Download or read book European Collections of Scientific Instruments 1550 1750 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-02-28 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collections of scientific instruments originated as part of Renaissance collections of 'naturalia' and 'artificialia'. Surveying and astronomical instruments were common in such collections, their role being to impress visitors by displaying the power that a ruler acquired through the control of nature. This book offers selected studies of notable European collections of scientific instruments from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. These studies also present the work of important instrument makers of the time, and their relations with patrons and rulers. A final section focuses on the role of modern museums and collectors in saving this scientific heritage from dispersal. The result is a contemporary perspective on the formation of the most important museums of the history of science. Contributors include: Paolo Brenni, Filippo Camerota, Gloria Clifton, Wolfram Dolz, Sven Dupré, Karsten Gaulke, Sven Hauschke, Michael Korey, Mara Miniati, Tatiana M. Moisseeva, Peter Plaßmeyer, Klaus Schillinger, Giorgio Strano, Koenraad Van Cleempoel, and Ewa Wyka. Scientific Instruments and Collections, 1

Download or read book European Collections of Scientific Instruments 1550 1750 written by Giorgio Strano and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-01-26 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These selected studies on sixteenth and eighteenth centuries European collections of scientific instruments, which were part of the princely ‘wunderkammern’, delineate an up-to-date-panorama about the formation of the most important museums of the history of science.

Download or read book Early Scientific Instruments written by Anthony John Turner and published by Philip Wilson Publishers, Limited. This book was released on 1987 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book New Approaches to Naples c 1500 c 1800 written by Helen Hills and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern Naples has been characterized as a marginal, wild and exotic place on the fringes of the European world, and as such an appropriate target of attempts, by Catholic missionaries and others, to ’civilize’ the city. Historiographically bypassed in favour of Venice, Florence and Rome, Naples is frequently seen as emblematic of the cultural and political decline in the Italian peninsula and as epitomizing the problems of southern Italy. Yet, as this volume makes plain, such views blind us to some of its most extraordinary qualities, and limit our understanding, not only of one of the world's great capital cities, but also of the wider social, cultural and political dynamics of early modern Europe. As the centre of Spanish colonial power within Europe during the vicerealty, and with a population second only to Paris in early modern Europe, Naples is a city that deserves serious study. Further, as a Habsburg dominion, it offers vital points of comparison with non-European sites which were subject to European colonialism. While European colonization outside Europe has received intense scholarly attention, its cultural impact and representation within Europe remain under-explored. Too much has been taken for granted. Too few questions have been posed. In the sphere of the visual arts, investigation reveals that Neapolitan urbanism, architecture, painting and sculpture were of the highest quality during this period, while differing significantly from those of other Italian cities. For long ignored or treated as the subaltern sister of Rome, this urban treasure house is only now receiving the attention from scholars that it has so long deserved. This volume addresses the central paradoxes operating in early modern Italian scholarship. It seeks to illuminate both the historiographical pressures that have marginalized Naples and to showcase important new developments in Neapolitan cultural history and art history. Those developments showcased here include bot

Download or read book A Bridge to the Sky written by Glaire Anderson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-25 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Bridge to the Sky explores the close connections between science, arts, and visual culture as they developed in the medieval Islamic lands. It presents a significant study of the career of 'Abbas Ibn Firnas, (d. 887), the most celebrated 'scientist' and polymath of early Islamic Spain, best known for conducting an experiment that has been celebrated as a milestone in the history of human flight.

Download or read book Janello Torriani and the Spanish Empire written by Cristiano Zanetti and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Janello Torriani, known in the Spanish-speaking world as Juanelo Turriano (Cremona, Italy ca. 1500 – Toledo, Spain 1585), is the greatest among Renaissance inventors and constructors of machines. Contemporary literates and mathematicians celebrated Janello Torriani and his creations in their writings. It is striking how such fame turned into nearly complete oblivion, leaving only a few clues of a blurred and distorted memory dispersed here and there. This book wishes to show the central role that artisans formed in the Vitruvian tradition played in demonstrating through practical mathematics an increasing and positive control over Nature, a step rooted in humanist culture and foundational for the understanding of those historical processes known as the Scientific and the Industrial Revolutions.

Download or read book Translating Early Modern Science written by Sietske Fransen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translating Early Modern Science explores the essential role translators played in a time when the scientific community used Latin and vernacular European languages side-by-side. This interdisciplinary volume illustrates how translators were mediators, agents, and interpreters of scientific knowledge.

Download or read book Ingenuity in the Making written by Richard J. Oosterhoff and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ingenuity in the Making explores the myriad ways in which ingenuity shaped the experience and conceptualization of materials and their manipulation in early modern Europe. Contributions range widely across the arts and sciences, examining objects and texts, professions and performances, concepts and practices. The book considers subjects such as spirited matter, the conceits of nature, and crafty devices, investigating the ways in which ingenuity acted in and upon the material world through skill and technique. Contributors ask how ingenuity informed the “maker’s knowledge” tradition, where the perilous borderline between the genius of invention and disingenuous fraud was drawn, charting the ambitions of material ingenuity in a rapidly globalizing world.

Download or read book The Astronomical Tables of Giovanni Bianchini written by José Chabás and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-05-06 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Alfonsine Tables became the main computing tool for astronomers for about 250 years, from their compilation in Toledo ca. 1272 to the edition in 1551 of new tables based on Copernicus’s astronomical models. It consisted of a set of astronomical tables which, over time, was presented in many different formats. Giovanni Bianchini (d. after 1469), an astronomer active in Ferrara, Italy, was among the few scholars of that extended period to compile a coherent and insightful set based on the Alfonsine Tables. His tables, described and analyzed here for the first time, played a remarkable role in the transmission of the Alfonsine Tables and in their transition from manuscript to print. Medieval and Early Modern Science, 10

Download or read book Creating Shapes in Civil and Naval Architecture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The design, construction and verification of complex two- and three-dimensional shapes in architecture and ship geometry have always been a particularly demanding part of the art of engineering. Before science-based structural design and analysis were applied in the construction industries, i.e., before 1800, the task of conceiving, documenting and fabricating such shapes constituted the most significant interface between practitioner's knowledge and learned knowledge, above all in geometry. The history of shape development in these two disciplines therefore promises especially valuable insights into the knowledge history of shape creation. This volume is a collection of contributions by outstanding scholars in their fields of study, archaeology, history of architecture and ship design, in classic antiquity, the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The volume presents a comparative knowledge history in these two distinct branches of construction engineering.

Download or read book Copernicus and the Aristotelian Tradition written by André Goddu and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking into account the most important results of the scholarly literature since 1973 and the best Polish scholarship of the past century, this is the first comprehensive study of Copernicus's achievement in English that examines Copernicus's path to heliocentrism from the perspective of late medieval philosophy, the Renaissance recovery of ancient literature and science, and early-modern editions of books that Copernicus used. The principal goals are to explain his commitment to the existence of celestial spheres, and the logical foundations for his views about hypotheses. In doing so, the work elucidates the logical and philosophical background that contributed to his accomplishments, and explains the limitations of his achievement. Medieval and Early Modern Science, 12

Download or read book Tycho Brahe and the Measure of the Heavens written by John Robert Christianson and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-03-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Danish aristocrat and astronomer Tycho Brahe personified the inventive vitality of Renaissance life in the sixteenth century. Brahe lost his nose in a student duel, wrote Latin poetry, and built one of the most astonishing villas of the late Renaissance, while virtually inventing team research and establishing the fundamental rules of empirical science. His observatory at Uraniborg functioned as a satellite to Hamlet’s castle of Kronborg until Tycho abandoned it to end his days at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. This illustrated biography presents a new and dynamic view of Tycho’s life, reassessing his gradual separation of astrology from astronomy and his key relationships with Johannes Kepler, his sister Sophie, and his kinsmen at the court of King Frederick II.

Download or read book Panaceia s Daughters written by Alisha Rankin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Panaceia’s Daughters provides the first book-length study of noblewomen’s healing activities in early modern Europe. Drawing on rich archival sources, Alisha Rankin demonstrates that numerous German noblewomen were deeply involved in making medicines and recommending them to patients, and many gained widespread fame for their remedies. Turning a common historical argument on its head, Rankin maintains that noblewomen’s pharmacy came to prominence not in spite of their gender but because of it. Rankin demonstrates the ways in which noblewomen’s pharmacy was bound up in notions of charity, class, religion, and household roles, as well as in expanding networks of knowledge and early forms of scientific experimentation. The opening chapters place noblewomen’s healing within the context of cultural exchange, experiential knowledge, and the widespread search for medicinal recipes in early modern Europe. Case studies of renowned healers Dorothea of Mansfeld and Anna of Saxony then demonstrate the value their pharmacy held in their respective roles as elderly widow and royal consort, while a study of the long-suffering Duchess Elisabeth of Rochlitz emphasizes the importance of experiential knowledge and medicinal remedies to the patient’s experience of illness.

Download or read book Inside the Stargazer s Palace written by Violet Moller and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-06-13 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enter the mysterious world of sixteenth-century science, where astronomers and alchemists shared laboratories 'A scintillating journey into a world where discoveries rip through doctrine like meteors. There is magic in these pages.' Daisy Dunn, author of The Missing Thread In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus declared the earth revolved around the Sun, overturning centuries of scholastic presumption. A new age was coming into view – one guided by observation, technology and logic. But omens and elixirs did not disappear from the sixteenth-century laboratory. Charms and potions could still be found nestled between glistening brass instruments and leather-bound tomes. The line between the natural and supernatural remained porous, yet to be defined. From the icy Danish observatory of Tycho Brahe, to the smoky, sulphur-stained workshop of John Dee, Violet Moller tours the intellectual heart of early European science. Exploring its rich, multidisciplinary culture, Inside the Stargazer’s Palace reveals a dazzling forgotten world, where all knowledge, no matter how arcane, could be pursued in good faith.

Download or read book Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society written by Tina Skouen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-11-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Royal Society’s establishment in 1660 signaled a new beginning for the rhetoric of science, mainly because the organization’s founders advocated a modern plain style for scientific communication. Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society aims to initiate fresh debates about this watershed event in the history of rhetoric and science. In the last twenty years, scholars in numerous disciplines have produced significant work, ranging from theoretical essays to case studies of founding members such as Wilkins, Hooke and Boyle. This is the first book to collect in one volume the key contributions. The newly written introduction by editors Skouen and Stark places the reprinted essays into perspective by evaluating the Society’s pioneering role in shaping modern scholarly communication.

Download or read book Manipulating the Sun written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume puts two biblical miracles - the Sun reversing its course in II Kings 20:8-11/Isaiah 38:8 (Horologium Ahaz) and the Sun standing still in Joshua 10:12 -, in the early modern period centre stage. We pay special attention to the development of related imagery, their role as anti-Copernican arguments (in text and image), their reception, their treatment in the mathematical sciences, and their various cultural layers, with a focus on the history of art and the history of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The material discussed spreads from rather prosaic mathematical reflections to highly appealing visual representations of the two miracles.

Download or read book The Early Modern Global South in Print written by Sandra Young and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern geographers and compilers of travel narratives drew on a lexicon derived from cartography’s seemingly unchanging coordinates to explain human diversity. Sandra Young’s inquiry into the partisan knowledge practices of early modernity brings to light the emergence of the early modern global south. Young proposes a new set of terms with which to understand the racialized imaginary inscribed in the scholarly texts that presented the peoples of the south as objects of an inquiring gaze from the north. Through maps, images and even textual formatting, equivalences were established between ’new’ worlds, many of them long known to European explorers, she argues, in terms that made explicit the divide between ’north’ and ’south.’ This book takes seriously the role of form in shaping meaning and its ideological consequences. Young examines, in turn, the representational methodologies, or ’artes,’ deployed in mapping the ’whole’ world: illustrating, creating charts for navigation, noting down observations, collecting and cataloguing curiosities, reporting events, formatting materials, and editing and translating old sources. By tracking these methodologies in the lines of beauty and evidence on the page, we can see how early modern producers of knowledge were able to attribute alterity to the ’southern climes’ of an increasingly complex world, while securing their own place within it.