Elena Fabietti - Böcker

The long history of tiny matter(s) in the sciences, thought, and cultureFrom catastrophic weather and steady warming caused by the accumulation of carbon particles in the Earth’s atmosphere to societies brought to a standstill by microscopic viruses, the new millennium has reminded us of how the minutest of phenomena can have outsized effects. This notion is one that has preoccupied the European and Anglo-American cultural imaginary since at least early modernity.Milieus of Minutiae brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to investigate various forms and appearances of minutiae prior to and beyond the advent of magnification. The collection illuminates connections between the empirical practices and technologies with which minutiae have come to be associated and the broader, more diffuse discourses—from the philosophical to the artistic—that have attended theories of smallness before and after Hooke’s Micrographia. Placing essays on Renaissance poetry, Romantic fiction, and matters of punctuation alongside essays on early modern germ theory and the optics of microscopic technology, this rigorously framed volume extends from sixteenth-century pathology to twentieth-century architectural theory, natural science to literature and art.

The long history of tiny matter(s) in the sciences, thought, and cultureFrom catastrophic weather and steady warming caused by the accumulation of carbon particles in the Earth’s atmosphere to societies brought to a standstill by microscopic viruses, the new millennium has reminded us of how the minutest of phenomena can have outsized effects. This notion is one that has preoccupied the European and Anglo-American cultural imaginary since at least early modernity.Milieus of Minutiae brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to investigate various forms and appearances of minutiae prior to and beyond the advent of magnification. The collection illuminates connections between the empirical practices and technologies with which minutiae have come to be associated and the broader, more diffuse discourses—from the philosophical to the artistic—that have attended theories of smallness before and after Hooke’s Micrographia. Placing essays on Renaissance poetry, Romantic fiction, and matters of punctuation alongside essays on early modern germ theory and the optics of microscopic technology, this rigorously framed volume extends from sixteenth-century pathology to twentieth-century architectural theory, natural science to literature and art.

Glass Bodies tells the story of how transparent humans have appeared throughout European history – in fiction, philosophy, and science – and what they reveal about changing ideas of the human.The book takes off in antiquity with the myth of Momus, who reproaches the gods for failing to build a window into the human heart so that humans' thoughts and wishes would be visible. From there, it follows transparent figures into the works of Cervantes, Rousseau, Sterne, and Goethe, and into the world of science, medicine, and public exhibitions: from mechanic eighteenth-century medical models to the famous Transparent Anatomical Manikin displayed in science museums. Elena Fabietti weaves together literature, cultural history, and material culture to show how transparent humans reflected the dreams and anxieties of their own time and how they were shaped by specific material conditions, the history of glass production, and scientific and medical beliefs.Glass bodies, Fabietti shows, have always been more than curiosities; they served as speculative, normative or utopian figures through which cultural tensions were articulated, revealing how people thought about the body, its agency, and limitations.