“Renaissance Aristotelianism and the Scientific Revolution,” Physics 52.1-2 (2017): 329-45

David Wootton’s The Invention of Science. A New History of the Scientific Revolution is the most significant work on the Scientific Revolution since the publication of Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution in 1996. However, whereas for Shapin “there was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution,” that is “a coherent, cataclysmic, and climatic event that fundamentally and irrevocably changed what people knew about the natural world and how they secured proper knowledge of that world,” for Wootton not only was there a Scientific Revolution, but it “was a single transformative process […] of several distinct types of change overlapping and interlocking with each other.” This paper is a review of Wootton’s book.