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Evidence Before Science

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Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences

Abstract

This chapter seeks to establish the broad boundaries that enclosed questions of evidence in early modern Europe, thereby laying the groundwork for the chapters that follow. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these boundaries were expansive, permitting the construction, interpretation, and assimilation of many kinds of evidence that later came to be seen as illegitimate. Nevertheless, these early modern varieties of evidence played a crucial role in the age of the new sciences, helping to shift the disciplines of knowledge into their modern configurations. Section 1.1 provides a brief introduction to the aims of this volume, while Sect. 1.2 offers a concise history of the word “evidence” and its meanings from its rhetorical roots in classical antiquity to its modern meaning in the seventeenth century. Section 1.3 then examines how the higher disciplines of medieval learning—law, medicine, and theology—approached the question of evidence in light of the classical definitions of proof offered by Aristotle. Finally, Sect. 1.4 considers some of the ways that early moderns discussed and contributed to new conceptions of evidence within the context of the shifting disciplines, and how the social, cultural, and religious contexts of the period shaped and weighted them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    George Best, A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie, for the Finding of a passage to Cathaya by the Northweast (London, 1578), 36–38. The history of this text is complicated and not entirely clear. It is comprised of three works recounting Frobisher’s voyages; Best was present for the second and third of these. He clearly planned to publish his efforts in some form, for the text includes a dedication that he must have penned after he returned from Frobisher’s second voyage, and before he left on the third. However, the full text was published without Best’s permission or knowledge.

  2. 2.

    Best, A True Discourse, 44.

  3. 3.

    Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5–7.

  4. 4.

    See Carlo Ginzburg, “Ekphrasis and Quotation,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 50ste Jaarg. (1988): 3–19.

  5. 5.

    Demetrius, On Style, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), IV.208–220.

  6. 6.

    Stijn Bussels, The Animated Image: Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012), 58, 68–69.

  7. 7.

    Cicero, Academics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1933), II.vi, 17, 488–489: “propterea quod nihil esset clarius ἐνάργεια (ut Graeci, perspicuitatem aut evidentiam nos, si placet, nominemus, fabricemurque si opus erit verba …): sed tamen orationem nullam putabant inlustriorem ipsa evidentia reperiri posse, nec ea. quae tam clara essent definienda censebant.”

  8. 8.

    Bussels, The Animated Image, 71–73 argues that the term is coined from ex-videri. That is to say, evidentia is a quality in the observata that projects an image into the observer, implying that knowledge is an inevitable result of seeing.

  9. 9.

    Through the Middle Ages, the Institutio was known only through a defective version now generally referred to as the Textus mutilatus. The complete text was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416.

  10. 10.

    Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, 5 vols, ed. and trans. Donald Russell (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 2002), vol. 2, 4.2.63–64, 250: “Sunt qui adiciant his evidentiam, quae ἐνάργεια Graece vocatur.”

  11. 11.

    Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, vol. 3, 6.2. 32, 60–61: “Occisum queror: non omnia quae in re praesenti accidisse credibile est. in oculis habebo? non precussor ille subitus erumpet? non expavescet circumventus, exclamabit vel rogabit vel fugiet? non ferientem, non concidentem videbo? non animo sanguis et pallor et gemitus, extremus denique expirantis hiatus insidet? / Insequetur ἐνάργεια, quae Cicerone inlustratio et evidentia nominatur, quae non tam dicere videtur quam ostendere.”

  12. 12.

    Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, 8.3.61, 374–375: “Itaque ἐνάργεια … quia plus est. evidentia vel, ut alii dicunt, repraesentatio quam perspicuitas, et illud patet. hoc se quodam modo ostendit, inter ornamenta ponamus.”

  13. 13.

    Cicero, Topica, 97 (emphasis added): “itemque narrationes ut ad suos fines spectent, id est. ut planae sint, ut breves, ut evidentes, ut credibiles, ut moderatae, ut cum dignitate.”

  14. 14.

    Pliny, Historia naturalis, VII.53.181, IX.35.71 and XXXI.30.54.

  15. 15.

    Augustine, Confessionum libri tredecim (Migne PL 32.0811).

  16. 16.

    Augustine, De civitate Dei (Migne PL 41.0646): “creditque sensibus in rei cujusque evidentia, quibus per corpus animus utitur: quoniam miserabilius fallitur, qui nunquam putat eis esse credendum.”

  17. 17.

    Desiderius Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo (Mainz, 1521), 144–157.

  18. 18.

    Aquinas, Super Epistolam B. Pauli ad Hebraeos lectura Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, section 558. <http://dhspriory.org/thomas/SSHebrews.htm#11>: “Uno modo quia intellectus movetur ad assentiendum ex evidentia obiecti, quod est. per se cognoscibile ...”

  19. 19.

    Aquinas, Questiones Disputatae de Veritate, q. 14, a.9 <http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer14.htm>: “Daemones non voluntate assentiunt his quae credere dicuntur, sed coacti evidentia signorum, ex quibus convincitur verum esse quod fideles credunt.”

  20. 20.

    See Duns Scotus, Tractatus de primo principio, in Opera Omnia, Vol. 3, ed. Luke Wadding (1638, reprint, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1968): 210–261. We are grateful to Helena Neumann for this reference to Scotus.

  21. 21.

    Peter King, “Jean Buridan’s Philosophy of Science,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 18 (1987): 109–132, 120 in particular. We are grateful to Peter King and Jean-Paul de Lucca for this reference.

  22. 22.

    Robert Pasnau, “Medieval Social Epistemology: Scientia for Mere Mortals,” Episteme 7 (2010): 23–41, 33–37.

  23. 23.

    Anonymous, Cursor mundi: A Northumbrian Poem of the XIVth Century in Four Versions, ed. Richard Morris (London, 1893), vol. 1, l. 4516–4518, 266.

  24. 24.

    Chaucer, Treatise on the Astrolabe, ed. Andrew Edmund Brae (London, 1870), 19.

  25. 25.

    John Wyclifle, “Sermon 174,” in Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. Thomas Arnold (Oxford, 1871), 107.

  26. 26.

    Edith Rickert, “Some English Personal Letters of 1402,” Review of English Studies 8 (1932): 257–263, at 259.

  27. 27.

    Rotuli Parliamentorum; ut et Petitiones et Placita in Parliamento (n.p., 1783), vol. 4, 59a.

  28. 28.

    This sudden increase in the use of the word “evidence” is suggested by a Google nGram, and further corroborated by a statistical analysis of Early Modern Books Online (EEBO).

  29. 29.

    See, for instance, Robert Boyle, A Continuation of New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, touching the Spring and Weight of the Air and their Effects (London, 1669), 16–17: “The Hymn to Christ as a God in Pliny, appeal’d to in the latter end of the second Century as a very early evidence of the belief of his Deity, seems to have been joined with the Eucharist.

  30. 30.

    Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), 360. Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (London, 1665), sig. a1r, a2r, 5 and 163.

  31. 31.

    Richard W. Serjeantson, “Proof and Persuasion,” in The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston, 132–175 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 136, 138, 150–154. For a broad overview of the problem of evidence in its disciplinary frameworks, see James Chandler, Arnould I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (eds), Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

  32. 32.

    Aristotle, Posterior Analytics. Topica, ed. and trans. Hugh Tredennick and E. S. Forster (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), II.13, 227–241.

  33. 33.

    Ian Maclean, “Evidence, Logic, the Rule and the Exception in Renaissance Law and Medicine,” Early Science and Medicine 5 (2000): 227–257, at 243. See also Ian Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 75–76.

  34. 34.

    For instance, MGH nat. Germ, 4.1, XIV.1, at 64.

  35. 35.

    MGH LL nat. Germ, 1, II.IV.5, at 98.

  36. 36.

    MGH LL nat. Germ, 1, II.IV.1–2, at 95.

  37. 37.

    MGH LL nat. Germ, 1, II.IV.3, at 96.

  38. 38.

    MGH LL nat. Germ, 1, II.IV.1–2, 95: “Quod si ab utraque parte testimonia equaliter proferantur, discussa prius veritate verborum, quibus magis debeat credi, iudicis extimabit electio.”

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 4.1, XIV.2, at 64.

  40. 40.

    Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water (Brattleboro, Vermont: Echo Point Books, 1986; 2014), 26–33.

  41. 41.

    H. G. Gengler, Germanische Rechtsdenkmäler: Leges, Capitularia, Formulae (Erlangen, 1875), 762.

  42. 42.

    In a particularly transparent example, in England in the early twelfth century, the chronicler Eadmer noted that of the 50 men accused of killing stags in the royal forest who submitted to the ordeal of hot iron, all emerged unscathed when their bandages were removed. This likely had more to do with the general dislike of the king and his reputation for brutality than any divine intervention. Eadmer, Historia novorum in Anglia, ed. Martin Rule (London, 1884), 102. Cf. Frederick Pollock and Frederic Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (Cambridge, 1952), vol. 2, 599.

  43. 43.

    This is a reference to 4.19.25 of Justinian’s Corpus iuris ciuilis, ed. A. Kriegel and E. Osenbrüggen (Leipzig, 1848), 236.

  44. 44.

    Lorraine Daston, “Probability and Evidence,” Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 2, 1108–1144, at 1113. Cf. Pollock and Maitland, 660.

  45. 45.

    Edward Peters, Torture: Expanded Edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 44.

  46. 46.

    “Constitutio criminalis Carolina,” in Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France, ed. John H. Langbein (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 259–308. See items 19–44, at 272–279.

  47. 47.

    Peters, Torture, 50.

  48. 48.

    Richard Groot, “Early Thirteenth-Century Criminal Jury,” in Twelve Good Men and True, ed., J. S. Cockburn and Thomas Green, 3–35 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3.

  49. 49.

    Jurors were expected to have land or income worth at least 40 shillings a year in order to serve. See John Fortescue, De laudibus Angliae, ed. A. Amos (Cambridge, 1825), 232–233.

  50. 50.

    Barbara Shapiro, Beyond Reasonable Doubt and Probable Cause: Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 4; cf. Barbara Shapiro, “The Concept ‘Fact’: Legal Origins and Cultural Diffusion,” Albion 26 (1994): 227–252, at 230. Pollock and Maitland argue that witnesses were being used in some especially important cases as early as the thirteenth century. Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 656.

  51. 51.

    Fortescue, De laudibus Angliae, 233.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 227.

  53. 53.

    Ibid.

  54. 54.

    Ibid.

  55. 55.

    See, for instance, Julian Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). On Boyle, see Richard Serjeantson, “Testimony and Proof in Early-Modern England,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 30 (1999): 195–236, especially at 215–223.

  56. 56.

    Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 78.

  57. 57.

    Maclean, “Evidence,” 247–253 provides a comprehensive explanation of medical semiology.

  58. 58.

    Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 120–123.

  59. 59.

    Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 124–125.

  60. 60.

    On the medical genre of observationes, see Gianna Pomata, “Observation Rising: Birth of an Epistemic Genre, 1500–1650,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, 45–80 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

  61. 61.

    MGH Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum IV, 712: “Oh Lord, I seek your mercy, so that those who dare to speak against your holy admonitions with such audacity and pride, succumbing to the seductions of demons rather than your precepts, now, by your promise, be given an example of great ferocity and terror that they will know whose work they are, so that your holy name may earnestly be glorified by the men believing in you [Quaeso, Domine, divinam clementiam tuam, ut hi qui cum tanta audatia atque superbia tuis sanctis monitis contradicere audent et magis daemonum seductionibus quam tuis praeceptis obtemperant, tuo permisso ipsorum nunc ferocitatem ad exemplum terroremque multorum impleantur, quo cognoscere possint, quorum opera exercent, u tab hominibus in te credentibus enixius glorificetur nomen sanctum tuum].”

  62. 62.

    In particular, see Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, I.1–2 and II.2–5.

  63. 63.

    Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. John Mortensen and Enrique Alarcón and trans. Laurence Shapcote, 8 vols (Lander, Wyoming: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012), vol. 1, 17–20 (ST Ia 2.2 obj. 1 and ad. 1).

  64. 64.

    On Scotus, see Stephen Dumont, “The Propositio Famosa Scoti: Duns Scotus and Ockham on the Possibility of a Science of Theology,” Dialogue 31 (1992): 415–429, at 415–416.

  65. 65.

    Maclean, “Evidence,” 228. In the sixteenth century, as Maclean shows, there was a discernible increase in questions of evidence, proof, and testimony in both the law and medicine.

  66. 66.

    Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers, 457–489 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 480–487.

  67. 67.

    See Richard Brathwait [sic], The English Gentleman (London, 1630), 137.

  68. 68.

    Hooke, Micrographia, sig. a2r.

  69. 69.

    Hooke, Micrographia, “The Preface,” sig. a1r. On the doctrine of the fall and its impact on the senses, see Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  70. 70.

    For a fuller examination of this tradition, see Richard Raiswell, “Geography is Better than Divinity: The Bible and Medieval Geographical Thought,” Canadian Journal of History / Annales Canadiennes d’Historie 45 (2010): 207–234.

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Lancaster, J.A.T., Raiswell, R. (2018). Evidence Before Science. In: Lancaster, J., Raiswell, R. (eds) Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 225. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91869-3_1

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