VII.The 17th Century研究生英语提高.doc

Europe in the Seventeenth Century Introduction The political troubles of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not preclude extraordinary developments in other areas. The scientific revolution changed the way Europeans thought about the physical universe. England, France, and above all the Netherlands challenged the Iberian powers and created substantial empires of their own. In the process they greatly expanded Europe’s presence in world markets and accumulated capital in unprecedented amounts. The Netherlands emerged, however briefly, as a major power and a center of high culture. Eventually, states that had been nearly shattered by a century of war and revolution began to reconstruct themselves, reforming their governmental institutions, curbing the power of local elites, and gaining control over the armies and navies whose independence had threatened to engulf them. The model for many of these changes was the France of Louis XIV, but the rise of England as an economic and naval power would have an even greater influence on the age to come. Medieval Science and the Scientific Revolution The scientific revolution of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has no parallel among modern intellectual movements. Its impact was comparable to that made by the thinkers of ancient Greece because, like them, it changed not only ideas but also the process by which ideas are formulated. The Renaissance and the Reformation, for all their importance, were rooted in traditional patterns of thought. They could be understood without reordering the concepts that had permeated Western thinking for more than two thousand years. The development of modern science, though in some ways an outgrowth of these earlier movements, asked questions that were different from those that had been asked before and by so doing created a whole new way of looking at the universe. Modern science and the scientific method with which it is associated may be the one body of European