An introduction to a large and complicated subject, which has come to be called the Scientific Revolution, this book refers to the fundamental changes in our understanding of the natural world that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These changes led to a rejection of ancient and medieval thinking about the universe in favour of the new thinking that gave birth to modern science. Professor Jacob does not pretend to tell the whole story of this momentous transformation, which is perhaps more important than any other in modern history. But he does highlight and survey what are often considered to be the six principal developments associated with this shift from old to new science. The six changes are: first, the abandonment of an ancient Greek picture of an earth-centred universe and its replacement by the modern picture of a solar system surrounded by an enormous universe; second, the gradual rejection of the Aristotelian binary physics in favour of the modern physics of universal forces; third, a medical revolution that culminated in the discovery of the circulation of the blood, and put animal (and human) physiology on a new foundation; fourth, the shift from an Aristotelian theory of knowledge to a modern scepticism; fifth, the development of new methods for establishing scientific certainty; and, finally, the founding of the world's first national, government-sponsored scientific societies for promoting research, spreading scientific knowledge, and stimulating inquiry.

Called ‘the most noted person of his age’ by Anthony Wood, Henry Stubbe (1632–76), classicist, polemicist, physician, philosopher and the most important critic of the early Royal Society, has never had a biography. This study seeks to fill that gap, while standing received opinion about him on its head. The older view has it that at the Restoration Stubbe renounced his radical past and became the enemy of scientific progress and a reactionary defender of church and monarchy. Professor Jacob shows instead that Stubbe continued to espouse radical views after 1660 by devious means. Publicly he resorted to a rhetoric of subterfuge, while he let the full extent of his radicalism be known in private conversations at Bath and in an important clandestine manuscript (which Jacob proves to be his) that circulated among radicals from the early 1670s well into the eighteenth century.