Science and the Marketplace in Early Modern Italy
Science and the Marketplace in Early Modern Italy

Author: Brendan Maurice Dooley

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780739102329

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In this book, Brendan Dooley examines Italian scientific communications in early modern history. He demonstrates that Italian science between the age of Galileo and the age of Galvani and Volta underwent two revolutions. While the methodological innovations of the time have received copious attention, Dooley is concerned with the revolution in published communicatons, which has hardly been studied at all. What his innovative research shows, in sum, is that the accomplishments of Galvani and Volta were not based upon a cultural void, but rather a century and a half of fervid activity aiming to consolidate the accomplishments of Galileo, reinforce scientific institutions, establish observation and experiment as the dominant methodology, and improve science's public relations. This process challenged traditional institutional hierarchies of specialized knowledge and had far-reaching, interdisciplinary implications for the development of universities, the profession of university science researcher, the academies, and even state government.

Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy
Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy

Author: David Gentilcore

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2006-09-21

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 0199245355

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From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the Italian Protomedicato tribunals, Colleges of Physicians, or Health Offices (jurisdiction varied from state to state) required charlatans to submit their wares for inspection and, upon approval, pay a licence fee in order to set up a stage from which to perform and sell them. The licensing of charlatans became an administrative routine. As far as the medical magistracies were concerned, charlatans had a defineable identity, constituting a specific trade or occupation. This book studies the way charlatans were represented, by contemporaries and by historians, how they saw themselves and, most importantly, it reconstructs the place of charlatans in early modern Italy. It explores the goods and services charlatans provided, their dealings with the public and their marketing strategies. It does so from a range of perspectives: social, cultural, economic, political, geographical, biographical and, of course, medical. Charlatans are not just some curiosity on the fringes of medicine: they offered health care to an extraordinarily wide sector of the population. Moreover, from their origins in Renaissance Italy, the Italian ciarlatano was the prototype for itinerant medical practitioners throughout Europe. This book offers a different look at charlatans. It is the first to take seriously the licences issued to charlatans in the Italian states, compiling them into a 'charlatans database' of over 1,300 charlatans active throughout Italy over the course of some three centuries. In addition, it makes use of other types of archival documents, such as trial records and wills, to give the charlatans a human face, as well as a wide range of artistic and printed sources, not forgetting the output of the charlatans themselves, in the form of handbills and pamphlets.

Watching Vesuvius
Watching Vesuvius

Author: Sean Cocco

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0226923711

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This work explores the question of Vesuvius as an object of study in the early modern science of volcanism from the investigations and opinions of humanists and naturalists in the late Renaissance to the early 18th-century philosophizing on volcanoes and the development of geology later in the century.

Forbidden Knowledge
Forbidden Knowledge

Author: Hannah Marcus

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-09-25

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 022673661X

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“Wonderful . . . offers and provokes meditation on the timeless nature of censorship, its practices, its intentions and . . . its (unintended) outcomes.” —Times Higher Education Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities. Through extensive archival research, Marcus highlights how talk of scientific utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What’s more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded the Copernican debate in astronomy by sixty years, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Beautiful illustrations accompany this masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge. “Marcus deftly explains the various contradictions that shaped the interactions between Catholic authorities and the medical and scientific communities of early modern Italy, showing how these dynamics defined the role of outside expertise in creating 'Catholic Knowledge' for centuries to come.” —Annals of Science “An important study that all scholars and advanced students of early modern Europe will want to read, especially those interested in early modern medicine, religion, and the history of the book. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

Possessing Nature
Possessing Nature

Author: Paula Findlen

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1994-09-16

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 0520917782

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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.

Merchants and Marvels
Merchants and Marvels

Author: Pamela Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-18

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1135300283

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The beginning of global commerce in the early modern period had an enormous impact on European culture, changing the very way people perceived the world around them. Merchants and Marvels assembles essays by leading scholars of cultural history, art history, and the history of science and technology to show how ideas about the representation of nature, in both art and science, underwent a profound transformation between the age of the Renaissance and the early 1700s.

Science and the Secrets of Nature
Science and the Secrets of Nature

Author: William Eamon

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 0691214611

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By explaining how to sire multicolored horses, produce nuts without shells, and create an egg the size of a human head, Giambattista Della Porta's Natural Magic (1559) conveys a fascination with tricks and illusions that makes it a work difficult for historians of science to take seriously. Yet, according to William Eamon, it is in the "how-to" books written by medieval alchemists, magicians, and artisans that modern science has its roots. These compilations of recipes on everything from parlor tricks through medical remedies to wool-dyeing fascinated medieval intellectuals because they promised access to esoteric "secrets of nature." In closely examining this rich but little-known source of literature, Eamon reveals that printing technology and popular culture had as great, if not stronger, an impact on early modern science as did the traditional academic disciplines.

Universities and Science in the Early Modern Period
Universities and Science in the Early Modern Period

Author: Mordechai Feingold

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2006-10-03

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1402039751

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This book includes most of the contributions presented at a conference on “Univ- sities and Science in the Early Modern Period” held in 1999 in Valencia, Spain. The conference was part of the “Five Centuries of the Life of the University of Valencia” (Cinc Segles) celebrations, and from the outset we had the generous support of the “Patronato” (Foundation) overseeing the events. In recent decades, as a result of a renewed attention to the institutional, political, social, and cultural context of scienti?c activity, we have witnessed a reappraisal of the role of the universities in the construction and development of early modern science. In essence, the following conclusions have been reached: (1) the attitudes regarding scienti?c progress or novelty differed from country to country and follow differenttrajectoriesinthecourseoftheearlymodernperiod;(2)institutionsofhigher learning were the main centers of education for most scientists; (3) although the universities were sometimes slow to assimilate new scienti?c knowledge, when they didsoithelpednotonlytoremovethesuspicionthatthenewsciencewasintellectually subversivebutalsotomakesciencearespectableandevenprestigiousactivity;(4)the universities gave the scienti?c movement considerable material support in the form of research facilities such as anatomical theaters, botanical gardens, and expensive instruments; (5) the universities provided professional employment and a means of support to many scientists; and (6) although the relations among the universities and the academies or scienti?c societies were sometimes antagonistic, the two types of institutionsoftenworkedtogetherinharmony,performingcomplementaryratherthan competing functions; moreover, individuals moved from one institution to another, as did knowledge, methods, and scienti?c practices.

A Companion to Early Modern Naples
A Companion to Early Modern Naples

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2013-05-24

Total Pages: 600

ISBN-13: 9004251839

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Naples was one of the largest cities in early modern Europe, and for about two centuries the largest city in the global empire ruled by the kings of Spain. Its crowded and noisy streets, the height of its buildings, the number and wealth of its churches and palaces, the celebrated natural beauty of its location, the many antiquities scattered in its environs, the fiery volcano looming over it, the drama of its people’s devotions, the size and liveliness - to put it mildly - of its plebs, all made Naples renowned and at times notorious across Europe. The new essays in this volume aim to introduce this important, fascinating, and bewildering city to readers unfamiliar with its history. Contributors are: Tommaso Astarita, John Marino, Giovanni Muto, Vladimiro Valerio, Gaetano Sabatini, Aurelio Musi, Giulio Sodano, Carlos José Hernando Sánchez, Elisa Novi Chavarria, Gabriel Guarino, Giovanni Romeo, Peter Mazur, Angelantonio Spagnoletti, J. Nicholas Napoli, Gaetana Cantone, Anthony DelDonna, Sean Cocco, Melissa Calaresu, Nancy Canepa, David Gentilcore, Diana Carrió-Invernizzi, and Anna Maria Rao. The publisher, editor, and contributors mourn the passing of Gaetana Cantone, who died in April 2013.

Books in Motion in Early Modern Europe
Books in Motion in Early Modern Europe

Author: Daniel Bellingradt

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-09-07

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 3319533665

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This book presents and explores a challenging new approach in book history. It offers a coherent volume of thirteen chapters in the field of early modern book history covering a wide range of topics and it is written by renowned scholars in the field. The rationale and content of this volume will revitalize the theoretical and methodological debate in book history. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of early modern book history as well as in a range of other disciplines. It offers book historians an innovative methodological approach on the life cycle of books in and outside Europe. It is also highly relevant for social-economic and cultural historians because of the focus on the commercial, legal, spatial, material and social aspects of book culture. Scholars that are interested in the history of science, ideas and news will find several chapters dedicated to the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge and news media.