 In recent decades, however, many historians have contested even the claim that there was a single, coherent development appropriately called “the Scientific Revolution.” Steven Shapin (1996, 1) captured the unease in his opening sentence: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” Everyone agrees that a series of rapid developments of various kinds took place during the period in question, but the operative word here is ‘various’. One difficulty is that no one has succeeded in capturing a 150-year (or more) period of work in an insightful, widely accepted characterization that embraces the important changes in theory, method, practices, instrumentation, social organization, and social status ranging over such a wide variety of projects. The very attempt has come to seem reductionist. Older styles of historical writing were characterized by grand narratives such as “the mechanization of the world picture” (Dijksterhuis 1961; original, Dutch edition, 1950) and humanity’s passage from subjective superstition to objectivity and mathematical precision (Gillispie 1960). Philosophically oriented writers attempted to find unity and progress in terms of the discovery of a new, special scientific method. Today even most philosophers of science dismiss the claim that there exists a powerful, general, scientific method, the discovery of which explains the Scientific Revolution and the success of modern science. Quite the contrary: effective scientific methods are themselves the product of painstaking work at the frontier—scientific results methodized—and are hence typically laden with the technical content of the specialty in question. There is no content-neutral, thereby general and timeless method that magically explains how those results were achieved (Schuster and Yeo 1986, Nickles 2009).