[Scientific knowledge]

What is now called science did not exist at the time of the Renaissance; for example, the connection with magic and the occult continued to be inseparable from scientific practices. It is extremely difficult to identify a general coherence among the methods used in the widely different cultural practices that tried to understand and master the world of nature, and the notion of a scientific revolution in the period 1470-1560 appears as an artificial creation. The only real certainty is the humanist project of a restoration of ancient knowledge, which laid the epistemological foundations of the early Renaissance, notably the emerging experimental approach in connection with the impetus theory. Although physics seemed to embrace the new approach, scholars remained perplexed in the face of breakthroughs in botany, mineralogy, and medicine that destroyed their certainties.