Scientiae Studies – serie

Engraving Accuracy in Early Modern England traces major concepts including: the creation of the visual effects of accuracy through careful action and training; the development of visual judgment and connoisseurship; the role of an epistolary network in the production of knowledge; balancing readers' expectations with representational conventions; and the effects of collecting on the creation and circulation of knowledge. On the one hand, this study uncovers how approaches to knowledge production differed in the seventeenth century as compared with the twenty-first century. On the other, it reveals how the early modern struggle to sort through an overwhelming quantity of visual information - brought on by major changes in image production and circulation - resonates with our own.

This volume aims to uncover the diverse approach to plants in the Renaissance and seventeenth century that paved the way for a definition of botany as a fully-fledged discipline. Its scope expands beyond the natural historical interest in collections and the fabrication of materia medica: moving from Varchi, Matthioli and Bauhin to Locke, Pinelli, and Linnaeus, among others, the contributions collected here connect practical and theoretical features, dealing with the challenges that characterized any involvement with plants. The authors focus on the linguistic shortcomings, problems in authenticating specimens, and efforts to establish new botanical geographies to favour trades, as well as the pursuits of new methodologies, artisanal technologies, and chymical experiments with plants. Botany thus emerges as a suitable discipline to disclose the complexities and challenges of early modern science in general.

Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early modern knowledge cultures; indeed, awareness of the fragility and plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element for understanding early modern science as a whole. Yet early modern actors never questioned the possibility of certainty itself and never objected to the notion that truth is out there, universal, and therefore safe from human manipulation. This book investigates how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern relativism, despite the increasing uncertainties and blatant disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. An international and interdisciplinary team of experts in fields ranging from the history of science to theology and the history of ideas analyses a number of practices that were central to maintaining and functionalizing the notion of absolute truth. Through such an interdisciplinary research the book shows how certainty about truth could be achieved, and how early modern society recognized the credibility of a wide plethora of actors in differentiating fields of knowledge.

This edited collection of papers explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the role of images and objects in early modern knowledge-making practices with an emphasis on mapping methodological approaches against printed pictures and things. The volume brings together work across diverse printed images, objects, and materials produced c. 1500-1700, as well as well as works in the ambit of early modern print culture, to reframe a comparative history of the rise of the ‘epistemic imprint’ as a new visual genre at the onset of the scientific revolution. The book includes contributions from the perspective of international scholars and museum professionals drawing on methodologies from a range of fields.

Tadeas Hajek of Hajek (1526–1600), Latinized as Thaddaeus Hagecius ab Hagek/Hayek, was a key figure in early scientific debates not only in his native Bohemia. A versatile scholar and polymath, he was prolific in medicine, botany, mathematics and astronomy. Modern interpreters tended to point out his astronomical interpretations to emphasize his greatest achievements and his “modernity.” However, Hajek also drew extensively on traditional arts such as alchemy, astrology and metoposcopy. In this volume, the contributors study various aspects of Hayek’s thought to present a less tendentious intellectual portrait of him in the context of his times. Even from this more adequate perspective, he remains an important figure in the dialectical process of transmitting ideas whose influence extended far beyond the Czech lands.

The book identifies to what extent it is possible to speak of a democratization of knowledge in Renaissance Italy. It establishes the boundaries of the present investigation within the Aristotelian tradition, and outlines democratization as a process capable of assigning power to people. It deals with how the democratization of knowledge historically is invested equally in ideas from religion and philosophy, involving the same democratizers, moved by similar intentions, employing identical techniques of vulgarization and targeting equivalent communities of recipients.

Marin Mersenne and the Study of Harmony delves into the central role of music among the early modern sciences by focusing on the work of the French polymath Marin Mersenne (1588–1648). Although now regarded more as an art than a science, music was for many early modern scholars a universal science for studying the harmonies present in all beings. For Mersenne, music’s ability to be quantified while being experienced aesthetically meant that it was the central science to approximate the sounding and inaudible harmonies present in the world and universe at large. Bringing together Mersenne’s interests in the physics of sound and hearing, musical composition, instruments, curiosities, and music from outside Europe, this book shows why so many scholars were drawn to music and how music was at the center of the early modern debate on the foundations of knowledge.

Tadeas Hajek of Hajek (1526–1600), Latinized as Thaddaeus Hagecius ab Hagek/Hayek, was a key figure in early scientific debates not only in his native Bohemia. In this volume, the contributors study various aspects of Hayek’s thought to present a less tendentious intellectual portrait of him in the context of his times.

This book investigates how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern relativism, despite the increasing uncertainties and blatant disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. It focuses on practices of negotiating credibility, not on conflicting notions of the content of truth.

On the one hand, this study uncovers how approaches to knowledge production differed in the 17th century as compared with the 21st century. On the other, it reveals how the early modern struggle to sort through an overwhelming quantity of visual information - brought on by major changes in image production and circulation - resonates with our own.

The book identifies to what extent it is possible to speak of a democratization of knowledge in Renaissance Italy. It establishes the boundaries of the present investigation within the Aristotelian tradition, and outlines democratization as a process capable of assigning power to people. It deals with how the democratization of knowledge historically is invested equally in ideas from religion and philosophy, involving the same democratizers, moved by similar intentions, employing identical techniques of vulgarization and targeting equivalent communities of recipients.

This collection of papers explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the role of images and objects in early modern knowledge-making practices with an emphasis on mapping methodological approaches against printed pictures and things.