Caroline Era - Sciences and Mathematics

Sciences and Mathematics

The sciences saw a major step forward with the 1628 publication by William Harvey of his study of the circulatory system, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus ("Anatomical Essay on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals").The reception granted to Harvey's work was, unfortunately, highly critical and hostile; but within a generation his work began to receive the valuation it deserved. More broadly, the revolution in thinking that connects Sir Francis Bacon (1561—1626) with the foundation of the Royal Society (1660) was ongoing throughout the Caroline period; Bacon's The New Atlantis was first printed in 1627, and contributed to the evolving new paradigm among receptive individuals. The men who would begin the Royal Society were for the most part still schoolboys and students in this period—though John Wilkins was already publishing early works of Copernican astronomy and science advocacy, The Discovery of a World in the Moon (1638) and A Discourse Concerning a New Planet (1640).

Lacking formal scientific institutions and organizations, Caroline scientists, proto-scientists, and "natural philosophers" had to cluster in informal groups, often under the social and financial patronage of a sympathetic aristocrat. This again was an old phenomenon: a precedent in the prior reigns of Elizabeth and James can be identified in the circle that revolved around the "Wizard Earl" of Northumberland. Caroline scientists often clustered similarly. These ad hoc associations helped individuals to avoid the dark by-ways of alchemy and astrology, Neoplatonism and Kabbalah and sympathetic magic—temptations that trapped more than a few in this era (like Sir Kenelm Digby with the Powder of Sympathy).

In mathematics, three major works were published in a single year, 1631—the Artis analyticae praxis of Thomas Harriot (1560–1621), published ten years posthumously, and the Clavis mathematicae of William Oughtred (1575–1660). Both contributed to the evolution of modern mathematical language, the latter giving us the sign for multiplication. In philosophy, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was already writing some of his works and evolving his key concepts, though they would not see print till after the end of the Caroline era.

And on the dark and obscure flipside of science, the occultist Robert Fludd continued his series of enormous and convoluted volumes of esoteric lore, begun during the previous reign. In 1626 appeared his Philosophia Sacra (which constituted Portion IV of Section I of Tractate II of Volume II of Fludd's History of the Macrocosm and Microcosm), which was followed in 1629 and 1631 by the two-part medical text Medicina Catholica. Fludd's last major work (there were various minor ones in between) would be the posthumously-published Philosophia Moysaica (1638). However one chooses to evaluate Fludd's intellectual achievement, the superb and daedally complex illustrations in his books, masterpieces of the engraver's art, are a cultural enrichment.