David Beck is an Academic Technologist and Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick, UK.

"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

• Part 1: 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 2 The Moral Physiology of Laughter 3. The Part and the Whole: Architectonics of Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century English Thought Part 2: God's Two Books 4. The Use of Scripture in the Beast Machine Controversy 5. Johann Jacob Zimmermann and God's Two Books: Copernican Cosmology in Lutheran Germany around 1700 6. The Cosmology of Martinus Szent-Ivany SJ (1633-1705): Some Philological Notes on His Dissertatio Cosmographica Seu de Mundi Systemate Part 3: 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 8. Early Modern Natural Science as an Agent for Change in Naturalist Painting: Jacopo Ligozzi's Zoological Illustrations as a Case Study 9. 'Direct Ideas': The Quotidian Imagination in John Willis's 1618 Memory Theater