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HIST294: Nature and culture 1500-1700: Themes from the
Renaissance This is a rare opportunity to study a revolution in
ideas about the world we live in. It begins in the Renaissance
(1500), when blood-letting was a common treatment for diseases,
when no-one suspected that the earth moved around the sun, when
witches were executed for performing diabolic magic, and when
students thought that the best authors on their reading lists
had to have died two thousand years ago. The module ends in the
early modern period (1700), and with “modern” thinkers like
Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.
But these people believed, respectively, that new inventions
would recreate Paradise on earth, that the laws of billiards
proved the existence of God, that the ocean’s tides proved that
the earth moved, and that alchemical manuscripts encoded the
deepest secrets of matter. You will f