Download or read book Publishing Sacrobosco s De sphaera in Early Modern Europe written by Matteo Valleriani and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-18 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access volume focuses on the cultural background of the pivotal transformations of scientific knowledge in the early modern period. It investigates the rich edition history of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera, by far the most widely disseminated textbook on geocentric cosmology, from the unique standpoint of the many printers, publishers, and booksellers who steered this text from manuscript to print culture, and in doing so transformed it into an established platform of scientific learning. The corpus, constituted of 359 different editions featuring Sacrobosco’s treatise on cosmology and astronomy printed between 1472 and 1650, represents the scientific European shared knowledge concerned with the cosmological worldview of the early modern period until far after the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. The contributions to this volume show how the academic book trade influenced the process of homogenization of scientific knowledge. They also describe the material infrastructure through which such knowledge was disseminated, and thus define the premises for the foundation of modern scientific communities.

Download or read book De Sphaera of Johannes de Sacrobosco in the Early Modern Period written by Matteo Valleriani and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book explores commentaries on an influential text of pre-Copernican astronomy in Europe. It features essays that take a close look at key intellectuals and how they engaged with the main ideas of this qualitative introduction to geocentric cosmology. Johannes de Sacrobosco compiled his Tractatus de sphaera during the thirteenth century in the frame of his teaching activities at the then recently founded University of Paris. It soon became a mandatory text all over Europe. As a result, a tradition of commentaries to the text was soon established and flourished until the second half of the 17th century. Here, readers will find an informative overview of these commentaries complete with a rich context. The essays explore the educational and social backgrounds of the writers. They also detail how their careers developed after the publication of their commentaries, the institutions and patrons they were affiliated with, what their agenda was, and whether and how they actually accomplished it. The editor of this collection considers these scientific commentaries as genuine scientific works. The contributors investigate them here not only in reference to the work on which it comments but also, and especially, as independent scientific contributions that are socially, institutionally, and intellectually contextualized around their authors.

Download or read book Latin Scientific Literature 1450 1850 written by Martin Korenjak and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-20 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the early modern period, the emergence of what ultimately became modern science took place mainly in Latin, the international language of educated discourse of the era. Hundreds of thousands of scientific texts were published in Latin from the invention of print around 1450 to the demise of Latin as a language of science around 1850. Despite its importance, our knowledge of this literature is extremely limited. This book aims to provide an overview of this area, the first ever to be written. It does so, not from the perspective of a natural scientist or a historian of science, but of a literary scholar. Instead of the scientific content or methodology of the respective works, it focusses on the genres of scientific literature and their communicative functions. Latin Scientific Literature, 1450-1850 falls into two main parts. The first part ('Contexts') introduces four aspects of early modern intellectual culture which are crucial for an understanding of the scientific literature of the time: the development of science, the role of Latin, the concept of literature, and the rise of print. Part two ('Texts'), offers an overview of Neo-Latin scientific literature. Subsumed under five communicative functions - disclosing sources, presenting facts, arguing for certain positions, summarizing knowledge, and publicizing science - twenty pertinent genres are discussed.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Academic Knowledge Circulation written by Wiebke Keim and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 870 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge is a result of never-ending processes of circulation. This accessible volume is the first comprehensive multidisciplinary work to explore these processes through the perspective of scholars working outside of Anglo-American paradigms. Through a variety of literature reviews, examples of recent research and in-depth case studies, the chapters demonstrate that the analysis of knowledge circulation requires a series of ontological and epistemic commitments that impact its conceptualisation and methodologies. Bringing diverse viewpoints from across the globe and from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, history, political science, sociology and Science & Technology Studies (STS), this wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection offers a broad and cutting-edge overview of outstanding research on academic knowledge circulation. The book is structured in seven sections: (i) key concepts in studying the circulation of academic knowledge; (ii) spaces and actors of circulation; (iii) academic media and knowledge circulation; (iv) the political economy of academic knowledge circulation; (v) the geographies, geopolitics and historical legacies of the global circulation of academic knowledge; (vi) the relationships between academic and extra-academic knowledges; and (vii) methodological approaches to studying the circulation of academic knowledge. This handbook will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate researchers in the humanities and social sciences interested in the circulation of knowledge.

Download or read book A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean written by Robert Clines and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts a Jewish-born Catholic priest's effort to prove he was Catholic to anyone who doubted him, including himself.

Download or read book Things and Thingness in European Literature and Visual Art 700 1600 written by Jutta Eming and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eleven chapters in this international volume draw on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to focus our attention on medieval and early modern things (ca. 700–1600). The range of things includes actual objects (the Altenburg Crucifixion, a copy of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi, a pilgrim’s letter), imagined objects (a prayed cloak for the Virgin Mary), and narrative objects in texts (the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Ordene de Chevalerie, Hartmann von Aue’s Erec, Heinrich of Neustadt’s Apollonius of Tyre, Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas, and the vita of Saint Guthlac). Each in its own way, the papers consider how things do what they do in texts and art, often foregrounding the intersection between the material and the immaterial by exploring such questions as how things act, how they express power, and how texts and images represent them. Medieval and early modern things are repeatedly shown to be more than symbolic or passive, they are agentive and determinative in both their intra- and extradiegetic worlds. The things that are addressed in this volume are varied and are embedded, or entangled, in different contexts and societies, and yet they share a concerted engagement in human life.

Download or read book Scientific Practices in European History 1200 1800 written by Peter Dear and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific Practices in European History, 1200–1800 presents and situates a collection of extracts from both widely known texts by such figures as Copernicus, Newton, and Lavoisier, and lesser known but significant items, all chosen to provide a perspective on topics in social, cultural and intellectual history and to illuminate the concerns of the early modern period. The selection of extracts highlights the emerging technical preoccupations of this period, while the accompanying introductions and annotations make these occasionally complex works accessible to students and non-specialists. The book follows a largely chronological sequence and helps to locate scientific ideas and practices within broader European history. The primary source materials in this collection stand alone as texts in themselves, but in illustrating the scientific components of early modern societies they also make this book ideal for teachers and students of European history.

Download or read book Debating the Stars in the Italian Renaissance written by Ovanes Akopyan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the astrological controversies that arose in Renaissance Italy in the wake of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, published in 1496.

Download or read book Scientific Visual Representations in History written by Matteo Valleriani and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores continuity and ruptures in the historical use of visual representations in science and related disciplines such as art history and anthropology. The book also considers more recent developments that attest to the unprecedented importance of scientific visualizations, such as video recordings, animations, simulations, graphs, and enhanced realities. The volume collects historical reflections concerned with the use of visual material, visualization, and vision in science from a historical perspective, ranging across multiple cultures from antiquity until present day. The focus is on visual representations such as drawings, prints, tables, mathematical symbols, photos, data visualizations, mapping processes, and (on a meta-level) visualizations of data extracted from historical sources to visually support the historical research itself. Continuity and ruptures between the past and present use of visual material are presented against the backdrop of the epistemic functions of visual material in science. The function of visual material is defined according to three major epistemic categories: exploration, transformation, and transmission of knowledge.

Download or read book Jesuit Contribution to Science written by Agustín Udías and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-09-27 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive history of the many contributions the Jesuits made to science from their founding to the present. It also links the Jesuits dedication to science with their specific spirituality which tries to find God in all things. The book begins with Christopher Clavius, professor of mathematics in the Roman College between 1567 and 1595, the initiator of this tradition. It covers Jesuits scientific contributions in mathematics, astronomy, physics and cartography up until the suppression of the order by the Pope in 1773. Next, the book details the scientific work the Jesuits pursued after their restoration in 1814. It examines the establishment of a network of observatories throughout the world; details contributions made to the study of tropical hurricanes, earthquakes and terrestrial magnetism and examines such important figures as Angelo Secchi, Stephen J. Perry, James B. Macelwane and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. From their founding to the present, Jesuits have trodden an uncommon path to the frontiers where the Christian message is not yet known. Jesuits’ work in science is also an interesting chapter in the general problem of the relation between science and religion. This book provides readers with a complete portrait of the Jesuit scientific tradition. Its engaging story will appeal to those with an interest in the history of science, the history of the relations between science and religion and the history of Jesuits.

Download or read book Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe written by Philip Beeley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Libraries and archives contain many thousands of early modern mathematical books, of which almost equally many bear readers’ marks, ranging from deliberate annotations and accidental blots to corrections and underlinings. Such evidence provides us with the material and intellectual tools for exploring the nature of mathematical reading and the ways in which mathematics was disseminated and assimilated across different social milieus in the early centuries of print culture. Other evidence is important, too, as the case studies collected in the volume document. Scholarly correspondence can help us understand the motives and difficulties in producing new printed texts, library catalogues can illuminate collection practices, while manuscripts can teach us more about textual traditions. By defining and illuminating the distinctive world of early modern mathematical reading, the volume seeks to close the gap between the history of mathematics as a history of texts and history of mathematics as part of the broader history of human culture.

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 The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth written by Glen Van Brummelen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth is the first major history in English of the origins and early development of trigonometry. Glen Van Brummelen identifies the earliest known trigonometric precursors in ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Greece, and he examines the revolutionary discoveries of Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer believed to have been the first to make systematic use of trigonometry in the second century BC while studying the motions of the stars. The book traces trigonometry's development into a full-fledged mathematical discipline in India and Islam; explores its applications to such areas as geography and seafaring navigation in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance; and shows how trigonometry retained its ancient roots at the same time that it became an important part of the foundation of modern mathematics. The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth looks at the controversies as well, including disputes over whether Hipparchus was indeed the father of trigonometry, whether Indian trigonometry is original or derived from the Greeks, and the extent to which Western science is indebted to Islamic trigonometry and astronomy. The book also features extended excerpts of translations of original texts, and detailed yet accessible explanations of the mathematics in them. No other book on trigonometry offers the historical breadth, analytical depth, and coverage of non-Western mathematics that readers will find in The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth.

Download or read book Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama written by M. Matei-Chesnoiu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geo-spatial identity and early Modern European drama come together in this study of how cultural or political attachments are actively mediated through space. Matei-Chesnoiu traces the modulated representations of rivers, seas, mountains, and islands in sixteenth-century plays by Shakespeare, Jasper Fisher, Thomas May, and others.

Download or read book The Structures of Practical Knowledge written by Matteo Valleriani and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-20 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Structures of Practical Knowledge investigates the nature of practical knowledge – why, how, when and by whom it is codified, and once codified, how this knowledge is structured. The inquiry unfolds in a series of fifteen case studies, which range in focus from early modern Italy to eighteenth century China. At the heart of each study is a shared definition of practical knowledge, that is, knowledge needed to obtain a certain outcome, whether that be an artistic or mechanical artifact, a healing practice, or a mathematical result. While the content of practical knowledge is widely variable, this study shows that all practical knowledge is formally equivalent in following a defined workflow, as reflected in a construction procedure, a recipe, or an algorithm. As explored in the volume’s fifteen contributions, there are three levels at which structures of practical knowledge may be understood and examined. At the most immediate level, there are the individual workflows that encompasses practical knowledge itself. Probing further, it is possible to examine the structure of practical knowledge as it is externalized and codified in texts, drawings, and artifacts such as models. Finally, practical knowledge is also related to social structures, which fundamentally determine its dissemination and evolution into new knowledge structures. The social structures of professionals and institutions represent the critical means by which practical knowledge takes form. These actors are the agents of codification, and by means of selection, appropriation, investment, and knowledge development, they determine the formation of new structures of practical knowledge. On a more abstract level, the creation of new knowledge structures is understood as constituting the basis for the further development of scientific knowledge. Rich in subject matter and incisive in the theory it lays out, this volume represents an important contribution to the history of science and epistemology. Individually, the fifteen case studies – encompassing the history of architecture, mining, brewing, glass production, printing, ballistics, mechanics, cartography, cosmology and astronomy – are replete with original research, and offer new insights into the history of science. Taken together, the contributions remodel historical epistemology as a whole, elucidating the underlining knowledge structures that transcend disciplinary boundaries, and that unite practitioners across time and space.

Download or read book On Their Own Terms written by Benjamin A. Elman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.

Download or read book The First Treatise on Museums written by Samuel Quiccheberg and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones, first published in Latin in 1565, is an ambitious effort to demonstrate the pragmatic value of curiosity cabinets, or Wunderkammern, to princely collectors in sixteenth-century Europe and, by so doing, inspire them to develop their own such collections. Quiccheberg shows how the assembly and display of physical objects offered nobles a powerful means to expand visual knowledge, allowing them to incorporate empirical and artisanal expertise into the realm of the written word. But in mapping out the collectability of the material world, Quiccheberg did far more than create a taxonomy. Rather, he demonstrated how organizing objects made their knowledge more accessible; how objects, when juxtaposed or grouped, could tell a story; and how such strategies could enhance the value of any single object. Quiccheberg’s descriptions of early modern collections provide both a point of origin for today’s museums and an implicit critique of their aims, asserting the fundamental research and scholarly value of collections: collections are to be used, not merely viewed. The First Treatise on Museums makes Quiccheberg’s now rare publication available in an English translation. Complementing the translation are a critical introduction by Mark A. Meadow and a preface by Bruce Robertson.