The modern world view is distinguished from the medieval or ancient view by what has been called a quest for reality: how does the world really work? "Reality" refers here to a definite structure of the universe independent of ourselves as observers. In even recent history of science, this quest for reality has been assigned only to those studying what we today define as science, that is our physical and natural sciences: astronomy, physics, botany, zoology,and even medicine, which occupies a special position. It is also commonly agreed that the transition occurred with the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries in physics and astronomy. Dr. Pyle, in this pathbreaking study, argues that the modern view emerged not only in science, but also in humanities and that it was the humanist traditions of the Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries are aspects of the same quest which influenced the development of science. She argues that the zoologists' approach to the masses of new materials and species which were flooding into Europe as a result of the explorations of the new world which began in the 15th and 16th centuries drew their techniques at least analogously from the humanists' approach to classical texts. The methods the humanists used to identify texts, date them, and test their validity are comparable according to Jacob Bronowski to the scientific method and, in the case of zoology, are directly analogous. Like the humanists, the zoologists relied increasingly on first-hand evidence,including specimens and drawings sent from one investigator to another. Under this grant, she will examine manuscript sources in Europe in order to determine the development of the new zoological methods in the 15th and 16th centuries. She will examine the work of a number of zoologists of this period in order to compare the philological and zoological methods in order to test her hypothesis that the two methods are indeed analogous and stem from the same scientific impulse which arose in the 15th and 16th centuries. This study thus promises to clarify the origins not only of zoology, a little-studied area in the history of science, but, more importantly, to lay the groundwork for a whole new interpretation of the origins of modern scientific methodology. The work is controversial as any new interpretation of the rise of science will be. Yet it also provides new insights into a force which has completely reshaped the world we live in.
