down a path of empiricism. This calling of the natural philosophers (later to be named scientists) of a return to classical research methods based on observation, experience and rational theorization would allow for a great shift in European scientific thought. Since the Early Middle Ages (sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages), Aristotle had been the backbone of the metanarrative of the system of Western academic knowledge officially endorsed by the Catholic Church. All philosophical discourse regarding nature (as well as its metanarrative) was held within the parameters of Catholic-approved Aristotelianism as set by Thomas Aquinas and other Doctors of the Church, which sought to harmoniously unite the totalizing aspect of God with a human understanding of nature that didn't contradict Church doctrine and was assumed to be perfect and complete. Aristotle's theories on the natural order were further substantiated by Ptolemy's geography and astronomy. This Aristotelian-Ptolemaic paradigm of scientific knowledge, particularly physics and astronomy, lasted unchallenged until the transformations in Western thought brought by the Renaissance, at which point the 16th and 17th centuries saw the union of a Copernican-Cartesian system of physics and astronomy open up a hefty first critique which was then completed by the union of the Galilean-Newtonian system of nature. The same transformation occurred in other fields of scientific knowledge, such as the medical theories of Galen and Avicenna becoming—under the authority of the Church—the mainstay of the medieval physician's university curriculum from the 11th century onwards, and the work of Renaissance men like Janus Cornarius and Michael Servetus, who questioned and challenged the established order, bringing about the fierce reaction of the defenders of medieval modernity (who burned Servetus's books in bonfires and had Cornarius' complete oeuvre put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, an index of texts prohibited by the Catholic Church. This debate in natural philosophy played a part in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. In 17th century France, the leaders of the Moderns, like Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, were for medieval scholasticism, while the Ancients party supported the new discoveries. Thus, Boileau, Racine, and François Bernier brilliantly defended, in an Arrêt Burlesque (a work of literary satire), the rebirth (in French: renaissance) of philosophy and science, and ridiculed all those who feared changes in the status quo of modernity. According to Claude Brossette, this Arrêt destroyed a project of the University of Paris to ban Cartesianism. Boileau also wrote in defense