The modern scientific community has descended from a community of scientists which came into being as part of the scientific revolution in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. Before this time, there were individuals whom we properly called scientists but there was no scientific community. Copernicus apparently worked in relative isolation. Three-quarters of a century later, Kepler also worked alone, but through correspondence he was in touch with other astronomers. By the end of the seventeenth century, Newton, as determined a recluse as the world has known, found himself surrounded by a scientific community despite himself and spent his final twenty-three years as President of the Royal Society. We know a great deal about the intellectual phenomenon called the scientific revolution, but we know much less about the sociological phenomenon which accompanied it. Scientific societies including both organized societies and informal communities constituted the framework of the emerging scientific community. The position of the community in the life of the seventeenth century needs to be understood by a detailed examination of the way knowledge was applied to technology in those areas in which it had found applications, such as military architecture and drainage projects. The knowledge that was employed in such areas and its precise relation to science can speak to the issue of whether the members of the scientific community were supported as purveyors of a necessity or whether they were fostered, like artists and musicians, as ornaments to the society. The means of support that enable a person to devote himself to science is a matter of significance to a social history of the scientific community. One means of the support available to scientists was patronage. The question of patronage is important because of the ways in which the search for it, and acceptance of it, affected the scientific work itself and hence the development of science. In his study of the social history of the scientific community during the period of the scientific revolution, Dr. Westfall, the premier historian of that period, examines the role of patronage as a way of support for scientific activity by means of a survey of scientists of the age and detailed individual studies of Galileo and Descartes. A major objective of the research is to arrive at an understanding of the mores of patronage and its influence on the careers of scientists and at an assessment of the role of patronage in the scientific revolution.
