The Universities and Science in Seventeenth Century England

Abstract

In the course of the debate over Puritan contributions to the scientific movement it sometimes has been asserted, and even more often assumed, that the English universities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were either unsympathetic towards or even hostile to the “new philosophy,” and that scientific studies had no place within their confines. Proponents of this position acknowledge one major exception to the scientific hiatus at Oxford and Cambridge, that of the Wadham group organized by John Wilkins in the 1650s which was the precursor of the Royal Society. However, the exception itself is said to result from Puritan intervention in the universities, and the dissolution of the group to follow from the demise of the Puritan regime.It will be the purpose of this paper to examine the state of the sciences in Oxford and Cambridge prior to, during, and after the Interregnum in order to suggest that universities had shown a continuous interest in science, that Puritan intervention did not significantly alter the pattern of scientific concerns and that the existence of the Wadham group of the 1650s does little to lend support to the notion of a connection between Puritanism and the development of science.The evidence for science in the universities before the Puritan Revolution is necessarily incomplete and scattered as is much of our knowledge of university life in that period. It might be best to begin with the work of Mark Curtis and F. R. Johnson who have already shown that the traditional framework of studies permitted the introduction of new ideas. By 1610 Oxford men had been disputing about such topics as the Copernican thesis, the infinity of the universe, the plurality of worlds, the habitability of the moon, and the earth as a magnet in formal university exercises.