Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe

About this book

Today we are used to clear divisions between science and the arts. But early modern thinkers had no such distinctions, with 'knowledge' being a truly interdisciplinary pursuit. Each chapter of this collection presents a case study from a different area of knowledge, including the acceptance of heliocentrism, Shakespeare's use of science and magic in The Tempest, and the use of scripture to refute Descartes's claims in A Discourse on Method (1637). Knowing Nature in Early Modern Europe comes out of an ongoing project, Scientiae, examining the nexus of Renaissance Europe and the history and philosophy of science.

Contents

Introduction: Early Modern Disciplines of Knowing: Scientiae – David Beck
1 The Cosmology of Martinus Szent-Ivany (1633–1705) – Svorad Zavarský
2 Johann Jacob Zimmermann and God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology in Lutheran Germany, c.1700 – Mike A Zuber
3 Urbanity, Laughter, Therapy – Stephen Pender
4 Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Magic, Science and Mastery in the Early Modern World – Donald Carlson
5 The Use of Scripture in the Beast-Machine Controversy – Lloyd Strickland
6 The Part and the whole: Architectonics of knowledge in Seventeenth Century Thought – Kevin Killeen
7 'Not a Hundred Sorts of Beasts, not Two Hundred of Birds': Universal Language-Schemes and the Early Modern End of the World – James Dougal Fleming
8 Early Modern Natural Science as an Agent for Change in Naturalist Painting: Jacopo Ligozzi’s Zoological Illustrations as a Case Study – Angelica Groom
9 May not Duration be Represented as Distinctly as Space? – Stephen Boyd Davis
10 'Approved … Confirmed … and Dayly Tried': The Rise of Experience in Sixteenth-Century English Instructional Writing – Adam Rzepka

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