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Six Stories is a radically new look at the intersection of science and art through “failed” images.
The remarkable astronomical discoveries made by Galileo with the new telescope in 1609-10 led to his famous disputes with philosophers and religious authorities, most of whom found their doctrines threatened by his evidence for Copernicus's heliocentric universe. In this book, Eileen Reeves brings an art historical perspective to this story as she explores the impact of Galileo's heavenly observations on painters of the early seventeenth century. Many seventeenth-century painters turned to astronomical pastimes and to the depiction of new discoveries in their work, yet some of these findings imposed controversial changes in their use of religious iconography. For example, Galileo's discovery...
The most popular painter of his day, yet an artist whose reputation has fluctuated among art scholars and critics of the succeeding centuries, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) is chiefly remembered today for his large canvases of sensual gardens, religious scenes, and voluptuous "Rubenesque" women. In Oppenheimer's account of his life, Rubens emerges not only as a talented painter but also as an intellectual with a unique conception of beauty that proved very influential and ahead of his time. Oppenheimer explores Rubens' ideas as he tells the story of his life, which included years as a diplomat, and illuminates his response to the humanism of the Renaissance in which he lived.
"Joanna Picciotto's Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England is a splendid study of the origins, devlopment, and eventual decline of the Experimentalist tradition in seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century English letters. In tracing out the arc of this intellectual and professional trajectory, Picciotto engages productively with the crucial religious, socio-economic, philosophical, and literary movements associated with the ongoing labors of the `innocent eye'".---Eileen Reeves, Princetion University --
The Journey to Wisdom addresses a broad array of topics in education, the natural world, and medieval intellectual history. The book examines a philosophy of education that originated with the ancient Greeks and that reached its culmination in the late-medieval and early-Renaissance periods. That philosophy of education promotes a journey to wisdom, involving an escape from pure subjectivity and ?the seductions of rhetoric? and leading to a profound awareness of the natural world and ?nature?s God.? It grants us a renewed sense of education as a self-directed, transforming journey to knowledge and insight?rather than (as is so often the case now) as an impersonal, bureaucratized trek that re...
The origins of the telescope have been discussed and debated since shortly after the instrument's appearance in The Hague in 1608. Civic and national pride have led local dignitaries, popular writers, and numerous scholars to search the archives and to construct sharply divergent histories. Did the honor of the invention belong to the Dutch, to the Italians, to the English, or to the Spanish? And if the city of Middelburg in the Netherlands was, in fact, the cradle of the instrument, was the "true inventor" Hans Lipperhey or his rival Zacharias Jansen? Or was the instrument there before anyone knew it? Over the past several decades, a group of historians and scientists have sought out new documents, re-examined familiar ones, and tested early lenses and telescopes. This volume contains the proceedings of a symposium held in Middelburg in September 2008 to mark 400 years of the telescope. The essays in it, taken as a whole, present a new and convincing account of the origins of the instrument that changed mankind's vision of the universe.
This book looks at Galileo's friend, student, and patron, Gianfrancesco Sagredo (1571-1620). Sagredo's life brings to light the relationship between the production, distribution, and reception of political information and scientific knowledge.
The fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries were truly an Age of Secrecy in Europe, when arcane knowledge was widely believed to be positive knowledge which extended into all areas of daily life. So asserts Daniel Jütte in this engrossing, vivid, and award-winning work. He maintains that the widespread acceptance and even reverence for this “economy of secrets” in premodern Europe created a highly complex and sometimes perilous space for mutual contact between Jews and Christians. Surveying the interactions between the two religious groups in a wide array of secret sciences and practices, the author relates true stories of colorful “professors of secrets” and clandestine encounters. In the process Jütte examines how our current notion of secrecy is radically different in this era of WikiLeaks, Snowden, etc., as opposed to centuries earlier when the truest, most important knowledge was generally considered to be secret by definition.
Figures of Chance I: Chance in Literature and the Arts (16th–21st Centuries) proposes a transhistorical analysis that will serve as a reference work on the evolution of literary and artistic representations of chance and contingency. Alongside its multidisciplinary companion volume (Figures of Chance II), it considers how the projective and predictive capacity of societies is shaped by representations and cultural models of a reality that is understood, to varying degrees, to be contingent, unpredictable, or chaotic. Giving special emphasis to the French context while also developing broad cross-cultural comparisons, this volume examines the dialogue between evolving conceptions and changing representations of chance, from Renaissance figures of Fortune to the data-driven world of the present. Written by recognized specialists of each of the periods studied, it identifies and historicizes the main fictional and factual modes of portraying, narrating, and comprehending chance in the West.
Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.