How ancient wisdom shaped the development of modern science

Using state-of-the-art digital analysis techniques on a large corpus of early modern texts.

Prof. Cornelis J. Schilt and the VERITRACE team, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Have you ever considered that knowledge may not be new but old? During the Italian Renaissance, this conception of knowledge became quite influential, fuelled by the rediscovery of texts like the Corpus Hermeticum, the Chaldean Oracles, the Orphic Hymns and the Sibylline Oracles, all understood to have been composed in antiquity. These texts, and the associated idea of knowledge as old, were reappropriated into a perennial philosophy, a prisca sapientia, which was a tradition that valued these works for their insights into God, mankind and the cosmos. Key figures in early modern science, such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ascribed to this tradition in one form or another. Yet no comprehensive account exists of exactly what these luminaries took from these ancient wisdom writings and how the concept of a perennial truth influenced their knowledge-making.

The ERC Starting Grant project VERITRACE, or “Traces de la verité: The reappropriation of ancient wisdom in early modern natural philosophy”, aims to fill this gap in our understanding of the development of early modern science. It focuses on the widespread dissemination and impact of the ancient wisdom tradition, employing specialised digital techniques adapted for early modern studies.

VERITRACE anticipates significant breakthroughs in our understanding of the role of these ancient texts in early modern natural philosophy by pursuing three main objectives: creating a comprehensive roadmap of how ancient wisdom was incorporated into early modern science, charting the spread of this discourse from Renaissance Italy to early modern Europe, and identifying watershed moments in the reception and perception of these ancient wisdom writings.

Intellectual background

The Renaissance nurtured the development of new knowledge about mankind and the cosmos. It was an era marked by discoveries of new worlds, translations of ancient texts newly discovered, Gutenberg’s printing press and a shifting European politico-religious landscape, which facilitated the emergence of innovative ideas and theories.

Perhaps surprisingly, during this same period, a tradition that had its roots in antiquity developed. Known in its many guises as prisca theologia, prisca sapientia and philosophia perennis, it focussed not on new, but ancient knowledge, considered to be original truths revealed to mankind at the beginning of the world (Schmitt, 1966; Walker, 1972; Garin, 1984; Schmidt-Biggemann, 2004; Leinkauf, 2017). These ancient doctrines, seemingly distant from modern science, were, in fact, eagerly studied by foundational natural philosophers, who in turn would shape modern physics, chemistry and mathematics.

Key texts such as the Chaldean and Sibylline Oracles, the Corpus Hermeticum and the Orphic Hymns, some of which were believed to be as old as the time of the patriarch Abraham, were rediscovered and reinterpreted by scholars like Georgios Gemistos Plethon, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Agostino Steuco and Francesco Patrizi. During the early modern period, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, and Newton were but four of the many natural philosophers who professed inspiration by this idea of an ancient knowledge, each in different ways, yet the extent of these ideas on the generation of new knowledge remains underexplored.

State-of-the-art approach

VERITRACE explores the impact of this idea of a perennial tradition on early modern natural philosophy primarily by tracing how four main corpora were read and discussed in the literature of the period. These corpora include all then-available editions of the Corpus Hermeticum (including the Asclepius), the Chaldean Oracles, the Sybilline Oracles and the Orphic Hymns. Printed books, connecting readers across Europe, offer a broader reach than the era’s other modes of discourse, like oral discussions, manuscripts and the circulation of letters. Indeed, even if we only focus on works in Latin, English, German, French, Dutch and Italian, the number of books that have survived from the early modern period is staggering and representative of what was printed in the period. To analyse the influence of ancient wisdom writings and their Renaissance popularisers, VERITRACE employs digital distant reading techniques. This method, closely related to natural language processing, allows for the analysis of large text corpora, identifying patterns and uncovering both prominent and neglected works, the latter termed ‘the great unread’ by Margaret Cohen (Cohen, 2009; Reid, 2019). Famously, early modern writers would hardly include references, in particular to their source material, which provides one of the key challenges for the project.

Significant advancements in digitising early modern books have expanded the application of distant reading techniques. Improved OCR technology now yields meaningful results even with suboptimal text recognition (Hill and Hengchen, 2019; Kurhekar et al., 2021). Online repositories, like those of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, provide standardised data for content extraction, facilitating large-scale analysis (Imai, 2018; Karsdorp et al., 2021). In fact, Prof. Schilt has previously applied these kinds of techniques to analyse Isaac Newton’s extensive manuscript archive.

The VERITRACE project integrates close and distant reading of Renaissance and early modern texts. The close reading corpus (CRC) includes all the relevant editions of the four main corpora under scrutiny that were published during the Renaissance and early modern period but also works that drew heavily on these ancient wisdom writings. These would have been used by natural philosophers both for the primary source materials they contain and for their incorporation in natural philosophical theories.

The distant reading corpus (DRC) consists of several hundred thousand works from important European publication databases in Latin, French, German, Dutch, English, and Italian, including:

early English Books Online (EEBO) (ProQuest), which in its EEBO-TCP format developed by the Text Creation Partnership, contains about 58 000 English and Latin texts published between 1540 and 1700
Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France), which contains almost 125 000 books published between 1540 and 1728 in a variety of languages, including French, Italian, Dutch, and Latin
the Digitale Sammlungen of the Bavarian State Library, which contains nearly 365 000 titles published between 1540 and 1728, in Latin, German and French, among others.

Digital images and texts from these databases can be extracted using advanced APIs for comprehensive analysis. OCR corrections, if needed, are done using specialist tools like EMOP (https://emop.tamu.edu).

The primary analytical techniques deployed by the project involve so-called latent semantic analysis (LSA) and sentiment analysis. LSA, familiar from plagiarism software, compares text usage across the corpus, revealing unacknowledged influences and similarities (Foltz, 2011; Kintsch et al., 2011; Ratna et al., 2017; Dobson, 2019). LSA will help detect the influence of particular authors upon one another and upon larger bodies of text present in Renaissance and early modern society, influences hitherto unrecognised.

Sentiment analysis is a text analysis technique that evaluates the emotional tone in textual discussions, useful for observing and comparing sentiments expressed on various topics. It has been successfully used in historical projects (Soni et al., 2021) and contemporary Twitter discourse (Colleoni et al., 2014; Lashari and Wiil, 2016). The ability to perform semi-automated sentiment analysis on a large corpus thus permits us to draw meaningful conclusions about the sentiments surrounding a particular topic, text or author.

Both LSA and sentiment analysis incorporate the latest machine learning techniques to detect subtle uses and discussions of ancient wisdom texts (Rani and Kumar, 2019; Dobson, 2021; Zhou, 2021). These techniques rely on careful implementation by a team skilled in both digital and historical analysis.

A multidisciplinary, multilinguistic team

The VERITRACE team, led by Prof. Dr Cornelis J. Schilt (see Project Lead), is as multifaceted as the VERITRACE project itself.

Dr Eszter Kovács, a Postdoctoral Fellow (Philosophy), completed her PhD in French literature under joint supervision at the University of Szeged and the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in 2008 and is pursuing a second PhD in philosophy, focussing on early modern female philosophers and metaphysical/scientific terminology. Dr Jeffrey Wolf, a Postdoctoral Fellow (Digital Humanities), obtained his PhD in the history of medicine from the University of Edinburgh and studied the philosophy and history of science at the University of California, Berkeley before that. He has also taught web development at Northwestern University. Doctoral student Nicolò Cantoni blends philosophy (University of Pavia) with screenwriting (Centro Italiano di Studi Superiori) and researches utopian thought and the interplay between philosophy, science and Abrahamic religions in the Renaissance and early modern era. Demetrios Paraschos, another doctoral student, specialises in Stoicism and Platonism, holding a BA in Philology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and an MA in Classics and Ancient Civilizations from Leiden University.

References

Cohen, M. (2009) ‘Narratology in the Archive of Literature’, Representations, 108, pp. 51–75.

Colleoni, E., Rozza, A. and Arvidson, A. (2014) ‘Echo Chamber or Public Sphere? Predicting Political Orientation and Measuring Political Homophily in Twitter Using Big Data’, Journal of Communication, 64, pp. 317–332.

Dobson, J.E. (2019) Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Dobson, J.E. (2021) ‘Interpretable Outputs: Criteria for Machine Learning in the Humanities’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 15(2). Available at: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/ vol/15/2/000555/000555.html (Accessed: 17 January 2024).

Foltz, P.W. (2011)’ Discourse Coherence and LSA’, in Landauer, T.K., McNamara, D.S., Dennis, S. and Kintsch, W. (eds.) Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 169–184.

Garin, E. (1994) Il ritorno dei filosofi antichi. Reprint. Napels: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici. Original work published 1984.

Hill, M.J. and Hengchen, S. (2019) ‘Quantifying the impact of dirty OCR on historical text analysis: Eighteenth Century Collections Online as a case study’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 34, pp. 825–843.

Imai, K. (2018) Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Karsdorp, F., Kestemont, M. and Riddell, A. (2021) Humanities Data Analysis: Case Studies with Python. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Kintsch, W., McNamara, D.S., Dennis, S. and Landauer, T.K. (2011) ‘LSA and Meaning: In Theory and Application’, in Landauer, T.K., McNamara, D.S., Dennis, S. and Kintsch, W. (eds.) Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 467–479.

Kurhekar, P., Nigam, S. and Pillai, S. (2021) ‘Automated Text and Tabular Data Extraction from Scanned Document Images’, in Sharma, N., Chakrabarti, A., Balas, V.E., and Bruckstein, A.M. (eds.) Data Management, Analytics and Innovation: Proceedings of ICDMAI 2021, Volume 1. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, pp. 169–182.

Lashari, I.A. and Wiil, U.K. (2016) ‘Monitoring Public Opinion by Measuring the Sentiment of Retweets on Twitter’, in Bernadas, C. and Minchella D. (eds.) Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Social Media. Reading: Academic Conferences and Publishing, pp. 153–161.

Leinkauf, T. (2017) ‘‘Prisca scientia’ versus ‘Prisca scientia’ versus ‘prisca sapientia’. Zwei Modelle des Umgangs mit der Tradition am Beispiel des Rückgriffs auf die Vorsokratik im Kontext der frühneuzeitlichen Debatte und der Ausbildung des Kontinuitätsmodell der ‘prisca sapientia’ bzw. ‘philosophia perennis’, Mediterranea. International Journal on the Transfer of Knowledge, 2, pp. 121–143.

Rani, S. and Kumar, P. (2019) ‘A sentiment analysis system for social media using machine learning techniques: Social enablement’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 34, pp. 569–581.

Ratna, A.A.P., Purnamasari, P.D., Adhi, B.A., Ekadiyanto, F.A., Salman, M., Mardiyah, M. and Winata,

D.J. (2017) ‘Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection System Using Latent Semantic Analysis and Learning Vector Quantization’, Algorithms, 10, 69. Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4893/10/2/69/ htm (Accessed: 17 January 2024).

Reid, D. (2019) ‘Distant Reading, “The Great Unread”, and 19th-Century British Conceptualizations of the Civilizing Mission: A Case Study’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, 15. Available at: http:// journals.openedition.org/jihi/435 (Accessed: 17 January 2024).

Schmidt-Biggemann, W. (2004) Philosophia perennis: Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought. Dordrecht: Springer.

Schmitt, C.B. (1966) ‘Perennial philosophy: from Agostino Steuco to Leibniz’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 27, pp. 505–532.

Soni, S., Klein, L. and Eisenstein J. (2021) ‘Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers.’ Journal of Cultural Analytics, 1, pp. 143.

Walker, D.P. (1972) The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Zhou, Z.-H. (2021) Machine Learning. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

Project summary

VERITRACE, or Traces de la Verité:
The Reappropriation of Ancient Wisdom in Early Modern Natural Philosophy.

Project summary

VERITRACE will enhance our understanding of the role of ancient wisdom writings in the development of early modern natural philosophy by employing state-of-the-art digital techniques on a large corpus of early modern texts. The project charts the spread of this discourse from Renaissance Italy to early modern Europe and identifies watershed moments in the reception of these ancient wisdom writings.

Project lead profile

Prof. Dr Cornelis J. Schilt is Associate Professor in History and Philosophy of Knowledge at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. He was educated in physics, astrophysics, and history and philosophy of science at Utrecht University, and holds a DPhil in History of Science from Oxford University. Previously, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford, and senior editor with the Newton Project. He has published extensively on Renaissance and early modern science and religion, with a particular focus on the life and writings of Isaac Newton, including Isaac Newton and the Study of Chronology: Prophecy, History, and Method (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). He is very interested in the application of computational methods to study past, present and future.

Project contacts

Prof. Dr Cornelis J. Schilt

Vrije Universiteit Brussel,
Department of History, Archaeology, Arts, Philosophy and Ethics (HARP),
Pleinlaan 2 B-1050 Brussels

+32 2 629 39 05

cschilt@vub.be

https://veritrace.eu

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101076836.