This volume, honoring the renowned historian of science, Allen G Debus, explores ideas of science - `experiences of nature' - from within a historiographical tradition that Debus has done much to define. As his work shows, the sciences do not develop exclusively as a result of a progressive and inexorable logic of discovery. A wide variety of extra-scientific factors, deriving from changing intellectual contexts and differing social millieus, play crucial roles in the overall development of scientific thought. These essays represent case studies in a broad range of scientific settings - from sixteenth-century astronomy and medicine, through nineteenth-century biology and mathematics, to the social sciences in the twentieth-century - that show the impact of both social settings and the cross-fertilization of ideas on the formation of science. Aimed at a general audience interested in the history of science, this book closes with Debus's personal perspective on the development of the field.
Audience: This book will appeal especially to historians of science, of chemistry, and of medicine.

Experiencing Nature in Intellectual Contexts.- The Body Politic before and after the Scientific Revolution.- The Geometrical Kabbalahs of John Dee and Johannes Kepler: The Hebrew Tradition and the Mathematical Study of Nature.- The Theological Foundations of Darwin's Theory of Evolution.- Chemistry through Invariant Theory? James Joseph Sylvester's Mathematization of the Atomic Theory.- Experiencing Nature in Social Contexts.- Religion, Science, and the Public Imagination: The Restoration of Order in Early Modern France.- Dancing with Spiders: Tarantism in Early Modern Europe.- Nature and Culture in the Discourses of the Virtuosi of France.- Dionysius Lardner's American Tour: A Case Study in Antebellum American Interest in Science, Technology, and Nature.- Establishing an Historiographical Tradition.- From the Sciences to History: A Personal and Intellectual Journey.- Selected Bibliography.- Notes on Contributors.