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On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hermann Graßmann (1809-1877), an interdisciplinary conference was held in Potsdam, Germany, and in Graßmann's hometown Szczecin, Poland. The idea of the conference was to present a multi-faceted picture of Graßmann, and to uncover the complexity of the factors that were responsible for his creativity. The conference demonstrated not only the very influential reception of his work at the turn of the 20th century, but also the unexpected modernity of his ideas, and their continuing development in the 21st century. This book contains 37 papers presented at the conference. They investigate the significance of Graßmann's work for philos...
Historically, the idea that the stars and planets influence the Earth and its inhabitants has proved powerful in almost every culture, offering an important context for the use of mathematical and astronomical instruments. In the past, however, historians of astronomy have paid relatively little attention to astrology and other “non-scientific” topics, while historians of astrology have tended to concentrate on the analysis of texts rather than surviving artefacts, scientific instruments in particular. Heaven and Earth United is an attempt to redress the balance through an exploration of the astrological contexts in which instruments once found a place. Contributors are Silke Ackermann, Marisa Addomine, Jim Bennett, Marvin Bolt, Louise E. Devoy, Richard Dunn, Seb Falk, Stephen Johnston, Richard L. Kremer, Günther Oestmann, Josefina Rodríguez-Arribas, Petra G. Schmidl, Giorgio Strano, and Sylvia Sumira.
The Gregorian calendar reform of 1582, which provided the basis for the civil and Western ecclesiastical calendars still in use today, has often been seen as a triumph of early modern scientific culture or an expression of papal ambition in the wake of the Counter-Reformation. Much less attention has been paid to reform's intellectual roots in the European Middle Ages, when the reckoning of time by means of calendrical cycles was a topic of central importance to learned culture, as impressively documented by the survival of relevant texts and tables in thousands of manuscripts copied before 1500. For centuries prior to the Gregorian reform, astronomers, mathematicians, theologians, and even ...
Early modern Spain was a global empire in which a startling variety of medical cultures came into contact, and occasionally conflict, with one another. Spanish soldiers, ambassadors, missionaries, sailors, and emigrants of all sorts carried with them to the farthest reaches of the monarchy their own ideas about sickness and health. These ideas were, in turn, influenced by local cultures. This volume tells the story of encounters among medical cultures in the early modern Spanish empire. The twelve chapters draw upon a wide variety of sources, ranging from drama, poetry, and sermons to broadsheets, travel accounts, chronicles, and Inquisitorial documents; and it surveys a tremendous regional ...