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Possessing Nature - Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Paperback, Revised)
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Possessing Nature - Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Paperback, Revised)
Series: Studies on the History of Society and Culture, 20
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In 1500 few Europeans considered nature an object worthy of study,
yet within fifty years the first museums of natural history had
appeared, chiefly in Italy. Vast collections of natural curiosities
- including living human dwarves, "toad-stones", and unicorn horns
- were gathered by Italian patricians as a means of knowing their
world. The museums built around these collections became the center
of a scientific culture that over the next century and a half
served as a microcosm of Italian society and as the crossroads
where the old and new sciences met. In Possessing Nature, Paula
Findlen vividly recreates the lost world of late Renaissance and
Baroque Italian museums and demonstrates its significance in the
history of science and culture. Based on exhaustive research into
natural histories, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for
patronage, Findlen describes collections and collectors great and
small, beginning with Ulisse Aldrovandi, professor of natural
history at the University of Bologna. Aldrovandi, whose museum was
known as the "eighth wonder" of the world, was a great popularizer
of collecting among the upper classes. From the universities,
Findlen traces the spread of natural history in the seventeenth
century to other learned sectors of society: religious orders,
scientific societies, and princely courts. There was, as Findlen
shows, no separation between scientific culture and general
political culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The community
of these early naturalists was, in many ways, a mirror of the
humanist "republic of letters". Archival documents point to the
currying of patrons and the hierarchical nature of the scientific
professions, characteristicscommon to the larger world around them.
Examining anew the society and accomplishments of the first
collectors of nature, Findlen argues that the accepted distinction
between the "old" Aristotelian, text-based science and the "new"
empirical science during the period is false. Rather, natural
history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and
the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom
and collecting in order to develop new scholarship. In this way, as
in others, the Scientific Revolution grew from the constant
mediation between the old form of knowledge and the new. Possessing
Nature is a unique cross-disciplinary study. Not only does its
detailed description of the earliest natural history collections
make an important contribution to museum studies and cultural
history, but by placing these museums in a continuum of scientific
inquiry, it also adds to our understanding of the history of
science.
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