the Protestant Reformation during the mid-16th to mid-17th centuries. The Counter-Reformation was a comprehensive effort, involving ecclesiastical or structural reforms as well as a political dimension and spiritual movements. Such reforms included the foundation of seminaries for the proper training of priests in the spiritual life and the theological traditions of the Church, the reform of religious life by returning orders to their spiritual foundations and new spiritual movements focusing on the devotional life and a personal relationship with Christ, including the Spanish mystics and the French school of spirituality. It also involved political activities that included the Roman Inquisition. New religious orders were a fundamental part of this trend. Orders such as the Capuchins, Ursulines, Theatines, Discalced Carmelites, the Barnabites, and especially the Jesuits strengthened rural parishes, improved popular piety, helped to curb corruption within the church and set examples that would be a strong impetus for Catholic renewal. Scientific Revolution The Great Divergence in scientific discovery, technological innovation, and economic development began in the early modern period as the pace of change in Western countries increased significantly compared to the rest of the world. During the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17 century, empiricism and modern science replaced older methods of studying nature – European research methods that mainly involved reading texts by ancient writers. In ancient times, natural philosophers made observations of nature and came up with explanations, but never conducted experiments to test those explanations, because creating an artificial situation was considered an invalid way to discover the rules of nature. The scientific method of testing hypotheses was first recorded in the 10th century by Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), inspiring Roger Bacon to begin experimenting in 13th century Europe. By the time of the Revolution, these methods resulted in accumulation of knowledge that overturned ideas inherited from Ancient Greece (primarily Aristotelian physics, which includes the modern domains of physics, chemistry, biology) through the Middle Ages and Islamic scholars. Major changes of the Scientific Revolution and the 18th century included: The ancient geocentric model of the solar system (the planets circle the Earth) was replaced by the heliocentric model (Earth and other planets circle the Sun). Known as the Copernican Revolution, the 1543 publication of Nicolaus Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which was influenced by Mu'ayyad al-Din al-Urdi and was based on detailed astronomical observations) is often used to mark