| Summary: | This dissertation focuses on how Italian civilization made its way, scientifically and mathematically, from the Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment. More specifically, I investigate how calculus and Newtonianism spread across the Italian peninsula between 1689 and 1742, and how these disciplines transformed---and were transformed by---practices of synthetic geometry, the Galilean heritage, and Catholic scholasticism. My thesis is that, unlike what happened with the Galileo Affair and notwithstanding the general prohibitions on Copernicanism, major contributions to the spread of Newtonianism in Enlightened Italy came from within the Church itself. Furthermore, calculus and Newtonianism eventually reactivated Italian intellectual life, giving it new energy after an economic and cultural decline in the second half of the seventeenth century.
|
|---|
