French Botany in the Enlightenment

French Botany in the Enlightenment PDF Author: R.L. Williams
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401701873
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
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.

French Botany in the Enlightenment

French Botany in the Enlightenment PDF Author: R.L. Williams
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401701873
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Botanophilia in Eighteenth-Century France

Botanophilia in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: R.L. Williams
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401598495
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
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.

Visible Empire

Visible Empire PDF Author: Daniela Bleichmar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226058530
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
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.

Radical Botany

Radical Botany PDF Author: Natania Meeker
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823286649
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
“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.

Minerva's French Sisters

Minerva's French Sisters PDF Author: Nina Rattner Gelbart
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252560
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
A fascinating collective biography of six female scientists in eighteenth-century France, whose stories were largely written out of history "Of the 72 scientific names engraved on the Eiffel Tower, none is female. Omissions include the six Enlightenment women dubbed 'Minerva's sisters' by historian Nina Gelbart in her pioneering, evocative rescue."--Nature 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.

James Sowerby

James Sowerby PDF Author: Paul Henderson
Publisher: Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
ISBN: 9781842465967
Category : Artists
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

Worlds of Natural History

Worlds of Natural History PDF Author: Helen Anne Curry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131651031X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 683

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Book Description
Explores the development of natural history since the Renaissance and contextualizes current discussions of biodiversity.

The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment

The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment PDF Author: Daniel Brewer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107021480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
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.

Science in the Enlightenment

Science in the Enlightenment PDF Author: William E. Burns
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1576078876
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
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.

Cultivating Commerce

Cultivating Commerce PDF Author: Sarah Easterby-Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107126843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
A new social history of botany in Britain and France, 1760-1815, demonstrating the significance of commerce, horticulture and amateur scholarship.