Abstract

“The present book,” acknowledges Wilson in her Preface, “owes its origins to a study of the preface to Robert Hooke‘s Micrographia undertaken in a seminar on reappraisals of the scientific revolution under the direction of Robert S. Westman.” It is in that very preface that Hooke proclaims: “my ambition is, that I may serve to the great Philosophers of this Age, as the makers and grinders of my Glasses did to me”, and it seems that for Wilson, the reappraisal of paragraphs like this have served to erode Westman’s conception of the scientific revolution as a “long-term event–some one hundred fifty years in the making”. From Wilson’s perspective, this time frame does not appear as an ‘event’ at all.