Introduction 3time in the nineteenth century and was only fully accepted in the early
twentieth.^5 Pushing the lexicographical evidence even further, specialists
of different historical periods have often make similar claims about the
meanings of “science.” Sir Geoffrey Lloyd writes in relation to the study
of nature in ancient Greece that “science is a modern category, not an an-
cient one: there is no one term that is exactly equivalent to our ‘science’
in Greek.” Historian of medieval science David Lindberg observes that the
modern term “science” has connotations that differentiate it somewhat
from the earlier study of nature. If we come to the Middle Ages with our
modern conceptions of science in mind, he cautions, the result is likely
to be a distorted impression of the past. Expressing the point even more
strongly for the sixteenth century, Nicholas Jardine has observed that “no
Renaissance category even remotely corresponds to ‘the sciences’ or ‘the
natural sciences’ in our senses of the terms.”^6
Yet the linguistic evidence alone is not conclusive, and the disconti-
nuities between our present understandings of “science” and those of the
past can be overstated. The ancient Greeks observed a clear distinction
between “science” and mere “opinion,” and from classical antiquity those
intellectual practices labeled “science” enjoyed a special status.^7 Medieval
discussions about whether, and in what sense, theology was a science
refl ect this, as do comparable discussions about the scientifi c status of
medicine and certain of the mathematical disciplines. There also seem to
be strong affi nities between some of the usages of “science” in the seven-
teenth century and those of our own era, as the title of Galileo’s Discourses
Concerning Two New Sciences (1638) indicates.^8 The signifi cance of the rela-
tively late appearance of the English term “scientist” is not altogether
clear, either, for it might be argued that there were much earlier expres-
sions in other European languages that were equivalent to this label in
certain respects. The French savant (or sçavan) dates from the seventeenth
century. The Italian scienziato, which Italians still use for their scientists,
goes back even further to the sixteenth century. The English used the ex-
pression “virtuoso,” which had similar connotations. In no case are these
expressions synonymous with “scientist,” but they capture a similar sense
of someone who is engaged in the serious and systematic study of nature,
amongst other things.
The history of science, in any case, is more than the history of the
meanings of particular terms, and there comes a point at which histori-
ans must lay aside their dictionaries and attend to the relevant activities
themselves. In essence, that is the task we have set for the contributors
to this volume. As noted at the outset, one of the biggest gaps in the
literature is the lack of histories of the meanings of “science,” “natural