Copernicus, Brahe, and Kepler: A New Astronomy

Before any of the great names of the Scientific Revolution appeared, medieval universities such as Oxford, Paris, and Bologna had already built an institutional and intellectual scaffolding on which early modern science would rest. From the twelfth century onward, Latin translations of Aristotle, often transmitted through Arabic commentators such as Averroes, gave European scholars a comprehensive account of the natural world, one that scholastic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas worked to reconcile with Christian doctrine. Within the arts faculties, natural philosophers such as Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme in fourteenth-century Paris questioned parts of Aristotelian physics, developing an impetus theory of motion and even entertaining, only to reject, the possibility that the earth rotated. This scholastic tradition supplied the vocabulary, the logical training, and the university structures that later reformers of science would both draw upon and rebel against.