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Well known as an accomplished interpreter of the cosmologies and epistemologies of Descartes and Francis Bacon, Stephen Gaukroger has conceived an ambitious project requiring no fewer than five projected volumes, of which The Emergence of a Scientific Culture is the first. His overarching goal is to document and explain the processes that produced one of the distinctive features of modern Western culture : not merely the primacy of the sciences as a source of knowledge but, more specifically, the assimilation of all cognitive values to the scientific. To make headway it is necessary first to understand how an incipient and heterogeneous scientific culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was consolidated into an enduring body of enquiry with goals, methods and institutions all its own. Cross-cultural comparisons do not dominate the book, but in a revealing preface Gaukroger explains that they played a heuristic role in his appreciation of the contingency and precariousness of scientific values, the contrast with China in particular persuading him that the legitimation of controversial reconstructions of natural philosophy in Europe probably had a lot to do with the Christian religion. Gaukroger is not in the business of diminishing the achievements of earlier scientific movements, in China and Arabia, but their 'boom-and-bust' character does invite an investigation into the peculiarities of intellectual life in Western Europe that engendered distinctive and resilient forms of legitimation. The thesis of his substantial and impressive book is that Christianity indeed played a major role, not, as often proposed, through the dissociation of science from religious concerns, but through a reconstituted partnership...