Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth-Century France

Book excerpt: A unique study in the culture of seventeenth-century French science, Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth-Century France focuses on the brief revolutionary period (1650–1680) that launched Europe's New Age of Academies. David S. Lux provides a lively account of one of the most intriguing scientific institutions in Louis XIV's France, the Academie de Physique de Caen, organized in 1662. Lux investigates why this promising institution with a talented membership and sympathetic private patrons foundered after it was provided royal support, finally to close its doors in 1672. Drawing upon hitherto unexploited archival materials, the author discovers the circumstances of one institution's failure, and develops a provocative new interpretation of the shift from privately funded to state-funded science in France during the second half of the seventeenth century. Lux provides a rare view of the everyday concerns of seventeenth-century science as it was practiced by those other than the immortals of the Scientific Revolution. Patronage and Royal Science in Seventeenth-Century France will interest sociologists of science and philosophers of science as well as historians, particularly those who work on early modern science and scientific institutions and French cultural history.