0 INTRODUCTION

4. RHETORIC AND THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IN THE EModE PERIOD
their method of formation. Furthermore, they are removed from everyday discourse,
restricting their use mainly to specialized contexts. It seems then that the properties of
nominalizations make them perfect candidates to fit in scientific discourse. However,
since science has changed over history, it is interesting to consider in greater depth how
science was understood during the EModE period. This will be done in what follows.
4.2. Science and the implications of the “scientific revolution”
During the EModE period, science ceased to be restricted to the knowledge contained in
texts written in Latin by scholars and passed down to their students in lectures had existed
as happened in the ME period (Eamon 1994: 93). Until 1600, there was a sharp
distinction between liberal and mechanical arts. The former were considered to be
suitable for educated men whereas the latter were only for lower-class people (Zilsel
1941: 26). Thus, medieval “intellectuals” were divided into scholars, humanists, and
artisans such as craftsmen and engineers. Scholars were academically trained, and
scholasticism and theology still prevailed at universities. However, the methods employed
by scholars would be far from being considered scientific nowadays because their
contempt for manual labour prevented them from experimenting. In other words, both
university scholars and humanists showed the social prejudices of the higher ranks of
society. They scorned uneducated members of society and used only Latin in their
writings. Craftsmen and engineers’ interests, on the other hand, were very different from
those of scholars and humanists. As they were concerned about causality and physical
laws, they made experiments and relied on quantitative methods to study them. However,
most of the craftsmen only had a practical education obtained from their masters in the
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