The Ferrara Earthquakes, 1570-1579: Science, Religion, and Politics in Late Renaissance Italy

The unusually large body of scientific works written about the earthquakes that struck Ferrara in 1570-1579 reveals much about the social and political tensions at the time. It is probable that the earthquake corpus is not in fact a disinterested scholarly discussion arising organically out of the similar preoccupations of individual thinkers, but a collective effort encouraged by the Ferrarese secular authorities in order to support the Ferrarese Duke against the Pope. If so, it would demonstrate the importance of political considerations in shaping ideas during a formative time in the development of natural philosophy, when new ideas traceable to "modern science" were interacting with the new religiosity of the Counter-Reformation in sometimes extremely uncomfortable ways.