The Ages Of Two Faced Janus

This volume deals with the tracts - Latin and vernacular - published in the Netherlands on the comets of 1577 and 1618. Central to the book is the question of how these cometary appearances influenced the Aristotelian world view. This is the first lengthy examination of the decline of Aristotelian cosmology in the Netherlands. Its demonstration of the connection between cosmological and political views renders the book useful to historians of general Dutch history, as well as historians of science.

Drawing on letters, orations and disputations, this book argues that during the seventeenth century, the Amsterdam Athenaeum, despite the revolutionary debates of the time, and despite the intellectual liberalism characteristic of Amsterdam, remained traditional in its teaching.

Focusing on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, these original essays by leading scholars explore how theatrical, aesthetic, and linguistic forms engage early modern experiences of temporality. Encompassing comedy, tragedy, history, and romance, some contributions consider how different models of pastness, presentness, sequentiality, memory, and historical meaning underwrite particular representational practices. Others, conversely, investigate how aesthetic forms afforded diverse ways for early-modern people to understand or experience time - and how this can impact us today.

This book contains twelve major essays written by prominent historians from the Netherlands, Belgium and the United States on the early Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic, and more in particular on the main schools of thought that made up its philosophical profile.

Libraries and archives contain many thousands of early modern mathematical books, of which almost equally many bear readers’ marks, ranging from deliberate annotations and accidental blots to corrections and underlinings. Such evidence provides us with the material and intellectual tools for exploring the nature of mathematical reading and the ways in which mathematics was disseminated and assimilated across different social milieus in the early centuries of print culture. Other evidence is important, too, as the case studies collected in the volume document. Scholarly correspondence can help us understand the motives and difficulties in producing new printed texts, library catalogues can illuminate collection practices, while manuscripts can teach us more about textual traditions. By defining and illuminating the distinctive world of early modern mathematical reading, the volume seeks to close the gap between the history of mathematics as a history of texts and history of mathematics as part of the broader history of human culture.

The conviction that Nature was God's second revelation played a crucial role in early modern Dutch culture. This book offers a fascinating account on how Dutch intellectuals contemplated, investigated, represented and collected natural objects, and how the notion of the 'Book of Nature' was transformed.

Seneca's Natural Questions is an eight-book disquisition on the nature of meteorological phenomena, ranging inter alia from rainbows to earthquakes, from comets to the winds, from the causes of snow and hail to the reasons why the Nile floods in summer. Much of this material had been treated in the earlier Greco-Roman meteorological tradition, but what notoriously sets Seneca's writing apart is his insertion of extended moralizing sections within his technical discourse. How, if at all, are these outbursts against the luxury and vice that are apparently rampant in Seneca's first-century CE Rome to be reconciled with his main meteorological agenda? In grappling with this familiar question, The Cosmic Viewpoint argues that Seneca is no blinkered or arid meteorological investigator, but a creative explorer into nature's workings who offers a highly idiosyncratic blend of physico-moral investigation across his eight books. At one level, his inquiry into nature impinges on human conduct and morality in its implicit propagation of the familiar Stoic ideal of living in accordance with nature: the moral deviants whom Seneca condemns in the course of the work offer egregious examples of living contrary to nature's balanced way. At a deeper level, however, The Cosmic Viewpoint stresses the literary qualities and complexities that are essential to Seneca's literary art of science: his technical enquiries initiate a form of engagement with nature which distances the reader from the ordinary involvements and fragmentations of everyday life, instead centering our existence in the cosmic whole. From a figurative standpoint, Seneca's meteorological theme raises our gaze from a terrestrial level of existence to a more intuitive plane where literal vision gives way to 'higher' conjecture and intuition: in striving to understand meteorological phenomena, we progress in an elevating direction - a conceptual climb that renders the Natural Questions no mere store of technical learning, but a work that actively promotes a change of perspective in its readership.

A collection of ground-breaking and scholarly papers on Latin literature by a number of distinguished classicists, produced in memory of Don Fowler, who died in 1999 at the age of 46. The essays are concerned with the reception of the classical world, extending into the realms of modern philosophy, art history, and cultural studies.