9781422277614

But, in the centuries before Galileo, a lot had already happened. The first universities in Europe had been established in the early thirteenth century. They preached a new system of thought, argument, and education. Christian monasteries in Europe, where books had previously been kept, had been centered around the value of an inward-looking, devotional life, but the universities were centers for the inquiring mind—and they found plenty to do. After the medieval period, Italy became the source and center of the artistic and cultural flowering known as the Renaissance. At the end of the sixteenth century, Italy held an important position in Europe. At the time, the area that today is known as Italy was not one nation, but seven separate and independent city- states. For the Roman Catholic Church, however, the sixteenth century was a time of crisis. Men like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox were repelled by the corruption and the excesses that had crept into the Church of Rome. They led a movement to return the Church to a purer, simpler faith. This Protestant Reformation had inspired some European rulers to break away from the authority of Rome. Leaders of the Catholic Church tried to stop this division of the faithful. A Church institution known as the Holy Inquisition was strengthened to deal with heresy—any teachings that contradicted the beliefs of the Catholic Church. In Europe, the universities were rather set in their ways. They absorbed the knowledge of ancient thinkers, but the university scholars rarely tried to go further. University education promoted reasoning rather than experiment. The standard curriculum was to blame for this. Universities were established to provide an education for the mind, focusing on three areas: law, philosophy, and theology . The disciplines that we understand as sciences today, such as physics, did not yet exist; they were considered a branch of philosophy. Although students had numerous books about the teachings of Aristotle and other ancient thinkers, the theories of Aristotle and the others were rarely tested. For example, no one ever bothered to challenge Aristotle’s proposal that objects with different weights would fall to Earth at different speeds. To the university scholars, the purpose for study was to find a cause or reason for things being as they were. Experimentation and testing of theories was scorned for showing only the effects

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