The Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution
How the Reformation of 1517 reshaped the cultural and institutional conditions for the new science — and how Protestant universities, vernacular Bible reading, and confessional competition fed the seventeenth-century breakthrough.
The Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution
The relationship between the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution is one of the most consequential and most contested questions in the history of early modern Europe. The standard nineteenth-century account, associated with Andrew Dickson White and the Draper–White thesis, treated the Reformation as the opening of a long conflict between science and theology. The more nuanced twentieth-century scholarship, beginning with R. K. Merton’s 1938 article “Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England” and developed in detail by historians such as Peter Harrison (2009), Charles Webster (1975), and Peter Zagorin (1998), has shown that the relationship was far more complicated: in some respects the Reformation was a precondition for the new science; in others, it was an obstacle; in still others, it was largely irrelevant.
This page looks at what the historical record actually shows.
The Institutional Reordering
The most direct material effect of the Reformation on the Scientific Revolution was the dissolution of the monastic and mendicant orders in the Protestant countries of northern Europe, and the redirection of the revenues and buildings of those orders into new educational and charitable institutions. The dissolution of the English monasteries under Henry VIII (1536–40) released a substantial fraction of the country’s educational endowment; much of it was eventually redeployed in the grammar schools and the two ancient universities, Oxford and Cambridge. In the German lands, the closure of cloisters and the secularisation of ecclesiastical property produced a comparable reorganisation of educational patronage, and the new Protestant Gymnasien and Universitäten taught the natural philosophy of the new astronomy, of Vesalius’s anatomy, and of the new chemistry, with less of the resistance that the Catholic universities in Spain and Italy often mounted. Charles Webster’s The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (1975) argued that the Puritan revolution in England produced a programme of Baconian reform that directly shaped the founding of the Royal Society.
At the same time, the Catholic Reformation (the so-called Counter-Reformation) preserved the Jesuit educational network, which became the most effective teaching order of the seventeenth century. The Jesuits taught the Aristotelian natural philosophy at the Collegio Romano and in dozens of colleges across Europe, but they also ran the leading astronomy programmes in Catholic Europe, and their astronomers (Christopher Clavius, Christoph Scheiner, Giovanni Battista Riccioli) made significant contributions to observational astronomy. The institutional reordering, in short, ran in different directions in different places.
The Vernacular Bible and the Culture of Reading
A second, less direct, effect of the Reformation was on the culture of reading. The Protestant insistence on the individual’s direct access to the scriptures, in the vernacular, required that the Bible be printed, translated, and distributed on an unprecedented scale. By 1600, the Bible had been translated into more than fifty European languages, and printed editions of the vernacular Bible were present in an estimated 30 to 40 per cent of households in Protestant countries. The printing industry that had been developed to serve this religious demand was, in turn, available to print the new science; and the habit of individual reading and interpretation that Protestantism encouraged fed, in a long, contested process, into the empirical and individualist cast of mind that historians often associate with the new science.
Peter Harrison’s The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 4–7) argued that Protestant literalist reading of the Bible inadvertently created a culture in which the “book of nature” could be read in similar fashion: as a text to be examined empirically and to be interpreted by the individual reader, not by ecclesiastical authority. This argument has been challenged — see especially the exchange between Harrison and his critics in the pages of Annals of Science and History of Science in the early 2000s — but it remains the most influential single account of the relationship.
Confessional Competition and the Growth of the Universities
A third, and less ideological, effect of the Reformation was the growth in the number of universities in Protestant countries. The German lands alone went from around twenty universities in 1500 to more than forty by 1700, and the establishment of new universities in the Dutch Republic (Leiden, 1575; Franeker, 1585; Groningen, 1614; Utrecht, 1636) and in the Palatinate and other German states was a direct consequence of the confessional fragmentation of the empire. The new universities, freed from the scholastic curriculum that had dominated the medieval institutions, were in many cases the institutional homes of the new science. Leiden, in particular, became the leading centre of the new anatomy and the Cartesian natural philosophy in the 1620s and 1630s; and the universities of the Dutch Republic collectively provided a substantial fraction of the natural philosophers of the seventeenth century.
The Catholic response to the Protestant challenge also contributed to the growth of the seventeenth-century science, in a more complicated way. The founding of the Society of Jesus in 1540 and the publication of the Ratio studiorum in 1599 gave the Catholic Church a remarkably effective educational network, and the Jesuit colleges were responsible for the training of a substantial part of the European scientific elite of the seventeenth century. The Jesuit order was not, on the whole, sympathetic to heliocentrism, but it was sympathetic to the new natural philosophy, and the order’s scientific contributions — in observational astronomy, in geomagnetism, in the early study of the vacuum — were substantial.
The Limits of the Connection
The most important qualification to the connection between the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution is the simple observation that the new natural knowledge was made mostly by devout men of every confession, that the universities of Catholic Europe continued to teach this new approach, and that the political fragmentation produced by the Reformation was not, in itself, a sufficient cause of the Scientific Revolution. The natural philosophy of the seventeenth century was the work of Catholics and Protestants, of Jesuits and Jansenists, of Lutherans and Reformed. The religious institutions provided some of the funding, some of the patronage, and some of the social stability within which the reformed natural philosophy could develop, but they did not, in any simple sense, cause the experimental science.
Peter Zagorin’s 1998 essay “The Historical Significance of the Reformation” (Reformation & Renaissance Review 1, no. 2) concluded, after a careful survey of the evidence, that the Reformation “did not cause the Scientific Revolution, but it provided one of the conditions for it.” This is, on the whole, the consensus view of recent scholarship: the Reformation was an important contributing cause, not a sufficient cause; the relationship is empirically observable, but it is not a simple story of science emerging from Protestantism or a story of science triumphing over religion. The detailed cultural and political histories of the seventeenth century, from France to the Dutch Republic to England to the German lands, are needed to understand how the new philosophy of nature actually emerged in each local context.
For the longer story of how the new learning was institutionalised in the new universities, see Education, Universities, and the New Science. For the religious controversies of the seventeenth century, see The Scientific Revolution and the Church. And for the broader question of where the seventeenth-century science came from, see Why Did the Scientific Revolution Start in Europe?.