Includes bibliographical references.

Introduction / Peter Dear -- The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory / Robert S. Westman -- Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science: Andreas Libavius versus Tycho Brahe / Owen Hannaway -- "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors": Geography as Self-Definition in Early Modern England / Lesley B. Cormack -- What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution? / Keith Hutchison -- Galileo, Motion, and Essences / Margaret J. Osler -- Science and Patronage: Galileo and the Telescope / Richard S. Westfall -- The Telescope in the Seventeenth Century / Albert Van Helden -- Descartes on Refraction: Scientific versus Rhetorical Method / Bruce Stansfield Eastwood -- Early Seventeenth-Century Atomism: Theory, Epistemology, and the Insufficiency of Experiment / Christoph Meinel -- Robert Boyle and Structural Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century / Thomas S. Kuhn -- Newton's Alchemy and His Theory of Matter / B. J. T. Dobbs --

Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society / Peter Dear -- The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England / Steven Shapin -- Maria Winkelmann at the Berlin Academy: A Turning Point for Women in Science / Londa Schiebinger -- Appendix. Articles on Early Modern European Science in Isis, 1970-1996.

This collection of readings on what is often called the "Scientific Revolution" brings together fourteen articles from the leading journal in the history of science, and combines traditional scholarship with revisionist approaches to the major themes of the period. This carefully-structured collection will help readers (students and specialists alike) approach complex questions - involving argument and experiment, audience and agency, authority and institutions - that surround this crucial era.