Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Scholasticism, Appropriation, and Censure 2. Humanists' Invectives and Aristotle's Impiety 3. Renaissance Aristotle, Renaissance Averroes 4. Italian Aristotelianism after Pomponazzi 5. Religious Reform and the Reassessment of Aristotelianism 6. Learned Anti-Aristotelianism 7. History, Erudition, and Aristotle's Past 8. The New Sciences, Religion, and the Struggle over Aristotle Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Principal Primary Sources Index

About the Author :
Craig Martin is an associate professor of history at Oakland University and author of Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes, also published by Johns Hopkins.

Review :
Academic and exuberant, the text provides a useful counter-reading of commonly held assumptions about the displacement of Aristotelian thought at the advent of the scientific revolution. —Choice Refreshingly clear and readable . . . A good introduction to Aristotelianism. —Renaissance Quarterly Concise but very richly informative, Martin’s book with its clear vision and narrative will surely remain an essential work on the history of Aristotelianism for years to come. —Isis . . . [Subverting Aristotle] effectively demonstrates the impossibility of completely disentangling the history of premodern philosophy from the history of premodern science, and the value of bridging the medieval and early modern periods even when endeavoring to account for the distinctiveness of the ‘new sciences’ of the later seventeenth century. —The British Journal for the History of Science Reading the wildly varying portrayals of Aristotle's relationship to religion, from virtual Christian to benighted atheist, which Martin has collected together in this rich study, one cannot but agree with the French Jesuit Rene Rapin that "it is difficult to understand how in the succession of time it has been possible to make such different judgments on the same person" (p.167). —The Catholic Historical Review [Subverting Aristotle] offers a lot of very useful and fine-grained research into the shifting fortunes of late-medieval and early-modern Scholasticism. —British Society for Literature and Science . . . excellent contribution —Common Knowledge . . . lucid and fascinating. . . Martin's book offers a necessary tonic to those texts that merely hold up religion as the adversary of science without explaining why. —Sun News Miami