Knowing Nature In Early Modern Europe

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.

From 22-25 May, 2002, the University of Groningen hosted an international conference on 'The Book of Nature. Continuity and change in European and American attitudes towards the natural world'. From Antiquity down to our own time, theologians, philosophers and scientists have often compared nature to a book, which might, under the right circumstances, be read and interpreted in order to come closer to the 'Author' of nature, God. The 'reading' of this book was not regarded as mere idle curiosity, but it was seen as leading to a deeper understanding of God's wisdom and power, and it culturally legitimated and promoted a positive attitude towards nature and its study. A selection of the papers which were delivered at the conference has been edited in two volumes. The first book was published as The Book of Nature in Antiquity and the Middle Ages; this second volume is devoted to the history of that concept after the Middle Ages.

Gerhild Scholz Williams here introduces the modern reader to the writings of Johannes Praetorius, an educated and productive German polymath of the seventeenth century. In his work we see the early modern beginnings of ethnography, anthropology, and physical geography; gender theory, early modern and contemporary notions of intellectual property, and competing and sometimes conflicting early modern scientific and theological explanations of natural anomalies.

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.

An illuminating exploration of the new frontiers—and unsettled geographical, temporal, and thematic borders—of early modern European history. The study of early modern Europe has long been the source of some of the most creative and influential movements in historical scholarship. New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship explores recent developments in historiography both to exhibit the field's continuing vibrancy and to highlight emerging challenges to long-assumed truths. Essays examine • how key ideas and intellectual practices arose, circulated through scholarly culture, and gave way to subsequent forms • Europe's transforming relationship with Asia, the Americas, Africa, and the rest of the world • how overlooked evidence illuminates vital but obscured people, practices, and objects • connections between disciplines, types of sources, time periods, and places Opening up emerging possibilities, this book demonstrates that early modern European scholarship remains a source for groundbreaking historical insights and methodologies that would benefit the study of any time and place. Contributors: Alexander Bevilacqua, Ann Blair, Daniela Bleichmar, William J. Bulman, Frederic Clark, Anthony Grafton, Jill Kraye, Yuen-Gen Liang, Elizabeth McCahill, Nicholas Popper, Amanda Wunder

Explores how early modern Europeans responded to suffering and asks how they both described and practised compassion.

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.

For a long time studies on northern antiquarianism have focused on individual nations. This volume introduces this phenomenon in a transnational perspective. In the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Baltic Sea was at the centre of a culture of debate, whose networks encompassed numerous European centres of learning. When the countries around the Baltic began to explore their own antiquities in this period, the prevailing climate of competition between Sweden, Denmark, Russia and the German countries soon permeated the construction and presentation of their own pasts. Exploring the ancient literatures and monuments of Iceland, Sweden or Denmark, studying runic writings or the Sami tradition, the northern scholars were establishing an individual architecture of history, and so extending the horizon of their emerging nations both geographically and historically. The contributions in this volume provide case studies illustrating the role that scholarship, art and literature played in establishing and maintaining national claims around the Baltic Sea. The variety of methods combined for this purpose makes this book of interest to intellectual historians as well as historians of art and early modern science.