scholarly journals Knowing and doing in the sixteenth century: what were instruments for?

2003 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIM BENNETT
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
History Of Astronomy ◽  
Scientific Instruments ◽  
Online Database ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Mathematics ◽  
The Relationship

Despite recent work on scientific instruments by historians of science, the meeting ground between historians and curators of collections has been disappointingly narrow. This study offers, first, a characterization of sixteenth-century mathematical instruments, drawing on the work of curators, as represented by the online database Epact. An examination of the relationship between these instruments and the natural world suggests that the ‘theoric’, familiar from studies of the history of astronomy, has a wider relevance to the domain of practical mathematics. This outcome from a study of collections is then used in re-examining an established question in the history of science, the position of William Gilbert on the motion of the Earth.

Specimen Collectors

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-188
Author(s):  
Reed Gochberg
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Louisa May Alcott ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Comparative Zoology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Philosophical Writings

This chapter examines the early history of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and broader conversations about the representation of the natural world as fixed and stable. While the museum’s founder, Louis Agassiz, emphasized the value of preserved specimens to research and teaching, many collectors and writers questioned such practices. After donating turtles to the museum, Henry David Thoreau contemplated the ethical and scientific implications of freezing nature for extended study. In children’s fiction, Louisa May Alcott emphasized the relationship between collecting specimens and moral order, while highlighting the growing gendered divide between scientific practice in the museum and the parlor. And in philosophical writings, William James drew on classification to consider more flexible possibilities to fixed theories. These accounts show how writers sought to promote a deeper understanding of flux and change both within the museum and beyond.

Lipsius and the Art of Letter-Writing

1956 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 145-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Catherine Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
History Of ◽  
Prose Rhythm ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Precise Role

“The whole history of the ‘epistle,’ as a literary genre, is full of interest and invites investigation.” — W. Rhys Roberts.One of Professor Morris Croll's earliest essays on prose style was an article on Justus Lipsius, the sixteenth-century Belgian scholar and rhetorician whose name has become identified with the “anti-Ciceronian” school of prose. Croll later studied him as the leader of a triumvirate (Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon), and thus clarified somewhat the relationship of English prose style to continental experiments. The indebtedness of certain English writers, like John Hoskyns and Ben Jonson, to the epistolary theory of Lipsius is now well known, but the precise role played by his Epistolica institutio in literary history has never been clearly presented. Because Professor Croll's interests were centered in prose rhythm, he analyzed the Institutio only for the light it shed upon the development of “Attic” prose structure in the Renaissance.

Lexical and Conceptual Arguments and Historical Reading: on the History of SELF

Paragraph ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-142
Author(s):  
James Helgeson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Conceptual Schemes ◽  
French And English ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cognitive Study ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The terms ‘self’ and ‘moi’ appeared within the lexica of French and English at the end of the sixteenth century, for example in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. This paper takes a sceptical approach to lexical arguments about the history of the self and SELF-concepts. Initially, the relationship of SELF to the question of ‘paradigms’ and ‘conceptual schemes’ is discussed via recent work in developmental psychology (Susan Carey) and classic discussions within analytic philosophy (Donald Davidson). The questions raised in the theoretical discussion are then re-examined through short readings of texts that do not contain lexicalized SELF-vocabulary, by the sixteenth-century French writers Maurice Scève and Michel de Montaigne. It is suggested that the importance of lexical arguments to the history of selves and SELF-concepts has been exaggerated, and that cognitive study has the potential to transform the study of the first-person stance and its history.

The Jurisprudence of Humanism

Traditio ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 493-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myron P. Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Major Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

During the last decade the works of Professor Guido Kisch have made an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the legal thought of the sixteenth century, particularly to the school represented by the University of Basel. His articles and monographs have dealt with the biographical and literary history of significant scholars as well as with the rival schools of interpretation represented by ‘mos italicus' and ‘mos gallicus.' Building on these earlier studies, Professor Kisch has now produced a major work of more comprehensive scope, which goes beyond biographical and methodological questions to the analysis of significant change in substantive legal doctrines. Convinced that the age of humanism and the reception of Roman law saw the formation of some of the most important modern legal concepts, he centers his research on the evolution of the theory of equity with due attention, on the one hand, to the relationship between sixteenth-century innovation and the historic western tradition and, on the other, to the interaction between the academic profession and the practicing lawyers.

scholarly journals Seeing the History of the Earth in the Cliffs at Møn: The Interaction between Landscape Painting and Geology in Denmark in the First Half of the 19th Century

Romantik ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gry Hedin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Landscape Painting ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Scientific Advances ◽  
The Way

During the first part of the nineteenth century, geologists developed a history of the earth so different from that accepted in previous centuries that it encouraged a rethinking of the relationship between man and nature. In this article I will argue that painters followed these changes closely and that some of them let the narratives and images of geology inform the way they depicted nature. In arguing my point, I will focus on images and descriptions of the chalk cliffs on the Danish island of Møn by both geologists and painters. I will follow the scientific advances in geology by referring to the texts and images of Søren Abildgaard, Henrich Steffens, Johan Georg Forchhammer, and Christopher Puggaard, and discuss how their changing theories correspond with paintings of the cliffs by four artists: Christopher Wilhelm Eckersberg, Frederik Sødring, Louis Gurlitt, and Peter Christian Skovgaard.

scholarly journals History in High Places: Tatarna Monastery and the Pindus Mountains

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Molly Greene
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Central State ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
History Of ◽  
Promising Source ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Made In

Abstract Monasteries and the records they produced are a promising source base for writing a history of the mountains of the western Balkans. These mountains are, by and large, absent from accounts of the Ottoman presence in the Balkans and, as with mountainous areas more generally, are often considered to exist outside of the main historical narrative. Using the example of a monastery that was founded in the Pindus mountains in 1556, I argue that the monastery’s beginnings are best understood within the context of the Ottoman sixteenth century, even as due regard for Byzantine precedent must also be made. In addition, I pay close attention to the monastery’s location, for two reasons. First, this opens up a new set of questions for the history of monasteries during the Ottoman period; to date most studies have focused on taxation, land ownership and the relationship to the central state. Second, the monastery’s location offers a way into the environmental history of these mountains at the Empire’s western edge. This article aspires to extend the nascent field of Ottoman environmental history into mountainous terrain.

Everywhere in Our Sight

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Physical World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Safe Harbor ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter focuses on the liturgy and psalm singing of a group of Dutch Reformed exiles known as the Stranger church, who found safe harbor under the leadership of Johannes a Lasco in London in the 1550s only to face expulsion after the accession of Mary I. By singing the metrical psalms of Jan Utenhove, the exiles envisioned a community that could be enacted in any place and redefined their relationship to a world in which they had no sanctioned place. Thus the Stranger church reimagined the entire earth as a place of exile and looked to heaven as their home when their bodies rose from the earth. The story of the Dutch Strangers thus separates belief from the political geography of sixteenth-century Europe, and it reveals how the turmoil of the era transformed the relationship between belief and the physical world.

„Ludzie bezdomni” Stefana Żeromskiego jako prefiguracja współczesnej powieści ekologicznej

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (11) ◽  
pp. 414-431
Author(s):  
Dariusz Piechota ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Environment ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Rational Use ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Ecological Thinking

This article attempts to read Żeromski’s novel as a prefiguration of a contemporary ecological novel. The green reading of the writer’s work redirects readers’ attention towards non-human forms of life, introducing alternative optics for describing reality. The story of Tomasz Judym is tangled with the history of the natural world. While wandering around Paris, Warsaw, Cisy and Zagłębie, the protagonist notices the symptoms which prove the progressive degradation of the natural environment. As one of the few protagonists, he sees the destructive impact of industry on the natural environment. Judym is abandoning the anthropocentric perspective in favour of the biocentric one, making him more sensitive to the suffering of others, understood here as non-human inhabitants of the Earth. Nature is a self-regulating living organism, a powerful element whose contemplation can both delight and frighten. “Ludzie bezdomni” anticipates contemporary ecological thinking, which calls for rational use of earthly goods.

Johannes Kepler and the Exploration of the Weight of Substances in the Long Sixteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 328-359
Author(s):  
Cesare Pastorino
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Specific Gravity ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Mathematics ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Extensive List

Abstract Numerous early modern experimentalists, including Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon and Thomas Harriot, viewed one seemingly humble principle – that at a given volume, different substances can be identified by their particular weight, or specific gravity – as a fundamental key to the understanding of nature in general. Johannes Kepler’s Messekunst Archimedis of 1616 contains a striking summary of the experimental research on specific gravities in the long sixteenth-century. Counting himself amongst an extensive list of authors interested in this problem, Kepler mentions not only natural philosophers or mathematicians interested in Archimedes. His account surprisingly includes humanists, instrument makers, antiquarians and assayers. Received histories of specific gravities often focus on antecedents of modern disciplinary concepts and methodologies, where instead, Kepler’s account suggests the existence of a heterogeneous group of early modern experts involved in experiments on the quantification of matter, at the intersection between the history of science, practical mathematics and the humanities.

Growth of Cratons and their Post-Stabilization Histories

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. W. Rogers ◽  
M. Santosh
Keyword(s):  
Continental Crust ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Major Elements ◽  
Tectonic Activity ◽  
Crustal Recycling ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Superior Craton ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Comparative Stability

As we have seen in chapter 3, continental crust evolved from regions of the mantle that contained higher concentrations of LIL elements than regions that underlie typical ocean basins. The most complete record of this evolutionary process is in cratons, which passed through periods of rapid crust production to times of comparative stability over intervals of several hundred million years. After the cratons became stable enough to accumulate sequences of undeformed platform sediments, they moved about the earth without being subjected to further compressive tectonic activity. Because many of the cratons are also partly covered by sediments that are unmetamorphosed or only slightly metamorphosed, they appear to have undergone very little erosion since the sediments were deposited. Thus, a craton may be considered as a large block of continental crust that has been permanently removed from the crustal recycling process. This chapter starts with a discussion of the history of cratons as interpreted from studies of the upper part of the crust. We describe the Superior craton of the Canadian shield and the Western Dharwar craton of southern India within the chapter and use appendix E for brief summaries of other typical cratons. These cratons and numerous others elsewhere developed at different times during earth history, and we look for similarities and differences that may have been caused by progressive cooling of the earth (chapter 2). This section concludes with a summary of the general evolution of cratons and the meaning of the terms “Archean” and “Proterozoic.” The following section is an investigation of processes that occurred following stabilization, all of which take place in the presence of fluids that permeate the crust. We include a summary of these fluids and their effects on anorogenic magmatism and separation of the lower and upper crust. The final section discusses the relationship between cratons and their underlying subcontinental lithospheric mantle (SCLM). Continual metasomatism and metamorphism of the SCLM after cratons develop above it apparently has not destroyed the relationship between the ages of the cratons and the concentrations of major elements in the SCLM. This provides us with an opportunity to determine whether cratons evolved from the mantle beneath them or by depletion of much larger volumes of mantle. The discussions in this chapter are based partly on information summarized in appendices B (heat flow) and D (isotopes).

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