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As is the case in so many other aspects of modern life, Renaissance
culture appears to mark the turning point in attitudes toward the
technological innovator. Technologists as a group, whether they were
inventors or skilled practitioners, gained greater recognition in the
Renaissance than they had in ancient or medieval times. They found
patrons to support them and their projects, wrote and published
elaborately illustrated books on their technical specialties, and
received praise from influential writers and thinkers for the
contributions they were making to human welfare.
Basalla [1988, 129]
seq Figure \* Arabic2
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1580
European Engraving of Great Inventions
One engraving, dating from the 1580s, by Johannes Stradanus
celebrates nine great inventions and discoveries of Renaissance Europe:
(1) New World, (II) magnetic windrose compass, (III) gunpowder, (IV)
printing press, (V) clock, (VI) guaiacum, used in treating syphilis,
(VII) distillation, (VIII) silkworm, and (IX) stirrup, which made armed
warfare on horseback possible. Source: The "new discoveries" of
Stradanus (Norwalk, Conn., 1953).
Basalla [1988, 130]
In Muslim tradition, innovation or novelty is automatically
assumed to be evil until it can be proved to be otherwise and applies to
innovations made by believers in Islam as well as those imported from
other cultures.
. . .
Although the West has never in its history
universally condemned novelty, the conscious quest for novelty dates to
recent times. Historians have traced the origins of the Western craving
for novelty to a series of developments that took place in Renaissance
Europe (Figure IV.3). Geographical exploration literally discovered new
worlds; astronomical observation confirmed the existence of new stars
(novae) in heavens hitherto thought immutable; medieval scholasticism
was replaced by new philosophical systems; and modern science, or the
"New Philosophy" as it was then called, presented a revolutionary
conception of the universe. By the seventeenth century the fascination
with novelty was so great that publishers' book lists were filled with
titles promising a new alchemy, astronomy, botany, chemistry,
geometry, medicine, pharmacopeia, rhetoric, and technology. Of these
the best known are Galileo's Discorso . . . intorno a due nuove
scienze (Two New Sciences) (1638), Johannes Kepler's Astronomia
Nova (1609), and Francis Bacon's Novum Organon (New Logic)
(1620). Lynn Thorndike has concluded that "the new was very much in the
consciousness of the men of the seventeenth century."
Closely related to the pursuit of novelty of the
great and influential ideas of the Western world - the idea of
progress. According to its tenets human history does not follow either
a cyclic or a declining course; it moves ever onward and upward to a
better future. The golden age, therefore, is not a paradise that was
lost in past times but one that will be reached in the future. Those
who go seeking for wisdom from the ancients must be made to realize that
the men and women of the present and future are the true sages. As for
the Greeks and Romans, they lived during the infancy of Western culture.
. . .
The domination of nature joined novelty and
progress to form a triad of ideas that emerged in the culture of
Renaissance Europe and became instrumental in stimulating technological
change. The idea that nature exists solely for human use is first found
in the account of the Creation in Genesis.
. . .
Medieval historian Lynn White, Jr., claims that
the spectacular success of the West in cultivating science and
technology is rooted in the Judeo-Christian belief that the domination
of nature is sanctioned by religion.
Basalla [1988, 131-133]
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