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This work is of great interest not only
to historians of science, but to all those concerned with
Tudor and intellectual history.
It is an original and scholarly account
of the intellectual transformation of Tudor England, especially
in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, medicine,
education and printing. Advances in these fields are seen
against the social and political background of the time
which both made possible and encouraged this transformation.
The scope of this transformation was as
remarkable as it was rapid. England entered the sixteenth
century with an educational system that was still hidebound
by medieval scholasticism, despite the forces which were
already operating to change it. Yet within a hundred years,
and particularly the sixty years after 1540, she was in
the forefront of scientific thought and possessed the basis
of an educational system, much of which remains today. In
this work Antonia McLean sets out to show how this came
about.
The author shows in the first three chapters
that the source of this intellectual revolution originated
in the invention of printing and in the work of the early
humanists in England: Erasmus, Sir Thomas More and others
who brought new ideas to bear on learning, education, religion
and the State itself.
Yet the source of this transformation was
more than the work of a few scholars. It lay deep in the
fabric of Tudor society. Chapters three and four recount
the social and political factors which lay behind the intellectual
transformation: the role of patronage, the changes in education
and the growth of libraries. Another important factor discussed
here was the expansion of the mercantile marine with a consequent
demand for navigational techniques both mathematical and
astronomical.
All these various elements combined to produce
a most dramatic and rapid surge forward in mathematics,
the natural sciences and medicine. In a wide-ranging and
well-illustrated survey, Antonia McLean describes the work
of those remarkable individuals -- Turner, Dee, Digges,
Gilbert, Harriot and others -- who by a mixture of practical
ability and inventive genius added so much to the sum of
human knowledge, and started that movement which was to
lead up to the work of Newton in the seventeenth century.
Antonia McLean was educated at Sommerville
College Oxford where she took an Honours Degree in History.
During the war she worked first in the Ministry of Information
and then joined the W.R.N.S. She took up teaching in 1955,
first at the Westminster Tutors, and at Blackheath High
School and Haberdashers' Aske's School, New Cross.
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