Science et théologie dans les débats savants de la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle

The second half of the 17th century witnessed a veritable revolution in communication in the Republic of Letters, with the appearance of the first scientific periodicals, the earliest and most important of which were established in 1665: the Journal des Savants and the Philosophical Transactions. Making use of the book reviews published in these two great scholarly journals, sources still largely underexploited, this book studies the relations between science and theology, and more precisely the narrative of Genesis, in the period leading up to the Enlightenment. Juxtaposition of the two journals, connected respectively to the French Académie royale des sciences and the Royal Society, permits a comparison between France, a Roman Catholic country, and England, a Protestant one, which changes the face of conventional wisdom. The pages devoted to the first decades of the Philosophical Transactions provide an original and welcome study which fills a gap on the subject. The problems raised by the exegesis of certain verses of Genesis evoke a broad range of theological, philosophical, scientific and sometimes even properly political questions. In book reviews, the confrontation between scientific theories and the narrative of Genesis most often discloses little-known works and takes us off the beaten track. Indeed, what posterity has retained as essential has not always received a wide circulation among contemporaries, whereas forgotten authors once found in their own time a large audience through the intermediary of scholarly periodicals. After a systematic inspection, the author has compiled a database on the scientific and theological content of the two scholarly journals. This has been conveniently placed at the reader’s disposal in the form of a CD-ROM attached to the volume.