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Although there is a rich historiography on Enlightenment Tuscany in
Italian as well as French and German, the principle Anglophone
works are Eric Cochrane's Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan
Academies (1961) and his Enlightenment Florence in the Forgotten
Centuries (1973). It is high time to revisit the Tuscan
Enlightenment. This volume brings together an international group
of scholars with the goal of putting to rest the idea that Florence
ceased to be interesting after the Renaissance. Indeed, it is
partly the explicit dialogue between Renaissance and Enlightenment
that makes eighteenth-century Tuscany so interesting. This
enlightened age looked to the past. It began the Herculean project
of collecting, editing, and publishing many of the manuscripts that
today form the bedrock of any serious study of Dante, Petrarch,
Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari, Galileo, and other Tuscan writers.
This was an age of public libraries, projects of cultural
restoration, and the emergence of the Uffizi as a public art
gallery, complemented by a science museum in Peter Leopold's reign
whose relics can still be visited in the Museo Galileo and La
Specola.
Although there is a rich historiography on Enlightenment Tuscany in
Italian as well as French and German, the principle Anglophone
works are Eric Cochrane's Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan
Academies (1961) and his Enlightenment Florence in the Forgotten
Centuries (1973). It is high time to revisit the Tuscan
Enlightenment. This volume brings together an international group
of scholars with the goal of putting to rest the idea that Florence
ceased to be interesting after the Renaissance. Indeed, it is
partly the explicit dialogue between Renaissance and Enlightenment
that makes eighteenth-century Tuscany so interesting. This
enlightened age looked to the past. It began the Herculean project
of collecting, editing, and publishing many of the manuscripts that
today form the bedrock of any serious study of Dante, Petrarch,
Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari, Galileo, and other Tuscan writers.
This was an age of public libraries, projects of cultural
restoration, and the emergence of the Uffizi as a public art
gallery, complemented by a science museum in Peter Leopold's reign
whose relics can still be visited in the Museo Galileo and La
Specola.
Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) - German Jesuit, occultist, polymath - was one of the most curious figures in the history of science. He dabbled in all the mysteries of his time: the heavenly bodies, sound amplification, museology, botany, Asian languages, the pyramids of Egypt - almost anything incompletely understood. His wild, beautifully illustrated books are sometimes visionary, frequently wrong, and yet compelling documents in the history of ideas. This volume contains new essays on Kircher and his world by leading historians and historians of science, including Stephen Jay Gould, Ingrid Rowland, Anthony Grafton, Daniel Stoltzenberg, Paula Findlen, and Barbara Stafford.
Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into
how objects - ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred,
natural and man-made - came to define some of the key developments
of the early modern world. Now in its second edition, this book
taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of
approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c.
1500-1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the
ambiguity of things, representing things, making things,
encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the
power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new
essays on 'encountering things' to enrich the volume. These look at
cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture
of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from
Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian
England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to
the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a
generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use,
consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things
themselves. Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives
and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern
Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early
modern world and the history of material culture.
Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) - German Jesuit, occultist, polymath - was one of the most curious figures in the history of science. He dabbled in all the mysteries of his time: the heavenly bodies, sound amplification, museology, botany, Asian languages, the pyramids of Egypt - almost anything incompletely understood. His wild, beautifully illustrated books are sometimes visionary, frequently wrong, and yet compelling documents in the history of ideas. This volume contains new essays on Kircher and his world by leading historians and historians of science, including Stephen Jay Gould, Ingrid Rowland, Anthony Grafton, Daniel Stoltzenberg, Paula Findlen, and Barbara Stafford.
These sixteen fascinating essays investigate how political, economic and material changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe also transformed the perception of nature, ideas about science, art and technology. Topics include: * the Dutch tulip-mania of 1637 * alchemy and commercial exchange in the Holy Roman Empire * the role of merchants in the origins of the Wunderkammer * and Spanish sea charts and territorial claims.
The Renaissance of Letters traces the multiplication of
letter-writing practices between the fourteenth and seventeenth
centuries in the Italian peninsula and beyond to explore the
importance of letters as a crucial document for understanding the
Italian Renaissance. This edited collection contains case studies,
ranging from the late medieval re-emergence of letter-writing to
the mid-seventeenth century, that offer a comprehensive analysis of
the different dimensions of late medieval and Renaissance
letters-literary, commercial, political, religious, cultural,
social, and military-which transformed them into powerful early
modern tools. The Renaissance was an era that put letters into the
hands of many kinds of people, inspiring them to see reading,
writing, receiving, and sending letters as an essential feature of
their identity. The authors take a fresh look at the correspondence
of some of the most important humanists of the Italian Renaissance,
including Niccolo Machiavelli and Isabella d'Este, and consider the
use of letters for others such as merchants and physicians. This
book is essential reading for scholars and students of Early Modern
History and Literature, Renaissance Studies, and Italian Studies.
The engagement with essential primary sources renders this book an
indispensable tool for those teaching seminars on Renaissance
history and literature.
Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into
how objects - ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred,
natural and man-made - came to define some of the key developments
of the early modern world. Now in its second edition, this book
taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of
approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c.
1500-1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the
ambiguity of things, representing things, making things,
encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the
power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new
essays on 'encountering things' to enrich the volume. These look at
cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture
of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from
Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian
England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to
the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a
generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use,
consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things
themselves. Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives
and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern
Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early
modern world and the history of material culture.
The Renaissance of Letters traces the multiplication of
letter-writing practices between the fourteenth and seventeenth
centuries in the Italian peninsula and beyond to explore the
importance of letters as a crucial document for understanding the
Italian Renaissance. This edited collection contains case studies,
ranging from the late medieval re-emergence of letter-writing to
the mid-seventeenth century, that offer a comprehensive analysis of
the different dimensions of late medieval and Renaissance
letters-literary, commercial, political, religious, cultural,
social, and military-which transformed them into powerful early
modern tools. The Renaissance was an era that put letters into the
hands of many kinds of people, inspiring them to see reading,
writing, receiving, and sending letters as an essential feature of
their identity. The authors take a fresh look at the correspondence
of some of the most important humanists of the Italian Renaissance,
including Niccolo Machiavelli and Isabella d'Este, and consider the
use of letters for others such as merchants and physicians. This
book is essential reading for scholars and students of Early Modern
History and Literature, Renaissance Studies, and Italian Studies.
The engagement with essential primary sources renders this book an
indispensable tool for those teaching seminars on Renaissance
history and literature.
In the age of the Grand Tour, foreigners flocked to Italy to gawk
at its ruins and paintings, enjoy its salons and cafes, attend the
opera, and revel in their own discovery of its past. But they also
marveled at the people they saw, both male and female. In an era in
which castrati were "rock stars," men served women as "cicisbei,"
and dandified Englishmen became "macaroni," Italy was perceived to
be a place where men became women. The great publicity surrounding
female poets, journalists, artists, anatomists, and scientists, and
the visible roles for such women in salons, academies, and
universities in many Italian cities also made visitors wonder
whether women had become men. Such images, of course, were
stereotypes, but they were nonetheless grounded in a reality that
was unique to the Italian peninsula. This volume illuminates the
social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Italy by
exploring how questions of gender in music, art, literature,
science, and medicine shaped perceptions of Italy in the age of the
Grand Tour.
For many years English-language scholarship on late medieval and
early modern Italy was largely dominated by work on Florence-as a
city, culture, and economic and political entity. During the past
few decades, however, scholarship has moved well beyond the
"Florentine model" to explore the diversity of Italian urban and
provincial life-the "many Italies" that stretched from the
Apennines to the Mediterranean. This volume brings together a group
of sixteen urban, social, religious, and economic historians of
late medieval and early modern Italy whose work reflects this
shift, and illustrates some of the significant new research
directions of the field. At the volume's core are questions
important to all historians of late medieval and early modern
Europe: What does the new work on Italy beyond Florence have to say
about the traditional definition of the Renaissance, a definition
that made Florence its paradigmatic expression? What new questions
about the period in general have emerged as a result of decentering
the Renaissance? How has the effort to view Florence in a wider set
of Italian and Mediterranean political and economic networks shed
new light on the history of city states? And how has this work led
to a reexamination of the continuities connecting the late medieval
world to the early modern period? In exploring the contours of
Italy from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries, the
volume creates a landscape against which to evaluate the current
state of Florentine studies, the resurgence of Venetian studies,
the renewed interest in Italy under Spanish rule, and the
development of many other regional and local histories that are
increasingly used by scholars to facilitate a broader understanding
of Italy as a whole.
These sixteen fascinating essays investigate how political, economic and material changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe also transformed the perception of nature, ideas about science, art and technology. Topics include: * the Dutch tulip-mania of 1637 * alchemy and commercial exchange in the Holy Roman Empire * the role of merchants in the origins of the Wunderkammer * and Spanish sea charts and territorial claims.
Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of
scientific networks - local and long-distance, informal and
institutional, religious and secular - as one of the important
phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions
about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how
information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the
brokers of this world were. Bringing together an international
group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the
changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early
modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the
Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of
understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of
well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading
companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship
on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and
local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and
truly global institutions. Empires of Knowledge is the perfect
introduction to the global history of early modern science and
medicine.
Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of
scientific networks - local and long-distance, informal and
institutional, religious and secular - as one of the important
phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions
about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how
information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the
brokers of this world were. Bringing together an international
group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the
changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early
modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the
Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of
understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of
well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading
companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship
on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and
local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and
truly global institutions. Empires of Knowledge is the perfect
introduction to the global history of early modern science and
medicine.
In her Letters on Natural Philosophy, published originally in
Krakow in 1584, Camilla Erculiani proposed her new theory of the
natural causes of the universal flood in the biblical book of
Genesis. Erculiani weaves together her understanding of
Aristotelian, Platonic, Galenic, and astrological traditions and
combines them with her own observations of the world as seen from
her apothecary shop in sixteenth-century Padua. This publication
brought Erculiani to the attention of the Inquisition, which
accused her of heresy, silencing her for centuries. Â This
edition presents the first full English translation of
Erculiani’s book and other relevant texts, bringing to light the
cultural context and scientific thought of this unique natural
philosopher.
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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