Abstract

William A. Wallace’s credentials as a Galileo scholar are well established. With seven books to his credit, notably Prelude to Galileo, Galileo and His Sources and Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof, he is certainly one of the world’s foremost students of Galileo and his period. It is this period, that of late medieval and sixteenth-and seventeenth-century science, that most interests him. Hence the title of this work. Wallace’s extensive knowledge of what was being accomplished in philosophy and science at university centers such as Salamanca, Coimbra, Oxford, Paris, Padova, and Rome are here brought to bear on the years spanning Soto and Galileo. Wallace moves from late scholasticism with its high confidence in intellect and is ability to achieve certitude in science, through the eclecticism spawned by the nominalism of Ockham and the Oxford “Calculators,” to the resurgence of confidence in intellect and scientific certitude claimed again in the Iberian Peninsula and in Italy, and that at the very time it was being questioned in England.