Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
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> One thing I like about studying the middle ages is the realization
> that it was absolutely not like the world we live in. It gives me
> hope that change is possible. It happened before, it can happen again.
>
I agree with this -- but it is important to identify the precise nature of that difference and the factors that brought about the change. And it does not seem to me that measurement was among those factors but, rather, a later and secondary result of the changes that took place.
Among the _core_ shifts was, I think, the gradual rejection of the dictum that "Nothing is in the mind that is not first in the senses." I'm not sure, incidentally, that astrology was more important in the middle ages than in the "Renaissance" -- in many ways superstition _increased_ greatly during the 16th & 17th centuries, Plato offering more room for it than did Aristotle. And this 'flowering' of strange superstition was not a wholly separate phenomenon from the growth of science (cf. the strange ideas Newton pursued when he was not doiing optics or gravity). Alchemy, for example, flourished more in the Renaissance than in the middle ages -- and in addition to the theological views that got him burnt Bruno has a host of really weird ideas.
Pound has pumped a good deal both of medieval thought and of Renaissance nuttiness into the Cantos. And in one of his essays he suggests that Descartes "queered" our geometry. What Descartes did was _separate_ geometry from sense perception -- a profoundly anti-scholastic move. After Descarte it was possible to express all geometry in purely abstract terms without visual reference. (No need to visualize a circle while exploring the meaning of a*2+b*2=c*2.
Now the question of explaining the change requires that we explore the conditions which could lead to a recognition of truth independent of sense perception! That also involved the rejection of analogical reasoning. That advance came slowly. Early efforts at developing a science of geology were greatly hampered by interpreting Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood as offering an analogical insight into the circulation of water in the earth. Milton was thoroughly modern when he appealed to his muse to enable him to "see and tell/ Of things invisible to mortal sight."
Gould's NYRB review of Laqueur's _Making Sex_ is invaluable on these topics.
Carrol