Nothing is considered more natural than the connection between Isaac Newton s science and the modernity that came into being during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Terms like Newtonianism are routinely taken as synonyms for Enlightenment and modern thought, yet the particular conjunction of these terms has a history full of accidents and contingencies. Modern physics, for example, was not the determined result of the rational unfolding of Newton s scientific work in the eighteenth century, nor was the Enlightenment the natural and inevitable consequence of Newton s eighteenth-century...