Mechanics in Renaissance Science

Abstract

The modern science of mechanics – a mathematical discipline – appeared during the sixteenth century at the crossroads of the increasing transformation of the mechanical arts and the humanist recovery of ancient and medieval textual traditions. Unlike other mixed-mathematical sciences such as astronomy and optics extensively developed during the medieval Latin West, the science of mechanics did not have clear medieval precedents. Consequently, intense debates and controversies forged mechanics as a mathematical science by borrowing elements from conflicting textual traditions, the expansion and transformation of the mechanical arts, the reconfiguration of disciplinary boundaries in mathematics and natural philosophy, and the possibility of incorporating this science of machines into existing taxonomies of knowledge – including their institutions (monasteries, universities, courts). By the sixteenth century, the science of mechanics was often portrayed as formulating the mathematical principles of the design and construction of machines, thereby dealing with artificial objects whose operation run against natural order to satisfy human needs. Mechanics was therefore seen as compatible with Aristotelian divisions of sciences. However, by the second half of the seventeenth century, the vast expansion of mechanics had reached themes and problems considered for centuries as territory of natural philosophy, particularly the motion of bodies whose explanation then became increasingly intertwined with emerging mathematical techniques – from infinitesimals to calculus. Mechanics then acquired a more general dimension as a mathematical science of motion. During the seventeenth, the codification and adaptation of mechanics into a mathematical science of motion provided materials for and stimulus to new cosmologies which attempted to replace Scholastic natural philosophies and naturalistic cosmologies of the Renaissance.