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The Thomistic Institute

Nicolaus Steno and the Intersection of Disciplines in the Scientific Revolution – Prof. Nuno Castel-Branco

The Thomistic Institute

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8729 Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Prof. Nuno Castel-Branco examines Nicolaus Steno’s innovative use of focused interdisciplinarity during the Scientific Revolution, tracing Steno’s groundbreaking shift from anatomy to geology and theology by integrating mathematics, mechanical philosophy, and collaboration across European scientific circles.


This lecture was given on July 17th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.


For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.


About the Speakers:


Prof. Nuno Castel-Branco is a historian of early modern culture and science. He is especially interested in the social and intellectual interactions between disciplines such as physics, medicine, and theology in early modern Europe and its global expansion. He is currently concluding a book about the emergence of the new sciences in seventeenth-century Europe through the fascinating career of Nicolaus Steno. He argues that Steno’s greatest innovation was introducing methods and ideas from various disciplines, especially mathematics, and chymistry, into anatomy. Undergirding this variety of approaches was Steno’s ability to forge friendships with scholars, princes, artisans, and women. I use Steno’s career to uncover novel interactions between science and religion. His second project aims to improve our historical knowledge of how mathematicians, anatomists, and patrons cooperated in the early 1600s. This project builds upon his previous research on early modern Italy and the Iberian oceanic expansion. He is also interested in science and religion, for which he currently co-organizing two workshops at the Max Planck in Berlin.


Keywords: Anatomy, Epicureanism, Euclidean Geometry, Fossils, Galileo, Geology, Jesuit Mathematicians, Mathematics, Steno’s Laws of Stratigraphy, Theology

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

0:06.2

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

0:13.1

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

0:19.5

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

0:24.9

So let's start and let's go to April 1667.

0:32.8

So April 1667 is about 20 years after Galileo had died.

0:39.4

And it was about this time that Newton was making his important discoveries,

0:43.3

which would only be published 20 years later.

0:45.6

So that you situate yourselves, you know, where we are in history.

0:49.7

And in that month, April 67,

0:53.3

Nicholas Steno published a book where he argued, arguably for the first time, that stones found in drylands, which we call fossils today, were actually teeth of shark.

1:07.7

Now, this discovery triggered what became his famous geological career, leading him to claim not only that the Earth has a history, but also that history can be known through a series of principles, today known as Steno's Laws of Stratigraphy, and because of, he is known in certain circles as the founder of modern geology.

1:33.4

Now, what is interesting about this book is that if you go to the front cover, you know, the title of the book has nothing to do with geology.

1:42.7

It is called a sample of the elements of myology.

1:47.0

So, myology being the study of muscles. He was an anatomist. He was writing a book about anatomy.

1:53.2

But again, if you flip through most of the pages of this book, you won't find much that

1:58.0

look like an anatomy book, and instead you find this.

2:01.6

And you see that it is a book filled with lemmas, definitions, corollaries, and many, many diagrams.

2:07.6

So it looks like Euclid's elements in many ways.

2:11.6

And not only that, it was also in this book that he made one of his most important anatomical discoveries,

2:18.3

namely saying that women had ovaries.

2:22.3

Until this time, many people called what we call today ovaries as female testicles.

...

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