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European Physico-Theology (1650-C. 1760) in Context by Kaspar von Greyerz Pdf
Physico-theology celebrated the observation of nature as a way toward recognising God as Creator, demonstrating the compatibility of the biblical record with new science. This is an English-language monograph which studies the impact of physico-theology on the intellectual and socio-cultural establishment in Europe from the mid-17th century.--
European Physico-theology (1650-c.1760) in Context by Kaspar von Greyerz Pdf
Physico-theology celebrated the observation of nature as a way toward the recognition of God as Creator and to demonstrate the compatibility of the biblical record with the new science. It was a crucial, albeit often underestimated element in the intellectual as well as socio-cultural establishment of the new science in western and central Europe beginning in the mid-seventeenth century. The importance of physico-theology in enhancing the acceptance of the new science among a broad educated public cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately, this insight has not yet received much attention in the history of early modern science, chiefly because the history of physico-theology tends to highlight the activities of virtuosi rather than well-known scientists. A contribution to the history of knowledge, this is the first monograph in English on physico-theology on the European scale. It concentrates on two genres, the argument from design, and the palaeontological argument regarding the role of the Deluge in the formation of fossils. It does so without neglecting practice (correspondence and collecting). It pays considerable attention to the historical context, above all to the new image of God as a wise, benevolent, rather than unpredictable being, which provided the practitioners of physico-theology (including clergy, physicians, lawyers, and philologists) with a new and powerful argument. It draws attention to the predominantly Protestant nature of the phenomenon and looks at the longevity of the argument from design in Britain and the Netherlands, where its demise came about as late as the first half of the nineteenth century.
Disaster in the Early Modern World by Ovanes Akopyan,David Rosenthal Pdf
How did early modern societies think about disasters, such as earthquakes or floods? How did they represent disaster, and how did they intervene to mitigate its destructive effects? This collection showcases the breadth of new work on the period ca. 1300-1750. Covering topics that range from new thinking about risk and securitisation to the protection of dikes from shipworm, and with a geography that extends from Europe to Spanish America, the volume places early modern disaster studies squarely at the intersection of intellectual, cultural and socio-economic history. This period witnessed fresh speculation on nature, the diffusion of disaster narratives and imagery and unprecedented attempts to control the physical world. The book will be essential to specialists and students of environmental history and disaster, as well as general readers who seek to discover how pre-industrial societies addressed some of the same foundational issues we grapple with today.
Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment by Michael Hunter Pdf
Anxiety about the threat of atheism was rampant in the early modern period, yet fully documented examples of openly expressed irreligious opinion are surprisingly rare. England and Scotland saw only a handful of such cases before 1750, and this book offers a detailed analysis of three of them. Thomas Aikenhead was executed for his atheistic opinions at Edinburgh in 1697; Tinkler Ducket was convicted of atheism by the Vice-Chancellor's court at the University of Cambridge in 1739; whereas Archibald Pitcairne's overtly atheist tract, Pitcairneana, though evidently compiled very early in the eighteenth century, was first published only in 2016. Drawing on these, and on the better-known apostacy of Christopher Marlowe and the Earl of Rochester, Michael Hunter argues that such atheists showed real 'assurance' in publicly promoting their views. This contrasts with the private doubts of Christian believers, and this book demonstrates that the two phenomena are quite distinct, even though they have sometimes been wrongly conflated.
The Mishnaic Moment by Piet van Boxel,Kirsten Macfarlane,Joanna Weinberg Pdf
This collection of essays treats a topic that has scarcely been approached in the literature on Hebrew and Hebraism in the early modern period. In the seventeenth century, Christians, especially Protestants, studied the Mishnah alongside a host of Jewish commentaries in order to reconstructJewish culture, history, and ritual, shedding new light on the world of the Old and New Testaments. Their work was also inextricably dependent upon the vigorous Mishnaic studies of early modern Jewish communities. Both traditions, in a sense, culminated in the monumental production in six volumes ofan edition and Latin translation of the Mishnah published by Guilielmus Surenhusius in Amsterdam between 1698 and 1703. Surenhusius gathered up more than a century's worth of Mishnaic studies by scholars from England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as the commentaries of Maimonidesand Obadiah of Bertinoro (c. 1455-c.1515), but this edition was also born out of the unique milieu of Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century, a place which offered possibilities for cross-cultural interactions between Jews and Christians. With Surenhusius's great volumes as an end point,the essays presented here discuss for the first time the multiple ways in which the canonical text of Jewish law, the Mishnah (c.200 CE), was studied by a variety of scholars, both Jewish and Christian, in early modern Europe. They tell the story of how the Mishnah generated an encounter betweendifferent cultures, faiths, and confessions that would prove to be enduringly influential for centuries to come.
Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy by Giuliano Mori Pdf
While humanists agreed on identifying the main requirement of the historical genre with truthfulness, they disagreed on their notions of historical truth. Some authors equated historical truth with verisimilitude, thus harmonizing the quest for truth with other ingredients of their histories, such as their political utility and rhetorical aptness. Others, instead, rejected the notion of verisimilitude, identifying historical truth with factuality. Accordingly, they sought to produce bare and exhaustive accounts of all the things that pertained to their historical explorations, often resorting to innovative disciplines, such as archeology, philology, and the history of institutions. The humanist historiographical debate is especially significant because the notion of verisimilitude encompassed crucial elements required for the development of methods of critical assessment. By perceiving verisimilitude and factuality as irreconcilable, Quattrocento humanists reached a critical impasse—those who were interested in factual truth mostly lacked the means to ascertain it, while those that developed embryonic notions of historical criticism were not eminently concerned with the factual account of the past. This critical weakness exposed humanists to considerable risks, including that of accepting non-verisimilar historical forgeries passed off as factual. Such forgeries eventually served as a testing ground for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars, who sought to restore factual truth by means of critical criteria grounded in verisimilitude, thus overcoming the humanist impasse. Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy addresses Renaissance history, philosophy, rhetoric, and jurisprudence to shed light on how humanists conceptualized truth and, more specifically, historical truth.
Latin Scientific Literature, 1450-1850 by Martin Korenjak Pdf
During the early modern period, the emergence of what ultimately became modern science took place mainly in Latin, the international language of educated discourse of the era. Hundreds of thousands of scientific texts were published in Latin from the invention of print around 1450 to the demise of Latin as a language of science around 1850. Despite its importance, our knowledge of this literature is extremely limited. This book aims to provide an overview of this area, the first ever to be written. It does so, not from the perspective of a natural scientist or a historian of science, but of a literary scholar. Instead of the scientific content or methodology of the respective works, it focusses on the genres of scientific literature and their communicative functions. Latin Scientific Literature, 1450-1850 falls into two main parts. The first part ('Contexts') introduces four aspects of early modern intellectual culture which are crucial for an understanding of the scientific literature of the time: the development of science, the role of Latin, the concept of literature, and the rise of print. Part two ('Texts'), offers an overview of Neo-Latin scientific literature. Subsumed under five communicative functions - disclosing sources, presenting facts, arguing for certain positions, summarizing knowledge, and publicizing science - twenty pertinent genres are discussed.
The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages by Mary Carruthers Pdf
Uses lexical analyses of key terms employed by medieval people to valuate their own aesthetic feelings to show how flux and change, and the creative tension of antithetical physical qualities from which all things were thought to be made (cold, hot, dry, wet), govern the pleasures medieval artists sought to produce.
Transmitting Knowledge by Sachiko Kusukawa,Ian Maclean Pdf
The period between the fifteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries saw a great many changes and innovations in scientific thinking. These were communicated to various publics in diverse ways; not only through discursive prose and formal notations, but also in the form of instruments and images accompanying texts. The collected essays of this volume examine the modes of transmission of this knowledge in a variety of contexts. The schematic representation of instruments is examined in the case of the 'navicula' (a versatile version of a sundial) and the 'squadro' (a surveying instrument); the new forms of illustration of plants and the human body are investigated through the work of Fuchs and Vesalius; theories of optics and of matter are discussed in relation to the illustrations which accompany the texts of Ausonio and Descartes. The different diagrammatic strategies adopted to explain the complex medical theory of the latitude of health are charted through the work of medieval and sixteenth-century physicians; Kepler's use of illustration in his handbook of cosmology is placed in the context of book production and Copernican propaganda. The conception of astronomical instruments as either calculating devices or as cosmological models is examined in the case of Tycho Brahe and others. A study is devoted to the multiple functions of frontispieces and to the various readerships for which they were conceived. The papers in the volume are all based on new research, and they constitute together a coherent and convergent set of case studies which demonstrate the vitality and inventiveness of early modern natural philosophers, and their awareness of the media available to them for transmitting knowledge.
"Can you Count the Clouds?" asks the voice of God from the whirlwind in the stunningly beautiful catalogue of nature-questions from the Old Testament Book of Job. Tom McLeish takes a scientist's reading of this ancient text as a centrepiece to make the case for science as a deeply human and ancient activity, embedded in some of the oldest stories told about human desire to understand the natural world. Drawing on stories from the modern science of chaos and uncertainty alongside medieval, patristic, classical and Biblical sources, Faith and Wisdom in Science challenges much of the current 'science and religion' debate as operating with the wrong assumptions and in the wrong space. Its narrative approach develops a natural critique of the cultural separation of sciences and humanities, suggesting an approach to science, or in its more ancient form natural philosophy - the 'love of wisdom of natural things' - that can draw on theological and cultural roots. Following the theme of pain in human confrontation with nature, it develops a 'Theology of Science', recognising that both scientific and theological worldviews must be 'of' each other, not holding separate domains. Science finds its place within an old story of participative reconciliation with a nature, of which we start ignorant and fearful, but learn to perceive and work with in wisdom. Surprisingly, science becomes a deeply religious activity. There are urgent lessons for education, the political process of decision-making on science and technology, our relationship with the global environment, and the way that both religious and secular communities alike celebrate and govern science.
This highly acclaimed volume examines the one firm bridge between the art of the humanists and the painters of the early Italian Renaissance: what Petrarch and other humanists wrote about painting. Baxandall surveys the main themes of their art criticism and describes how their language conditioned their insights into painting.
Joseph Scaliger: Historical chronology by Anthony Grafton Pdf
This book describes the later life of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), the most original scholar of the later Renaissance. It concentrates on his efforts to date the main events of ancient and medieval history using both astronomical data and philological methods.
The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy by Ohad Nachtomy,Justin E. H. Smith Pdf
The present volume advances a recent historiographical turn towards the intersection of early modern philosophy and the life sciences by bringing together many of its leading scholars to present the contributions of important but often neglected figures, such as Ralph Cudworth, Nehemiah Grew, Francis Glisson, Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Georg Ernst Stahl, Juan Gallego de la Serna, Nicholas Hartsoeker, Henry More, as well as more familiar figures such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, and Kant. The contributions to this volume are organized in accordance with the particular problems that living beings and living nature posed for early modern philosophy: the problem of life in general, whether it constitutes something ontologically distinct at all, or whether it can ultimately be exhaustively comprehended "in the same manner as the rest"; the problem of the structure of living beings, by which we understand not just bare anatomy but also physiological processes such as irritability, motion, digestion, and so on; the problem of generation, which might be included alongside digestion and other vital processes, were it not for the fact that it presented such an exceptional riddle to philosophers since antiquity, namely, the riddle of coming-into-being out of -- apparent or real -- non-being; and, finally, the problem of natural order.
In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.