Possessing Nature

Possessing Nature PDF Author: Paula Findlen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520073340
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 478

Book Description
"As a study of late Renaissance naturalists, the science they practised, and the fit between that science and late Renaissance court life, the book has no rival."--Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

Possessing Nature

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

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.

Slide Mountain, Or, The Folly of Owning Nature

Slide Mountain, Or, The Folly of Owning Nature PDF Author: Theodore Steinberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520087637
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
"A beautifully written work. . . . A tremendously fresh assessment of not only the perils of owning nature, but an entire realm of public and private thoughts, writings, laws, and legislation having to do with nature, property, conservation, and culture."--William Deverell, author of Railroad Crossings

Ribera’s Repetitions

Ribera’s Repetitions PDF Author: Todd P. Olson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271098015
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
The seventeenth-century Valencian artist Jusepe de Ribera spent most of his career in Spanish Viceregal Naples, where he was known as “Lo Spagnoletto,” or “the Little Spaniard.” Working under the patronage of Spanish viceroys, Ribera held a special position bridging two worlds. In Ribera’s Repetitions, art historian Todd P. Olson sheds new light on the complexity of Ribera’s artwork and artistic methods and their connections to the Spanish imperial project. Drawing from a diverse range of sources, including poetry, literature, natural history, philosophy, and political history, Olson presents Ribera’s work in a broad context. He examines how Ribera’s techniques, including rotation, material decay (through etching), and repetition, influenced the artist’s drawings and paintings. Many of Ribera’s works featured scenes of physical suffering—from Saint Jerome’s corroded skin and the flayed bodies of Saint Bartholomew and Marsyas to the ragged beggar-philosophers and the eviscerated Tityus. But far from being the result of an individual sadistic predilection, Olson argues, Ribera’s art was inflected by the legacies of the Reconquest of Spain and Neapolitan coloniality. Ribera’s material processes and themes were not hermetically sealed in the studio; rather, they were engaged in the global Spanish Empire. Pathbreaking and deeply interdisciplinary, this copiously illustrated book offers art history students and scholars a means to see Ribera’s art anew.

A History of Global Consumption

A History of Global Consumption PDF Author: Ina Baghdiantz McCabe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317652649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
In A History of Global Consumption: 1500 – 1800, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe examines the history of consumption throughout the early modern period using a combination of chronological and thematic discussion, taking a comprehensive and wide-reaching view of a subject that has long been on the historical agenda. The title explores the topic from the rise of the collector in Renaissance Europe to the birth of consumption as a political tool in the eighteenth century. Beginning with an overview of the history of consumption and the major theorists, such as Bourdieu, Elias and Barthes, who have shaped its development as a field, Baghdiantz McCabe approaches the subject through a clear chronological framework. Supplemented by illlustrations in every chapter and ranging in scope from an analysis of the success of American commodities such as tobacco, sugar and chocolate in Europe and Asia to a discussion of the Dutch tulip mania, A History of Global Consumption: 1500 – 1800 is the perfect guide for all students interested in the social, cultural and economic history of the early modern period.

Nature's Museums

Nature's Museums PDF Author: Carla Yanni
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781568984728
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Yanni (art history, Rutgers U.) examines the relationship between architecture and science in the 19th century by considering the physical placement and display of natural artifacts in Victorian natural history museums. She begins by discussing the problem of classification, the social history of collecting, as well as architectural competitions an

A Centaur in London

A Centaur in London PDF Author: Fabian Kraemer
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421446316
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
A nuanced reframing of the dual importance of reading and observation for early modern naturalists. Historians traditionally argue that the sciences were born in early modern Europe during the so-called Scientific Revolution. At the heart of this narrative lies a supposed shift from the knowledge of books to the knowledge of things. The attitude of the new-style intellectual broke with the text-based practices of erudition and instead cultivated an emerging empiricism of observation and experiment. Rather than blindly trusting the authority of ancient sources such as Pliny and Aristotle, practitioners of this experimental philosophy insisted upon experiential proof. In A Centaur in London, Fabian Kraemer calls a key tenet of this master narrative into question—that the rise of empiricism entailed a decrease in the importance of reading practices. Kraemer shows instead that the early practices of textual erudition and observational empiricism were by no means so remote from one another as the traditional narrative would suggest. He argues that reading books and reading the book of nature had a great deal in common—indeed, that reading texts was its own kind of observation. Especially in the case of rare and unusual phenomena like monsters, naturalists were dependent on the written reports of others who had experienced the good luck to be at the right place at the right time. The connections between compiling examples from texts and from observation were especially close in such cases. A Centaur in London combines the history of scholarly reading with the history of scientific observation to argue for the sustained importance of both throughout the Renaissance and provides a nuanced, textured portrait of early modern naturalists at work.

English Students at Leiden University, 1575-1650

English Students at Leiden University, 1575-1650 PDF Author: Daniela Prögler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317142934
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
The oldest and most renowned Dutch university, Leiden was an attractive proposition for travelling foreign students in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Alongside offering an excellent academic program and outstanding facilities, Leiden was also able to cater to the desires of noble students providing various extra-curricular activities. Leiden was the most popular continental university among English students, and this book investigates the 831 English students who studied there between 1575 and 1650. The preference of English students for Leiden was, on the one hand, related to close Anglo-Dutch relations of the period, and these are investigated with respect to politics, economy, religion, culture, as well as to the large 'stranger' communities residing in the respective countries. On the other hand, Leiden's attraction resulted from its academic achievements, which are traced back to the conditions in the United Provinces, the limited influence of the Calvinist Church, Leiden's professors, as well as the university's facilities. The core of this study is an exhaustive quantitative study of the composition of the Leiden student population in general, and that of its English segment in particular. Information is provided on the duration of the studies of English students at Leiden, their age, social background and fields of study. We learn about the careers of English students both prior to and after their time at Leiden, and of the motivation that led the English to choose Leiden over other continental universities. More than a study of one group of students at one university, this book is a valuable contribution to the history of early modern universities and will appeal to a wide international readership interested in cultural and intellectual history as well as in Anglo-Dutch relations.

The World of Carolus Clusius

The World of Carolus Clusius PDF Author: Florike Egmond
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317324226
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
Egmond's study investigates horticultural techniques, fashions in the collection of rare plants, botanical experimentation and methods of scientific evaluation, as well as tracking the exchange of knowledge. Central to this activity is the figure of Carolus Clusius (1526-1609), the first truly scientific botanist.

Being With God

Being With God PDF Author: Aristotle Papanikolaou
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268161445
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
The central task of Being With God is an analysis of the relation between apophaticism, trinitarian theology, and divine-human communion through a critical comparison of the trinitarian theologies of the Eastern Orthodox theologians Vladimir Lossky (1903–58) and John Zizioulas (1931– ), arguably two of the most influential Orthodox theologians of the past century. These two theologians identify as the heart and center of all theological discourse the realism of divine-human communion, which is often understood in terms of the familiar Orthodox concept of theosis, or divinization. The Incarnation, according to Lossky and Zizioulas, is the event of a real divine-human communion that is made accessible to all; God has become human so that all may participate fully in the divine life. Aristotle Papanikolaou shows how an ontology of divine-human communion is at the center of both Lossky's and Zizioulas's theological projects. He also shows how, for both theologians, this core belief is used as a self-identifying marker against "Western" theologies. Papanikolaou maintains, however, that Lossky and Zizioulas hold profoundly different views on how to conceptualize God as the Trinity. Their key difference is over the use of apophaticism in theology in general and especially the relation of apophaticism to the doctrine of the Trinity. For Lossky, apophaticism is the central precondition for a trinitarian theology; for Zizioulas, apophaticism has a much more restricted role in theological discourse, and the God experienced in the eucharist is not the God beyond being but the immanent life of the trinitarian God. Papanikolaou provides readers with a richer understanding of contemporary Orthodox theology through his analysis of the consensus and debate between two leading Orthodox theologians.
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