differentiation or knowledge and its various
applications but an attempt to give the formal study of nature identity by
specifying what it is not. Throughout history various distinctions refl ect
this process: chemistry and alchemy, astronomy and astrology, medicine
and quackery, technology and magic, science and superstition. Each of
these sets of oppositions would be worth exploring in its own right, es-
pecially since the pejorative associations of some of these labels are quite
recent. In this volume, we have chosen to restrict our attention to two
general oppositions that still have a contemporary resonance: science and