Western Civilization I / Unit 17 WC1 1635 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading Galileo's Abjuration and Bacon's Novum Organum
The idea
The exam may quote a document of the Scientific Revolution and ask what it assumes. The method is three questions: who speaks, under what pressure, and what the words concede or claim. Galileo's abjuration of sixteen thirty-three and Bacon's Novum Organum of sixteen twenty, both read in translation from Fordham's Modern History Sourcebook, are the pair.
In practice
Galileo speaks kneeling before the Inquisition, under threat, and abjures the opinion that the sun is central and the earth moves, promising never to hold it again. What it concedes: that the Church may define which doctrines are permitted. What it assumes: that a scientific claim can be a doctrine. Bacon speaks as a philosopher to his readers, under no pressure, and argues that the idols of the mind, of the tribe, the cave, the marketplace and the theater, corrupt observation, so knowledge must be rebuilt from experience. What it claims: that ancient authority is worthless as a starting point. What it assumes: that nature can be read by method. The exam's question: what do the two documents together show. Answer: a method being born and an authority resisting it in the same decade.
Where people slip
Galileo's abjuration is not evidence that he changed his mind, and Bacon's idols are biases, not superstitions. Keep each document's situation, and remember the anchor's reason for the trial: religious war and a mocked pope.
Your place on the trail
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Builds on
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