Download or read book Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe written by David Beck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we are used to clear divisions between science and the arts. But early modern thinkers had no such distinctions, with ‘knowledge’ being a truly interdisciplinary pursuit. Each chapter of this collection presents a case study from a different area of knowledge.
Download or read book Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe written by David Beck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we are used to clear divisions between science and the arts. But early modern thinkers had no such distinctions, with ‘knowledge’ being a truly interdisciplinary pursuit. Each chapter of this collection presents a case study from a different area of knowledge.
Download or read book Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe written by David Beck and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we are used to clear divisions between science and the arts. But early modern thinkers had no such distinctions, with 'knowledge' being a truly interdisciplinary pursuit. Each chapter of this collection presents a case study from a different area of knowledge.
Download or read book Inventing the Indigenous written by Alix Cooper and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-19 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on cultural, social, and environmental history, as well as the histories of science and medicine, this book shows how, amidst a growing reaction against exotic imports -- whether medieval spices like cinnamon or new American arrivals like chocolate and tobacco -- early modern Europeans began to take inventory of their own "indigenous" natural worlds.
Download or read book The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan written by Federico Marcon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century Japan saw the creation, development, and apparent disappearance of the field of natural history, or "honzogaku." Federico Marcon traces the changing views of the natural environment that accompanied its development by surveying the ideas and practices deployed by "honzogaku" practitioners and by vividly reconstructing the social forces that affected them. These include a burgeoning publishing industry, increased circulation of ideas and books, the spread of literacy, processes of institutionalization in schools and academies, systems of patronage, and networks of cultural circles, all of which helped to shape the study of nature. In this pioneering social history of knowledge in Japan, Marcon shows how scholars developed a sophisticated discipline that was analogous to European natural history but formed independently. He also argues that when contacts with Western scholars, traders, and diplomats intensified in the nineteenth century, the previously dominant paradigm of "honzogaku "slowly succumbed to modern Western natural science not by suppression and substitution, as was previously thought, but by creative adaptation and transformation.
Download or read book Possessing Nature written by Paula Findlen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-09-16 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory. Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.
Download or read book Knowing Demons Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period written by Michelle D. Brock and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the manifold ways of knowing—and knowing about— preternatural beings such as demons, angels, fairies, and other spirits that inhabited and were believed to act in early modern European worlds. Its contributors examine how people across the social spectrum assayed the various types of spiritual entities that they believed dwelled invisibly but meaningfully in the spaces just beyond (and occasionally within) the limits of human perception. Collectively, the volume demonstrates that an awareness and understanding of the nature and capabilities of spirits—whether benevolent or malevolent—was fundamental to the knowledge-making practices that characterize the years between ca. 1500 and 1750. This is, therefore, a book about how epistemological and experiential knowledge of spirits persisted and evolved in concert with the wider intellectual changes of the early modern period, such as the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.
Download or read book Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany written by Gerhild Scholz Williams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gerhild Scholz Williams's Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany: Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to His Time, reviews key discourses in eight of Praetorius's works. She introduces the modern reader to the kinds of subjects, the intellectual and spiritual approaches to them, and the genres that this educated and productive German scholar and polymath presented to his audience in the seventeenth century. By relating these individual works to a number of contemporaneous writings, Williams shows how Praetorius constructed a panorama in print in which wonders, the occult, the emerging scientific way of thinking, family and social mores are recurrent themes. Included in Praetorius's portrait of the mid-seventeenth-century are discussions of Paracelsus's scientific theories and practice; early modern German theories on witchcraft and demonology and their applications in the seventeenth century. Furthermore, we read about the early modern beginnings of ethnography, anthropology, and physical geography; gender theory, early modern and contemporary notions of intellectual property, and competing and sometimes conflicting early modern scientific and theological explanations of natural anomalies. Moreover, throughout his work and certainly in those texts chosen for this study, Praetorius appears before us as an assiduous reporter of contemporary European and pan-European events and scientific discoveries, a critic of common superstitions, as much a believer in occult causes and signs and in God's communication with His people. In his writings, in his way of telling, he offers strategies by which to comprehend the political, social, and intellectual uncertainties of his century and, in so doing, identifies ways to confront the diverse interpretive authorities and the varieties of structures of knowledge that interacted and conflicted with each other in the public arena of knowing.
Download or read book Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe written by Pamela H. Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aims to bring together essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. This book looks at production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within different communities.
Download or read book New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship written by Ann Blair and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating exploration of the new frontiers—and unsettled geographical, temporal, and thematic borders—of early modern European history. The study of early modern Europe has long been the source of some of the most creative and influential movements in historical scholarship. New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship explores recent developments in historiography both to exhibit the field's continuing vibrancy and to highlight emerging challenges to long-assumed truths. Essays examine • how key ideas and intellectual practices arose, circulated through scholarly culture, and gave way to subsequent forms • Europe's transforming relationship with Asia, the Americas, Africa, and the rest of the world • how overlooked evidence illuminates vital but obscured people, practices, and objects • connections between disciplines, types of sources, time periods, and places Opening up emerging possibilities, this book demonstrates that early modern European scholarship remains a source for groundbreaking historical insights and methodologies that would benefit the study of any time and place. Contributors: Alexander Bevilacqua, Ann Blair, Daniela Bleichmar, William J. Bulman, Frederic Clark, Anthony Grafton, Jill Kraye, Yuen-Gen Liang, Elizabeth McCahill, Nicholas Popper, Amanda Wunder
Download or read book From Lived Experience to the Written Word written by Pamela H. Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-09-23 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book focuses on how literate artisans began to write about their discoveries starting around 1400: in other words, it explores the origins of technical writing. Artisans and artists began to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs and recipe books rather than simply pass along their knowledge in the workshop. And they tried to articulate what the new knowledge meant. The popularity of these texts coincided with the founding of a "new philosophy" that sought to investigate nature in a new way. Smith shows how this moment began in the unceasing trials of the craft workshop, and ended in the experimentation of the natural scientific laboratory. These epistemological developments have continued to the present day and still inform how we think about scientific knowledge"--
Download or read book The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan written by Federico Marcon and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-07-16 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Opens a fascinating window into the history of Japan’s relationship to its natural environment. . . . A must-read for historians of early modern science.” —New Books in East Asian Studies Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the world, developed into a system (called honzogaku) that rivaled Western science in complexity—and then seemingly disappeared. Or did it? In The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, Federico Marcon recounts how Japanese scholars developed a sophisticated discipline of natural history analogous to Europe’s but created independently, without direct influence, and argues convincingly that Japanese natural history succumbed to Western science not because of suppression and substitution, as scholars traditionally have contended, but by adaptation and transformation. The first book-length English-language study devoted to the important field of honzogaku, The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan will be an essential text for historians of Japanese and East Asian science, and a fascinating read for anyone interested in the development of science in the early modern era. “Marcon introduces to a Western readership for the first time the early history of natural history in Japan . . . Who those naturalists were, how they fitted into society, and what they accomplished, is Marcon’s beautifully told story.” —Archives of Natural History “A bold attempt to provincialize Eurocentric narratives of modernity’s relation to nature.” —Canadian Journal of History “An essential resource.” —Journal of Japanese Studies
Download or read book Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture written by Kristine Steenbergh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how early modern Europeans responded to suffering and asks how they both described and practised compassion.
Download or read book Boreas rising written by Bernd Roling and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a long time studies on northern antiquarianism have focused on individual nations. This volume introduces this phenomenon in a transnational perspective. In the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Baltic Sea was at the centre of a culture of debate, whose networks encompassed numerous European centres of learning. When the countries around the Baltic began to explore their own antiquities in this period, the prevailing climate of competition between Sweden, Denmark, Russia and the German countries soon permeated the construction and presentation of their own pasts. Exploring the ancient literatures and monuments of Iceland, Sweden or Denmark, studying runic writings or the Sami tradition, the northern scholars were establishing an individual architecture of history, and so extending the horizon of their emerging nations both geographically and historically. The contributions in this volume provide case studies illustrating the role that scholarship, art and literature played in establishing and maintaining national claims around the Baltic Sea. The variety of methods combined for this purpose makes this book of interest to intellectual historians as well as historians of art and early modern science.
Download or read book A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the period of the Baroque and Enlightenment the word “emotion”, denoting passions and feelings, came into usage, albeit in an irregular fashion. “Emotion” ultimately emerged as a term in its own right, and evolved in English from meaning physical agitation to describe mental feeling. However, the older terminology of “passions” and “affections” continued as the dominant discourse structuring thinking about feeling and its wider religious, political, social, economic, and moral imperatives. The emotional cultures described in these essays enable some comparative discussion about the history of emotions, and particularly the causes and consequences of emotional change in the larger cultural contexts of the Baroque and Enlightenment. Emotions research has enabled a rethinking of dominant narratives of the period-of histories of revolution, state-building, the rise of the public sphere, religious and scientific transformation, and more. As a new and dynamic field, the essays here are just the beginning of a much bigger history of emotions.
Download or read book Visual Voyages written by Daniela Bleichmar and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented visual exploration of the intertwined histories of art and science, of the old world and the new From the voyages of Christopher Columbus to those of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, the depiction of the natural world played a central role in shaping how people on both sides of the Atlantic understood and imaged the region we now know as Latin America. Nature provided incentives for exploration, commodities for trade, specimens for scientific investigation, and manifestations of divine forces. It also yielded a rich trove of representations, created both by natives to the region and visitors, which are the subject of this lushly illustrated book. Author Daniela Bleichmar shows that these images were not only works of art but also instruments for the production of knowledge, with scientific, social, and political repercussions. Early depictions of Latin American nature introduced European audiences to native medicines and religious practices. By the 17th century, revelatory accounts of tobacco, chocolate, and cochineal reshaped science, trade, and empire around the globe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, collections and scientific expeditions produced both patriotic and imperial visions of Latin America. Through an interdisciplinary examination of more than 150 maps, illustrated manuscripts, still lifes, and landscape paintings spanning four hundred years, Visual Voyages establishes Latin America as a critical site for scientific and artistic exploration, affirming that region's transformation and the transformation of Europe as vitally connected histories.
Download or read book The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution written by Matthew L. Jones and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid the unrest, dislocation, and uncertainty of seventeenth-century Europe, readers seeking consolation and assurance turned to philosophical and scientific books that offered ways of conquering fears and training the mind—guidance for living a good life. The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution presents a triptych showing how three key early modern scientists, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibniz, envisioned their new work as useful for cultivating virtue and for pursuing a good life. Their scientific and philosophical innovations stemmed in part from their understanding of mathematics and science as cognitive and spiritual exercises that could create a truer mental and spiritual nobility. In portraying the rich contexts surrounding Descartes’ geometry, Pascal’s arithmetical triangle, and Leibniz’s calculus, Matthew L. Jones argues that this drive for moral therapeutics guided important developments of early modern philosophy and the Scientific Revolution.
