History 692W - S-Witchcraft, Magic & Science

The foundations of modern science and scientific method were laid in the Scientific Revolution of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. This period would be seen as a golden age by the philosophes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the founders of the history of science in the twentieth century. Yet the period from 1550 to 1650 also saw widespread interest in occult powers and natural magic, and it was the height of the "witch craze" in Europe, a period in which about fifty thousand Europeans, most of them women, were executed for the crime of diabolical witchcraft. Are these trends contradictory or complementary? Historians have disagreed vehemently about whether the Scientific Revolution, a triumph of rational thought, was opposed to the Renaissance interest in the occult, demonology, natural magic, and witchcraft, or whether these aspects were part and parcel of the intense study of the natural world that characterized early modern science. For example, Isaac Newton was both the founder of modern physics and a dedicated alchemical adept. Were these aspects of his life compatible? Or did they coexist in an uneasy tension, reflected in the fact that Newton never published his alchemical writings?
This course will address these questions on the basis of intensive study of the primary sources and intellectual, cultural and social history and the history of science. Though our focus will be on early modern Europe, we will look to the High Middle Ages for the origins of many European concepts of demonic and occult powers and the origins of modern notions of scientific explanation. On the most fundamental level, this course is about the history of reason and rationality: what did it mean to approach a problem reasonably, and what - if anything - did modern science add to the ways in which human beings justify their claims to know something?

Open to Doctoral & Masters students only. Meets with History 492H