This group of books traces the slow, uneven emergence of an empirical worldview in the seventeenth century, when observation, experiment, and inherited learning coexisted in productive tension. At its center stands Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius and Johannes Kepler’s Dioptrice, works that permanently altered how the heavens could be seen and described, here mediated through Pierre Gassendi’s synthetic Institutio Astronomica. Around these orbit texts that extend empirical habits into medicine, travel, antiquarianism, and natural history: Francis Bacon’s programmatic remapping of knowledge, Thomas Browne’s learned skepticism, Francesco Redi’s experiments, and travel narratives that treat mines, baths, flora, and customs as objects of inquiry. Taken together, these books show science not as a sudden break with the past, but as a crowded, transitional landscape—where telescopes, curiosities, errors, and hard-won observations all contributed to the gradual re-education of the senses.

Bernardus Connor and the Science Behind Gospel Miracles
The History of the Royal-Society of London 1667.
Galileo’s “Starry Messenger” and Kepler’s “Dioptrice” Two of the Most Important Books in Early Observational Astronomy
Edward Brown’s 1677 Travels through Germany: Natural History, Mines & Baths.
Philosophia Mentis et Sensuum (1698): Jesuit Aristotelianism and Empirical Philosophy
The Works Of the Learned Sr Thomas Brown 1686
Of The Advancement And Proficience Of Learning 1640
Strimesius’s Somatologia 1697
Natural ? History & “The devil’s arse”
A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence.
Experiments on Diverse Natural Things Francesco Redi 1685

JAMESGRAY2@ME.COM