A unique study in the culture of seventeenth-century French science, Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth-Century France focuses on the brief revolutionary period (1650–1680) that launched Europe's New Age of Academies. David S. Lux provides a lively account of one of the most intriguing scientific institutions in Louis XIV's France, the Academie de Physique de Caen, organized in 1662. Lux investigates why this promising institution with a talented membership and sympathetic private patrons foundered after it was provided royal support, finally to close its doors in 1672. Drawing upon hitherto unexploited archival materials, the author discovers the circumstances of one institution's failure, and develops a provocative new interpretation of the shift from privately funded to state-funded science in France during the second half of the seventeenth century. Lux provides a rare view of the everyday concerns of seventeenth-century science as it was practiced by those other than the immortals of the Scientific Revolution. Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth-Century France will interest sociologists of science and philosophers of science as well as historians, particularly those who work on early modern science and scientific institutions and French cultural history.

An account of European knowledge of the natural world, c.1500-1700.

A bold new study of politics and power in 17th-century France, this book argues that the French Crown centralized its power nationally by changing the way it delegated its royal patronage in the provinces. During this period, the royal government of Paris gradually extended its sphere of control by taking power away from the powerful and potentially disloyal provincial governors and nobility and instead putting it in the hands of provincial power brokers--regional notables who cooperated with the Paris ministers in exchange for their patronage. The new alliances between the Crown's ministers and loyal provincial elites functioned as political machines on behalf of the Crown, leading to smoother regional-national cooperation and foreshadowing the bureaucratic state that was to follow.

Who pays for science, and who profits? Historians of science and of France will discover that those were burning questions no less in the seventeenth century than they are today. Alice Stroup takes a new look at one of the earliest and most influential scientific societies, the Acad�mie Royale des Sciences. Blending externalist and internalist approaches, Stroup portrays the Academy in its political and intellectual contexts and also takes us behind the scenes, into the laboratory and into the meetings of a lively, contentious group of investigators. Founded in 1666 under Louis XIV, the Academy had a dual mission: to advance science and to glorify its patron. Creature of the ancien r�gime as well as of the scientific revolution, it depended for its professional prestige on the goodwill of monarch and ministers. One of the Academy's most ambitious projects was its illustrated encyclopedia of plants. While this work proceeded along old-fashioned descriptive lines, academicians were simultaneously adopting analogical reasoning to investigate the new anatomy and physiology of plants. Efforts to fund and forward competing lines of research were as strenuous then as now. We learn how academicians won or lost favor, and what happened when their research went wrong. Patrons and members shared in a new and different kind of enterprise that may not have resembled the Big Science of today but was nevertheless a genuine "company of scientists."

A study of the involvement of the Catholic Church in the cultural life of France in the seventeenth century.

The scientific revolution of the 17th century engendered diverse & prolific offspring, among which were the scientific societies. The French Academie Royale des Sciences, founded in 1666 by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's minister of finance, was the beneficiary of the most generous patronage of science known during the 17th century. It was an official, governmental expression of support for science rather than the independent, scholarly coterie characteristic of other contemporary scientific societies. As this study shows, the finances of the early Academy clarify the research & organization of the fledgling institution & the policies of its three ministerial protectors during the 17th century -- Colbert, Louvois, & Pontchartrain. Illustrations.

This volume presents new work in history and historiography to the increasingly broad audience for studies of the history and philosophy of science. These essays are linked by a concern to understand the context of early modern science in its own context.