The Scientific Revolution: An Encyclopedia Available to Purchase

If you wanted to write a history of the scientific revolution which occurred in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is doubtful whether you would choose an encyclopaedic format in which entries follow one another in alphabetical order. Yet in some ways it is remarkably effective, as this book shows. For example, if you wanted to know what happened in astronomy in this period but could not remember the names of any of the people involved, just look under “astronomy” and the names of the principal actors are revealed. If, on the other hand, the only name that...