REJOINDER TO GILLESPIE, LINDBERG AND SHEA Peter Harrison Let me first thank my respondents for their thought-provoking contributions, and say how pleased I am to be in such illustrious company. I am also pleased that we seem to be in general agreement about the value of Butterfield’s contribution and the importance of retaining the category ‘the scientific revolution’, albeit with some caveats. William Shea provides a useful reminder of the importance for this revolution of such things as scientific instruments and the printing press. Indeed, Shea offers a gentle corrective to my somewhat intellectualized account of the changes that took place in the sciences of this period. Whereas I had pointed largely to conceptual revolutions and the reasons for them, he has rightly pointed out that material factors played a pivotal role in the production of the new forms of knowledge. Shea also highlights the importance of a new emphasis on the mastery of nature, to which I shall return at the end of this rejoinder. There are several other matters raised in the responses on which we might engage in profitable discussion. However, I shall restrict myself to two of the more important, raised in the main by David Lindberg and Charles Gillespie. These are, firstly, the issue of the putative separation of natural philosophy and mathematics in medieval science and, secondly, the question of whether concern with the early modern conception of ‘science’ is largely a matter of semantics. David Lindberg has made quite a strong statement disagreeing with my contention that natural philosophy and mathematics operated as two distinct disciplines until the seventeenth century. This criticism is pertinent to our present discussion insofar as it relates to an increasingly common view that what was distinctive (or ‘revolutionary’) about early modern physics was its mathematical character. This issue has been the