Gravitas, Renaissance Concept of

Traditionally, gravitas denotes the inner source of movement towards the center of the universe. In the mediaeval Latin tradition, the chief problem was to fit this notion within a coherent Aristotelian framework. As philosophers in the Renaissance begin to breach the constraints of Aristotelian natural philosophy, we see diverse attempts to conceive gravitas as a force also responsible for natural phenomena such as tides and free fall acceleration. The coexistence in the Renaissance of different Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian concepts of gravitas makes the latter a polysemic scientific term, whose meaning can be determined only after careful examination of the context in which it was employed.