Knowledge and Cosmos is the second edition of Robert K. DeKosky’s ambitious survey of astronomical, cosmological and physical knowledge in the Western tradition, first published in 1979. This revised version incorporates much of the scholarship on these topics published in the intervening forty years, especially the work of Peter Barker, Aviva Rothman and Victor Thoren. Over twenty-one chapters, it offers a panoramic sweep of the varied attempts to interpret the nature of the universe from the ancient Greeks to the end of the seventeenth century.

The book is subtitled ‘Development and Decline of the Medieval Perspective’, and this neatly conveys both the work’s thesis and structure. Part I covers the development of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, its reception and elaboration in late antiquity, and the rise of scholasticism, before ending with the mathematical innovations of the Oxford calculators. This sets the stage for the real focus of the work in Part II, the Copernican Revolution of the sixteenth century and its intellectual wake. Here, the Aristotelian allegiance to final causes is successively eroded by Copernicus, then Kepler and Galileo, whose strictly mathematical and mechanical accounts of celestial motion pave the way for the natural systems of Newton and Descartes. This section abounds in well-explained technical detail on the astronomical controversies which structured the development of Kepler’s and Galileo’s thought, such as the precise motion of Mars and the variable brightness of Venus. This is also where the bulk of new material has been integrated, and the coverage becomes far more granular, at times going into the minutiae of Galileo’s observations or dealings with the Curia.

DeKosky circumscribes the work’s scope tightly from the outset, describing it as ‘not an effort to treat all dimensions of the early-modern “Scientific Revolution”’, nor ‘a history of astronomy or cosmology’, nor an ‘attempt to address all important aspects of scientific activities and contributions of major figures’ (p. xix). Instead, DeKosky identifies four ‘patterns of interpretation’, whose interactions and irreconcilability shaped the course of Western physical sciences and prepared the ground for the intellectual revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These ‘patterns’ are ‘mathematico-descriptive’, ‘mechanical’, ‘occultist’ and ‘teleological’.

Each of these modes of thought was represented in medieval scholarship. The Aristotelianism of the high scholastics averred a thoroughly teleological view of matter, guided as it was by the doctrines of natural places and final causes. Parallel to this, in the disciplines of alchemy, astrology and natural magic, was an occultist belief in a universe of hidden causes, virtues and spirits. Mechanism is perhaps the longest-lived pattern, which DeKosky traces from the atomism of Democritus and Lucretius right up to the fully fledged ‘animal machine’ of Descartes. The ‘mathematico-descriptive’ pattern emerges late into the game with the uses of geometry and arithmetic by fourteenth-century scholars at Oxford and Paris to solve the thorny issues of motion, momentum and change. For DeKosky, Newton represents the final resolution of tensions inherent in these systems of interpretation. In his Principia, Newton finally dispenses with the shadow of teleology cast by Scholastic Aristotelianism, and ‘reintroduced … an occultist pattern of interpretation to harmonize mathematico-descriptive and mechanical modes of his immediate predecessors’ (p. 463). Newton’s occultism, he argues, was fundamentally different from that of medieval alchemy or Renaissance hermeticismas it was guided by the notion that forces acted ‘according to mathematical regularities’ rather than being supernatural or teleological urges innate in matter.

DeKosky’s coverage of his subject matter is impressive, and he marshals a broad range of material to support his analysis of how these four ‘patterns’ interacted. Yet what will probably stand out to readers is the sense that this is an account of historical sciences rather than a history of science per se. Even when Knowledge and Cosmos was first published in 1979, its strict adherence to an ‘internalist’ view of scientific development, broadly to the exclusion of social, cultural and historical factors, made it unusual in a discipline that had been paying significant attention to the contexts of knowledge production since at least the 1960s. The updated version of Knowledge and Cosmos does consider these issues more closely than before, especially in the sections on Kepler and Galileo, which have benefited the most from the integration of new scholarship. It feels, however, out of step with much recent literature on the same topics, which has explored, for example, the social and religious context of scholasticism and the universities, the role of technical and material culture in medieval astronomy, or networks of patronage and authority-building in sixteenth-century Italian science, to name but a few areas.

Regrettably, the text is marred by frequent typographical errors, which a comparison with the first edition indicates have been introduced during the preparation of this revised version. This is unfortunate, as the prose is otherwise lucid and highly readable, with technical information well supported by figures. Experts in the topics covered by Knowledge and Cosmos are unlikely to find anything surprising here, but, perhaps because of this, the book has an obvious appeal for those seeking a comprehensive survey of the background of early modern physical sciences. Its structure and synoptic approach make it an ideal teaching text for history-of-science undergraduates, and it synthesizes the opinions of major scholars, from Koyré and Duhem up to Pamela Smith and Aviva Rothman, in a way which makes it a good starting point from which to explore particular issues more fully. The text as a whole, however, may leave students with an understanding of medieval and early modern astronomy, cosmology and physical theory which is rather insulated from the historical context of their development and, perhaps ironically, is quite teleological in its outlook.