David Beck is an Academic Technologist and Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick, where his research interests lie in the intellectual culture of England through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is a member of Council of the British Society for the History of Science and co-founder of Scientiae, an academic society at the nexus of Renaissance/early-modern studies and history/philosophy of science.

"Knowing Nature in Modern Europe provides a series of intriguing insights into how nature was studied and interpreted in early modern Europe."--Thinking Like A Mountain- The Weird & Wonderful in the History of Science & the Environment

• Introduction - David Beck Part I: Unity and the Investigation of Nature 1 'Not a Hundred Sorts of Beasts, Not Two Hundred of Birds': Universal Language and the Early Modern End of the World - James Dougal Fleming 2 The Moral Physiology of Laughter - Stephen Pender 3 The Part and the Whole: Architectonics of Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century English Thought - Kevin Killeen Part II: God's Two Books 4 The Use of Scripture in the Beast Machine Controversy - Lloyd Strickland 5 Johann Jacob Zimmermann and God's Two Books: Copernican Cosmology in Lutheran Germany around 1700 - Mike A Zuber 6 The Cosmology of Martinus Szent-Ivany SJ (1633-1705): Some Philological Notes on His Dissertatio Cosmographica Seu de Mundi Systemate - Svorad Zavarsky Part III: Imagination and Reality: Time, Zoology and Memory 7 May Not Duration Be Represented as Distinctly as Space? Geography and the Visualization of Time in the Early Eighteenth Century - Stephen Boyd Davis 8 Early Modern Natural Science as an Agent for Change in Naturalist Painting: Jacopo Ligozzi's Zoological Illustrations as a Case Study - Angelica Groom 9 'Direct Ideas': The Quotidian Imagination in John Willis's 1618 Memory Theater - Adam Rzepka