Mordechai Feingold

Professor of History

Research interests

Early modern history, history of science.

Research Statement

For the past twenty years I have been engaged in studying the history of British and European science between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The overall focus of my research has been the manner in which the rise of "modern science" -- and particularly the mathematical and physical sciences -- has transformed western culture from a humanistic, religious, and unified culture c. 1500 into a scientific/technological, secular, and fragmented culture by the turn of the twentieth century. My earlier studies investigated the contribution of such traditional institutions of higher learning as Oxford and Cambridge to the emergence of the "new science" and to the overall diffusion of scientific ideas during the early modern period. Concurrently, I studied the significance of erudition in the cultural life of the early modern period. By following the maturation of classical philology and literature as well as the flowering of Oriental learning (Hebrew and Arabic), I showed how the ideal of the general scholar - the person endowed with wide-ranging, encyclopedic learning - took hold among educated classes. Such studies serve as the basis for my current project: a multi-volume history of the Royal Society of London between 1660 and 1850. The Royal Society, I believe, presents a superb instance of the complex emergence of "modernity" at the cost of the earlier culture of erudition. The proponents of the new philosophies understood from the start that if they were to succeed, they needed to discredit the entire value system upon which humanistic culture rested. They accordingly presented "science" as something that was not only the arbiter of truth and the solution to all mankind's ills, but even the sole yardstick of thought, conversation, and style. The resultant colossal debate concerning the kind of knowledge "most worth having" has persisted to the present day. Precisely for this reason, I believe the history of the Royal Society provides the key to understanding how the emergence of an autonomous, specialized domain of science profoundly affected traditional canons of knowledge; helped reshape literary sensibilities; brought about the marginalization of philology, classical studies, and theological learning; and generally contributed to the fragmentation of the shared culture that dominated Europe for centuries.