Download or read book French Botany in the Enlightenment written by R.L. Williams and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume completes a trilogy meant to be a commentary on the botanophilia that captured the literate public in 18th-century France. Enthusiastic public support for any governmental initiative likely to expand botanical knowledge was an expression of immense curiosity about the natural world beyond Europe. It amounted to a quest for universal knowledge that could benefit all mankind: useful knowledge that could improve the human condition in this life.
Download or read book Botanophilia in Eighteenth Century France written by R.L. Williams and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book describes the innovations that enabled botany, in the Eighteenth century, to emerge as an independent science, independent from medicine and herbalism. This encompassed the development of a reliable system for plant classification and the invention of a nomenclature that could be universally applied and understood. The key that enabled Linnaeus to devise his classification system was the discovery of the sexuality of plants. The book, which is intended for the educated general reader, proceeds to illustrate how many aspects of French life were permeated by this revolution in botany between about 1760 to 1815, a botanophilia sometimes inflated into botanomania. The reader should emerge with a clearer understanding of what the Enlightenment actually was in contrast to some popular second-hand ideas today.
Download or read book French Botany in the Enlightenment written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Visible Empire written by Daniela Bleichmar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.
Download or read book Science and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth century France written by Colm Kiernan and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Enlightenment and Science in Eighteenth century France written by Colm Kiernan and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.
Download or read book Radical Botany written by Natania Meeker and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Succeeds beautifully in discovering and entwining an entire tradition of speculative botany that will reshape plant studies and posthumanist theory.” —Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times Science Fiction & Technoculture Studies Book Prize Winner Radical Botany excavates a tradition in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Modernity, the book claims, is defined by the idea of all life as vegetal. Meeker and Szabari argue that the recognition of plants’ liveliness and animation, as a result of scientific discoveries from the seventeenth century to today, has mobilized speculative creation in fiction, cinema, and art. Plants complement and challenge notions of human life. Radical Botany traces the implications of the speculative mobilization of plants for feminism, queer studies, and posthumanist thought. If, as Michael Foucault has argued, the notion of the human was born at a particular historical moment and is now nearing its end, Radical Botany reveals that this origin and endpoint are deeply informed by vegetality as a form of pre- and posthuman subjectivity. The trajectory of speculative fiction which this book traces offers insights into the human relationship to animate matter and the technological mediations through which we enter into contact with the material world. Plants profoundly shape human experience, from early modern absolutist societies to late capitalism’s manipulations of life and the onset of climate change and attendant mass extinction. A major intervention in critical plant studies, Radical Botany reveals the centuries-long history by which science and the arts have combined to posit plants as the model for all animate life and thereby envision a different future for the cosmos.
Download or read book The French Collector written by Paul Gibbard and published by University of Western Australia Press. This book was released on 2023-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It is only with difficulty that I may describe for you the sensations I felt the first time I went ashore on an unknown coast. My whole being was filled with confused pleasure, everything around me sparked my curiosity - pebbles, shells washed up on the beach, plants. I collected all with wild enthusiasm...' The French botanist Théodore Leschenault (1773-1826) travelled with Nicolas Baudin's voyage of discovery to Australia in the years 1800 to 1803: his journal and letters vividly record his impressions of the plant life and animals he encountered, along with dramatic and unsettling meetings with Indigenous peoples. Shaped as much by Enlightenment ideas as by his painful experience of the French Revolution, Leschenault weaves through his travelogue reflections on topics ranging from slavery and colonialism to plant systematics and environmental damage. Long thought lost, Leschenault's original manuscript journal was rediscovered only in 2016. The French Collector offers the first complete English translation of this journal (including two previously unknown chapters recounting his experiences in Le Havre, Tenerife and Mauritius) and various letters relating to the expedition. This edition also provides extensive explanatory notes and an introduction which details Leschenault's early life in Burgundy and imprisonment during the Revolution and sets his activities against the backdrop of French science and exploration in the period.
Download or read book The Unfinished Enlightenment written by Joanna Stalnaker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Unfinished Enlightenment, Joanna Stalnaker offers a fresh look at the French Enlightenment by focusing on the era's vast, collective attempt to compile an ongoing and provisional description of the world. Through a series of readings of natural histories, encyclopedias, scientific poetry, and urban topographies, the book uncovers the deep epistemological and literary tensions that made description a central preoccupation for authors such as Buffon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Diderot, Delille, and Mercier. Stalnaker argues that Enlightenment description was the site of competing truth claims that would eventually resolve themselves in the modern polarity between literature and science. By the mid-nineteenth century, the now habitual association between description and the novel was already firmly anchored in French culture, but just a century earlier, in the diverse network of articles on description in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and in the works derived from it, there was not a single mention of the novel. Instead, we find articles on description in natural history, geometry, belles-lettres, and poetry. Stalnaker builds on the premise that the tendency to view description as the inevitable (and subservient) partner of narration—rather than as a universal tool for making sense of knowledge in all fields—has obscured the central place of description in Enlightenment discourse. As a result, we have neglected some of the most original and experimental works of the eighteenth century.
Download or read book Cultivating Commerce written by Sarah Easterby-Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new social history of botany in Britain and France, 1760-1815, demonstrating the significance of commerce, horticulture and amateur scholarship.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment written by Daniel Brewer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing essays by leading scholars representing a wide range of disciplines, this Companion offers new perspectives on the French Enlightenment. Clearly organized and easy to use, the volume provides a comprehensive overview of a period that marks the beginning of modern intellectual culture and political life.
Download or read book Science in the Enlightenment written by William E. Burns and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-11-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first introductory A–Z resource on the dynamic achievements in science from the late 1600s to 1820, including the great minds behind the developments and science's new cultural role. Though the Enlightenment was a time of amazing scientific change, science is an often-neglected facet of that time. Now, Science in the Enlightenment redresses the balance by covering all the major scientific developments in the period between Newton's discoveries in the late 1600s to the early 1800s of Michael Faraday and Georges Cuvier. Over 200 A-Z entries explore a range of disciplines, including astronomy and medicine, scientists such as Sir Humphry Davy and Benjamin Franklin, and instruments such as the telescope and calorimeter. Emphasis is placed on the role of women, and proper attention is given to the shifts in the worldview brought about by Newtonian physics, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier's "chemical revolution," and universal systems of botanical and zoological classification. Moreover, the social impact of science is explored, as well as the ways in which the work of scientists influenced the thinking of philosophers such as Voltaire and Denis Diderot and the writers and artists of the romantic movement.
Download or read book Minerva s French Sisters written by Nina Rattner Gelbart and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating collective biography of six female scientists in eighteenth-century France, whose stories were largely written out of history This book presents the stories of six intrepid Frenchwomen of science in the Enlightenment whose accomplishments—though celebrated in their lifetimes--have been generally omitted from subsequent studies of their period: mathematician and philosopher Elisabeth Ferrand, astronomer Nicole Reine Lepaute, field naturalist Jeanne Barret, garden botanist and illustrator Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, anatomist and inventor Marie-Marguerite Biheron, and chemist Geneviève d’Arconville. By adjusting our lens, we can find them. In a society where science was not yet an established profession for men, much less women, these six audacious and inspiring figures made their mark on their respective fields of science and on Enlightenment society, as they defied gender expectations and conventional norms. Their boldness and contributions to science were appreciated by such luminaries as Franklin, the philosophes, and many European monarchs. The book is written in an unorthodox style to match the women’s breaking of boundaries.
Download or read book Botany sexuality and women s writing 1760 1830 written by Sam George and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating study, Samantha George explores the cultivation of the female mind and the feminised discourse of botanical literature in eighteenth-century Britain. In particular, she discusses British women’s engagement with the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and his unsettling discovery of plant sexuality. Previously ignored primary texts of an extraordinary nature are rescued from obscurity and assigned a proper place in the histories of science, eighteenth-century literature, and women’s writing. The result is groundbreaking: the author explores nationality and sexuality debates in relation to botany and charts the appearance of a new literary stereotype, the sexually precocious female botanist. She uncovers an anonymous poem on Linnaean botany, handwritten in the eighteenth century, and subsequently traces the development of a new genre of women’s writing — the botanical poem with scientific notes. The book is indispensable reading for all scholars of the eighteenth century, especially those interested in Romantic women’s writing, or the relationship between literature and science.
Download or read book The Letters of Dominique Chaix Botanist Cur written by R.L. Williams and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: etween 1772 and 1799, Dominique Chaix wrote 170 letters to Dominique Villars. B None of the letters that Vtllars wrote in response have survived, and there is evidence to indicate that Chaix simply did not retain incoming letters once they had served their informative purpose. Villars, blessed with more ample facilities, kept incoming letters; and those from Chaix are now preserved in the Bibliotheque Municipale de Grenoble in three volumes under the number RI0073. A transcription of them for public use was made earlier in this century under the supervision of Georges de Manteyer [Georges-Barthelemy-Marie Pinet de Manteyer] when he was archivist of the Department of Hautes-Alpes. I am gready indebted to Mme Marie-Fran~ise Bois-Delatte, Conservateur des Fonds Dauphinoise at the Bibliotheque Municipale d'Etude et d'lnformation in Grenoble, not merely for making these letters available to me, but for her eagerness to see someone take an interest in Dauphinois botanists. I met a similar friendly interest at the Archives du Departement des Hautes-Alpes in Gap. I thank M. Pierre-Yves Playoust, Directeur des Services, and members of his archival staff for the cordial assistance in my search for materials documenting the career of the abbe Chaix. I am also obligated to the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for providing me photocopies of Villars' letters in their Allioni collection. They relate to the composition of a flora for Dauphine and are revealing of Villars' character.
Download or read book In the Herbarium written by Maura C. Flannery and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How herbaria illuminate the past and future of plant science Collections of preserved plant specimens, known as herbaria, have existed for nearly five centuries. These pressed and labeled plants have been essential resources for scientists, allowing them to describe and differentiate species and to document and research plant changes and biodiversity over time--including changes related to climate. Maura C. Flannery tells the history of herbaria, from the earliest collections belonging to such advocates of the technique as sixteenth-century botanist Luca Ghini, to the collections of poets, politicians, and painters, and to the digitization of these precious specimens today. She charts the growth of herbaria during the Age of Exploration, the development of classification systems to organize the collections, and herbaria's indispensable role in the tracking of climate change and molecular evolution. Herbaria also have historical, aesthetic, cultural, and ethnobotanical value--these preserved plants can be linked to the Indigenous peoples who used them, the collectors who sought them out, and the scientists who studied them. This book testifies to the central role of herbaria in the history of plant study and to their continued value, not only to biologists but to entirely new users as well: gardeners, artists, students, and citizen-scientists.
Download or read book James Sowerby written by Paul Henderson and published by Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Sowerby (1757-1822) was an outstanding artist and natural historian, renowned for his discoveries and prodigious output of beautiful, scientific books of plants, fungi, animals, fossils and minerals, all at a key historical time; the age of Enlightenment in Great Britain.Beautifully illustrated with artwork and letter and manuscript extracts, this first full biography of Sowerby is a fascinating artistic and historical account, which extends beyond that of one key player.
