The notion of Catholic Copernicanism in the aftermath of the Galileo affair remains something of an apparent oxymoron. It has been suggested that after the Galileo affair of 1633, cosmological truth went underground in the Catholic world for many decades, thus creating an asymmetry in the role played by Catholic and Protestant Europe in the so-called Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. This story remains an important reference for the history of science in the Spanish Netherlands. Living in a region that the Tridentine Church approached as a northern bulwark against the Reformation, we are told that natural philosophers suffered increasing control by ‘the hair-splitting orthodoxy of the Counter-Reformation’. Likewise, the Galileo affair is held to have shaped new doctrinal conformism, under which cosmological reflection became confined to private rooms and correspondence with intimate friends. A recent revisionist volume on seventeenth-century Southern Netherlandish science has done little to challenge this view. On the one hand, it acknowledges the centrality of the dissemination of post-Tridentine Catholicism to local Habsburg and Spanish rulers, and of a culture of publicly demonstrating ‘a radical form of princely piety’. On the other hand, it dismisses this as irrelevant, possibly even detrimental, to Southern Netherlandish science: ‘This aim, however, certainly did not call for heterodox or novel doctrines, nor did it have any particular connection with scientific research.’

Interestingly, the claim that Roman orthodoxy determined Catholic attitudes to Copernicanism after 1633 does not seem to apply to France. As Lisa Sarasohn pointed out in 1988, growing state control over religious affairs and individual theological or epistemological convictions were more decisive in shaping French attitudes to Copernicanism than Roman disciplinary power.