An anatomy of a Religio-Scientific Polemic: the Wilkins-Ross Controversy Revisited

Abstract

The Wilkins-Ross controversy has long been recognized as crucial for the diffusion of Copernicanism in England, as well as for the waning of Biblicism as an imposing authority in scientific matters. However, since scholars to date have found it sufficient to harvest the highpoints of the debate, certain salient features of the affair remain unexplored. This article will seek to throw these features into sharp relief through an exhaustive scrutiny of the religious part of the dispute. This should not only shed light on the intricacies of religio-scientific polemic during the first half of the seventeenth century, but reveal a hitherto unrecognized guiding principle behind Wilkins's ideological and rhetorical strategies. And in view of the fact that the Discovery and the Discourse were the first, and only, apologias for Copernicanism to be published in England, it is clear that Wilkins's shrewd stratagem rendered unnecessary any additional defense of the new astronomy.

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