This volume is a comprehensive account of knowledge of the natural world in Europe, ca. 1500-1700. Often referred to as the Scientific Revolution, this period saw major transformations in fields as diverse as anatomy and astronomy, natural history and mathematics. Articles by leading specialists describe in clear, accessible prose supplemented by extensive bibliographies, how new ideas, discoveries, and institutions shaped the ways in which nature came to be studied, understood, and used.

Katharine Park is Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science and of the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (1985), and The Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human Dissection (forthcoming 2006). Her work has appeared in Isis, The Renaissance Quarterly, and Renaissance Studies, and many periodicals.

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Honorary Professor at the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. She is the author of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (1998), with Katharine Park; and Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen: Zur Geschichte der Rationalität (2001).