Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe
Author: Catherine Atkinson
Publisher:
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9783161560392
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Inventing Inventors in Renaissance Europe
Author: Catherine Atkinson
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9783161491870
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPolydore Vergil of Urbino (ca.1470-1555) fired his readers' imagination with his encyclopaedic book On the inventors of all things ( De inventoribus rerum 1499). His account of the manifold origins of sciences, crafts and social institutions is a praise of man's inventive genius and a prototypical cultural history. Polydorus was a household name for several centuries. Erasmus envied his friend the book's success, Rabelais heaped scorn on it, Catholic censors put it on the index, while Protestants were fascinated with that papist work. In this first in-depth study of the Renaissance 'bestseller', Catherine Atkinson examines not only the Italian humanist's bona fide (mostly ancient) inventors, in books I-III, she enquires into the neglected and misunderstood, yet equally important, books IV-VIII (1521). This early modern text, written on the eve of the Reformation, is devoted to the highly controversial topic of the 'invention' of ecclesiastical institutions. The priest and humanist Vergil, who during his 50 years in England rose in the church hierarchy, is shown to be an acute observer of contemporary religious practice. He employs the inventor question (who was the first to do this?) as an instrument of historiography and by comparing medieval church rites and institutions with religious practice of antiquity, implicitly questions the singularity of the Christian church.
What Reason Promises
Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2016-06-20
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 3110454564
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis collection demonstrates the range of approaches that some of the leading scholars of our day take to basic questions at the intersection of the natural and human worlds. The essays focus on three interlocking categories: Reason stakes a bigger territory than the enclosed yard of universal rules. Nature expands over a far larger region than an eternal category of the natural. And history refuses to be confined to claims of an unencumbered truth of how things happened.
Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe
Author: Miriam Eliav-Feldon
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2015-09-29
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 1137447494
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this book, twelve scholars of early modern history analyse various categories and cases of deception and false identity in the age of geographical discoveries and of forced conversions: from two-faced conversos to serial converts, from demoniacs to stigmatics, and from self-appointed ambassadors to lying cosmographer.
The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence
Author: Helen King
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-02-17
Total Pages: 287
ISBN-13: 1317022394
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBy far the most influential work on the history of the body, across a wide range of academic disciplines, remains that of Thomas Laqueur. This book puts on trial the one-sex/two-sex model of Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud through a detailed exploration of the ways in which two classical stories of sexual difference were told, retold and remade from the mid-sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Agnodike, the 'first midwife' who disguises herself as a man and then exposes herself to her potential patients, and Phaethousa, who grows a beard after her husband leaves her, are stories from the ancient world that resonated in the early modern period in particular. Tracing the reception of these tales shows how they provided continuity despite considerable change in medicine, being the common property of those on different sides of professional disputes about women's roles in both medicine and midwifery. The study reveals how different genres used these stories, changing their characters and plots, but always invoking the authority of the classics in discussions of sexual identity. The study raises important questions about the nature of medical knowledge, the relationship between texts and observation, and the understanding of sexual difference in the early modern world beyond the one-sex model.
Bach's Feet
Author: David Yearsley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-01-19
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 0521199018
DOWNLOAD EBOOKYearsley explores the cultural significance of making music with hands and feet, a mode of performance unique to the organ.
Caligula's Barges and the Renaissance Origins of Nautical Archaeology Under Water
Author: John M. McManamon
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2016-12-09
Total Pages: 640
ISBN-13: 1623494397
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSometime around 1446 A.D., Cardinal Prospero Colonna commissioned engineer Battista Alberti to raise two immense Roman vessels from the bottom of the lago di Nemi, just south of Rome. By that time, local fishermen had been fouling their nets and occasionally recovering stray objects from the sunken ships for 800 years. Having no idea of the size of the objects he was attempting to recover, Alberti failed. For most of the next 500 years, various attempts were made to recover the vessels. Finally, in 1928, Mussolini ordered the draining of the lake to remove the vessels and place them on the lake shore. In 1944, the ships burned in a fire that was generally blamed on the Germans. John M. McManamon connects these attempts at underwater archaeology with the Renaissance interest in reconstructing the past in order to affect the present. Nautical and marine archaeologists, as well as students and scholars of Renaissance history and historiography, will appreciate this masterfully researched and gracefully written work.
Cultures of Knowledge
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2011-11-14
Total Pages: 402
ISBN-13: 9004219366
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLooking at knowledge transmission as a cultural feature, this book isolates and examines the individual factors that affect knowledge in the making and created uniquely Chinese cultures of knowledge. The volume is organized into four sections: Internode, Imperial Court, Agora, and Scholarly Arts. Each has a theoretical introduction, followed by two core contributions from experts in Chinese history. The section concludes with a ‘reflection’ by a historian of Western Technology who scrutinizes each sphere and identifies the points that reflect universal technological experience. The combination of broadly sketched theoretical introductions and detailed core contributions provides an unparalleled insight into pre-modern Chinese history from the Song to early Qing dynasty, revealing Chinese attitudes towards innovation and invention.
The Art of Discovery
Author: Maren Elisabeth Schwab
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-11-29
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 069123714X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA panoramic history of the antiquarians whose discoveries transformed Renaissance culture and gave rise to new forms of art and knowledge In the early fifteenth century, a casket containing the remains of the Roman historian Livy was unearthed at a Benedictine abbey in Padua. The find was greeted with the same enthusiasm as the bones of a Christian saint, and established a pattern that antiquarians would follow for centuries to come. The Art of Discovery tells the stories of the Renaissance antiquarians who turned material remains of the ancient world into sources for scholars and artists, inspirations for palaces and churches, and objects of pilgrimage and devotion. Maren Elisabeth Schwab and Anthony Grafton bring to life some of the most spectacular finds of the age, such as Nero’s Golden House and the wooden placard that was supposedly nailed to the True Cross. They take readers into basements, caves, and cisterns, explaining how digs were undertaken and shedding light on the methods antiquarians—and the alchemists and craftspeople they consulted—used to interpret them. What emerges is not an origin story for modern archaeology or art history but rather an account of how early modern artisanal skills and technical expertise were used to create new knowledge about the past and inspire new forms of art, scholarship, and devotion in the present. The Art of Discovery challenges the notion that Renaissance antiquarianism was strictly a secular enterprise, revealing how the rediscovery of Christian relics and the bones of martyrs helped give rise to highly interdisciplinary ways of examining and authenticating objects of all kinds.
Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences
Author: Dana Jalobeanu
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2022-08-27
Total Pages: 2267
ISBN-13: 3319310690
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis Encyclopedia offers a fresh, integrated and creative perspective on the formation and foundations of philosophy and science in European modernity. Combining careful contextual reconstruction with arguments from traditional philosophy, the book examines methodological dimensions, breaks down traditional oppositions such as rationalism vs. empiricism, calls attention to gender issues, to ‘insiders and outsiders’, minor figures in philosophy, and underground movements, among many other topics. In addition, and in line with important recent transformations in the fields of history of science and early modern philosophy, the volume recognizes the specificity and significance of early modern science and discusses important developments including issues of historiography (such as historical epistemology), the interplay between the material culture and modes of knowledge, expert knowledge and craft knowledge. This book stands at the crossroads of different disciplines and combines their approaches – particularly the history of science, the history of philosophy, contemporary philosophy of science, and intellectual and cultural history. It brings together over 100 philosophers, historians of science, historians of mathematics, and medicine offering a comprehensive view of early modern philosophy and the sciences. It combines and discusses recent results from two very active fields: early modern philosophy and the history of (early modern) science. Editorial Board EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Dana Jalobeanu University of Bucharest, Romania Charles T. Wolfe Ghent University, Belgium ASSOCIATE EDITORS Delphine Bellis University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Zvi Biener University of Cincinnati, OH, USA Angus Gowland University College London, UK Ruth Hagengruber University of Paderborn, Germany Hiro Hirai Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Martin Lenz University of Groningen, The Netherlands Gideon Manning CalTech, Pasadena, CA, USA Silvia Manzo University of La Plata, Argentina Enrico Pasini University of Turin, Italy Cesare Pastorino TU Berlin, Germany Lucian Petrescu Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium Justin E. H. Smith University de Paris Diderot, France Marius Stan Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA Koen Vermeir CNRS-SPHERE + Université de Paris, France Kirsten Walsh University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada
