"It comes naturally to a modern to suppose that the new astronomy made a profound impression on men's minds; but when we look into the literary texts we find it rarely mentioned. The idea that it produced a shock comparable to that which Darwin gave to the Victorians or Freud to our own age is certainly mistaken. Nor are the reasons hard to find. In the first place it must be remembered that the De Revolutionibus (1543) of Copernicus put forward only a theory: verification, at the hands of Kepler and Galileo, came only at the end of our period, and general acceptance later still. And secondly, humanism, dominant in mid-sixteenthcentury England, tended to be on the whole indifferent, if not hostile, to science. It is an English humanist, a classical pedant, who in Bruno's Cena delle Cenere (1584) still thinks that Copernicus can be dismissed with an airy gibe from the Adagia of Erasmus. Even where the new theory was accepted, the change which it produced was not of such e...