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“Science” and “Religion” have been two major elements in the building of modern nation-states. While contemporary historiography of science has studied the interactions between nation building and the construction of modern scientific and technological institutions, “science-and-religion” is still largely based on a supposed universal historiography in which global notions of “science” and of “religion” are seldom challenged. This book explores the interface between science, religion and nationalism at a local level, paying attention to the roles religious institutions, specific confessional traditions, or an undefined notion of “religion” played in the construction o...
From the books of H.G. Wells to the press releases of NASA, we are awash in cliched claims about technology and history, writes David Edgerton. Now, in The Shock of the Old, Edgerton offers a startling new and fresh way of thinking about the history of technology, radically revising our ideas about the interaction of technology and society in the past and in the present. Our sense of technological time--and our thinking about technology and production, nationalism, war, and more besides--will all be changed, and to a surprising degree. Modern technology, writes Edgerton, is not just a matter of electricity, mass production, aerospace, nuclear power, and the internet. It also involves the ric...
Migration is a problem of highest importance today, and likewise is its history. Italian migrants who had to leave the peninsula in the long sixteenth century because of their heterodox Protestant faith is a topic that has its deep roots in Italian Renaissance scholarship since Delio Cantimori: It became a part of a twentieth century form of Italian leyenda negra in liberal historiography. But its international dimension and Central Europe (not only Germany) as destination of that movement has often been neglected. Three different levels of connectivity are addressed: the materiality of communication (travel, printing, the diffusion of books and manuscripts); individual migrants and their biographies and networks; and the cultural transfers, discourses, and ideas migrating in one or in both directions.
Narrative Science examines the use of narrative in scientific research over the last two centuries. It brings together an international group of scholars who have engaged in intense collaboration to find and develop crucial cases of narrative in science. Motivated and coordinated by the Narrative Science project, funded by the European Research Council, this volume offers integrated and insightful essays examining cases that run the gamut from geology to psychology, chemistry, physics, botany, mathematics, epidemiology, and biological engineering. Taking in shipwrecks, human evolution, military intelligence, and mass extinctions, this landmark study revises our understanding of what science is, and the roles of narrative in scientists' work. This title is also available as Open Access.
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"This volume includes the original Latin text of Della Porta's "De Refractione" with English translation. Della Porta's volume explored optics at the time of the late Renaissance."--
Anthony Grafton explores the art and influence of an opaque historical figure: the magus, or learned magician. A distinctive intellectual type in Renaissance Europe, magi contributed to the humanistic currents of the time and had a transformative impact on public life, influencing advances in sculpture, painting, engineering, and other fields.
The Middle Ages in Western Europe extended from roughly 500 to 1500 c.e. During these thousand years, hundreds of monastic communities were founded and played important roles in religious, economic, social, literary and even military realms. Each had different emphases and goals, ranging from aristocratic monasteries and nunneries that offered comfort and security, to rural institutions that specialized only in the most ascetic lifestyles. This book has two goals. The first is to detail the most significant monastic and secular events of the Middle Ages in Western Europe, such as the decline of the Roman Catholic Church, the rise of Protestantism and the various types and purposes of monasteries and nunneries. The second is to introduce some notable (and unusual) individuals who made their mark upon the Middle Ages-- such as Eustache, the French monk who became a pirate and made a pact with the Devil.
A 400-year history of the development of alchemy in England that brings to light the evolution of the practice. In medieval and early modern Europe, the practice of alchemy promised extraordinary physical transformations. Who would not be amazed to see base metals turned into silver and gold, hard iron into soft water, and deadly poison into elixirs that could heal the human body? To defend such claims, alchemists turned to the past, scouring ancient books for evidence of a lost alchemical heritage and seeking to translate their secret language and obscure imagery into replicable, practical effects. Tracing the development of alchemy in England over four hundred years, from the beginning of ...
Medicine and the Inquisition offers a wide-ranging and nuanced account of the role played by the Roman, Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in shaping medical learning and practice in the period from 1500 to 1850. Until now, learned medicine has remained a secondary subject in scholarship on Inquisitions. This volume delves into physicians’ contributions to the inquisitorial machinery as well as the persecution of medical practitioners and the censorship of books of medicine. Although they are commonly depicted as all-pervasive systems of repression, the Inquisitions emerge from these essays as complex institutions. Authors investigate how boundaries between the medical and the religious w...