Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe

Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: David Beck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317317378
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
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.

Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe

Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: David Beck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317317378
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe

Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: David Beck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781848935181
Category : Knowledge, Theory of
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

Possessing Nature

Possessing Nature PDF Author: Paula Findlen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520917782
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
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.

The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan

The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan PDF Author: Federico Marcon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625190X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
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.

Inventing the Indigenous

Inventing the Indigenous PDF Author: Alix Cooper
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521870879
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
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.

Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period

Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period PDF Author: Michelle D. Brock
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319757385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
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.

Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Pamela H. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226763293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
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.

Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism

Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism PDF Author: Giulia Champion
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000373843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There brings together a range of works exploring the evolution of cannibalism, literally and metaphorically, diachronically and across disciplines. This edited collection aims to promote a conversation on the evolution and the different uses of the tropes and figures of cannibalism, in order to understand and deconstruct the fascination with anthropophagy, its continued afterlife and its relation to different disciplines and spaces of discourse. In order to do so, the contributing authors shed a new light not only on the concept, but also propose to explore cannibalism through new optics and theories. Spanning 15 chapters, the collection explores cannibalism across disciplines and fields from Antiquity to contemporary speculative fiction, considering history, anthropology, visual and film studies, philosophy, feminist theories, psychoanalysis and museum practices. This collection of thoughtful and thought-provoking scholarly contributions suggests the importance of cannibalism in understanding human history and social relations.

Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art

Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art PDF Author: Yvonne Owens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350190500
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body. Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling. She reveals how Hans Baldung exploited this radical polarity to create moralising and titillating portrayals of how monstrous female sexuality victimised men and brought them low. Furthermore, these images issued from-and contributed to-the contemporary understanding of witchcraft as a heresy that stemmed from natural 'feminine defect,' a concept derived from Aristotle. Offering new and provocative interpretations of Hans Baldung's iconic witchcraft imagery, this book is essential reading for historians of art, culture and gender relations in the late medieval and early modern periods.

The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution

The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution PDF Author: Matthew L. Jones
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226409562
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
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.