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Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname.
This first volume of Collected Works of the ERC Project TYPARABIC focuses on the history of printing during the 18th century in the Ottoman Empire and the Romanian Principalities among diverse linguistic and confessional communities. Although "most roads lead to Istanbul," the many pathways of early modern Ottoman printing also connected authors, readers and printers from Central and South-Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Levant. The papers included in this volume are grouped in three sections. The first focuses on the first Turkish-language press in the Ottoman capital, examining the personality and background of its founder, İbrahim Müteferrika, the legal issues it faced, and its c...
In this follow-up to his popular Science Secrets, Alberto A. Martinez discusses various popular myths from the history of mathematics: that Pythagoras proved the hypotenuse theorem, that Archimedes figured out how to test the purity of a gold crown while he was in a bathtub, that the Golden Ratio is in nature and ancient architecture, that the young Galois created group theory the night before the pistol duel that killed him, and more. Some stories are partly true, others are entirely false, but all show the power of invention in history. Pythagoras emerges as a symbol of the urge to conjecture and "fill in the gaps" of history. He has been credited with fundamental discoveries in mathematic...
It is generally agreed that great men transcend their time while ordinary men remain rooted in it. This is why, if we want to know what life was like in days gone by, we must study those who were most representative of their age, those individuals who, though they may have achieved a modicum of fame or notoriety, are now, because of their limited abilities and outlook, largely forgotten. The great figures involved in the political and religious controversies that took of the seventeenth century and the beginning place in Holland! towards the end of the eighteenth, men such as Bayle, Jurieu, Le Clerc and others who were in the forefront of what has been aptly termed as the "crise de la consci...
This is a book about a box that contained the world. The box was the Picture Academy for the Young, a popular encyclopedia in pictures invented by preacher-turned-publisher Johann Siegmund Stoy in eighteenth-century Germany. Children were expected to cut out the pictures from the Academy, glue them onto cards, and arrange those cards in ordered compartments—the whole world filed in a box of images. As Anke te Heesen demonstrates, Stoy and his world in a box epitomized the Enlightenment concern with the creation and maintenance of an appropriate moral, intellectual, and social order. The box, and its images from nature, myth, and biblical history, were intended to teach children how to coll...
Introduction -- Precocious in print -- Acting like children -- Kinderlieder and the work of play -- Cadences of the childlike -- Toying with Mozart.