The botanical works of Nehemiah Grew, F. R. S. (1641-1712)

1973 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-231 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Material Things

NEHEMIAH GREW was the first English plant anatomist. He was one of that closely knit group of amateur scientists of the seventeenth century who were consciously applying Baconian principles to the exploration of the natural world. The questions they were asking about material things were new questions, of limited and precise range. The answers they found helped to define the scope and content of new sciences, one by one. In this way Grew mapped out the science of botany. In the writings of these men are to be found a strenuous reaching towards a rational view and an attempt to discard the speculations and superstitions of past ages. Yet their work often showed a curious ambivalence, despite their brave words. They were men of both worlds and the old lies embedded undetected beside the new in their philosophy.

scholarly journals Rational and natural theology in Anne Conway's Principia

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-51
Author(s):  
Jonathan Head
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Religious Epistemology

AbstractThis paper gives an account of the religious epistemology and theological working methods used in Anne Conway's Principia Philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae (1690). It is argued that the epistemic foundations of Conway's philosophical theology are rooted in a personal revelation of the existence and nature of God, which forms a framework through which the natural world can be approached and studied as creation. In this way, we can clarify both the place of Conway's work in the intellectual currents of the seventeenth century and various aspects of her metaphysical system, such as her account of creation.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Laws of God or Laws of Nature?

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Commands ◽  
Theological Understanding ◽  
Will Of God

The appeal to laws of nature as an explanatory principle is often regarded as fundamental to naturalism. Yet when the idea that there were immutable, mathematical laws of nature first rose to prominence in the seventeenth century it was deeply connected to a theological understanding of natural order. Descartes thus imagined laws of nature to be divine commands, and attributed their immutability to the immutability of their divine source. For Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, the invariable uniformity of nature was understood as a consequence not of God’s withdrawal from the world, but of his direct and incessant engagement with it. It followed that the world was to be investigated empirically, because this was the only way in which the otherwise inscrutable will of God could be discerned. Over the course of the following centuries, however, laws came to be reimagined as simply observational generalizations, or brute features of the natural world.

Some Firsts

2021 ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Graham Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Northern Africa ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
The Public ◽  
Pliny The Elder ◽  
History Of ◽  
Public Lives

Although the public lives and history of giraffes have been well recorded in many books, the story of giraffes told in this book would be incomplete without a brief review of how giraffes first entered into the consciousness of those humans who did not live in Africa. They did so via art and literature. The first appearance of giraffes in literature is probably in the Old Testament, but after that, many other authors wrote of them, in particular Pliny the Elder. Their appearance in art begins with rock paintings in southern and northern Africa, and artwork in Egypt over the period 6000 to 3000 BC. More modern images began appearing ~AD 500 in the first texts that dealt with the natural world. Julius Caesar brought the first living giraffe to Europe, followed by Lorenzo de Medici in the thirteenth century. By the late seventeenth century they had disappeared from public view in Europe except as a stellar constellation.

scholarly journals The Saline Chymistry of Color in Seventeenth-Century English Natural History

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 562-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Color Changes ◽  
Natural Philosophers

Before Newton’s seminal work on the spectrum, seventeenth-century English natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Nehemiah Grew and Robert Plot attributed the phenomenon of color in the natural world to salts and saline chymistry. They rejected Aristotelian ideas that color was related to the object’s hot and cold qualities, positing instead that saline principles governed color and color changes in flora, fauna and minerals. In our study, we also characterize to what extent chymistry was a basic analytical tool for seventeenth-century English natural historians.


Painted Gems. The Color Worlds of Portrait Miniature Painting in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 428-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Leonhard
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Painting Technique ◽  
Close Affinity ◽  
Miniature Painting ◽  
Light And Shadow ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Precious Stones

It has been argued persuasively that we should see the art of the portrait miniaturist as being closely related to the art of the goldsmith – with the painted ‘jewel’ of the portrait set into a richly ornamented piece of jewelry. Indeed, there is a close affinity between Nicholas Hilliard’s art of portrait miniature painting and goldsmithery. His Treatise’s famous section devoted to precious stones reflects this idea, as it is concerned with the relationship of those stones to the colors used in the miniatures, colors that can be seen as surrogates for the stones themselves. Color, light and shadow – these three aspects of how to render the natural world into paint are closely related: it is the complexity of the relationship that demanded a painting technique that took care not to create chia­roscuro-effects and specifically not let color be ‘corrupted’ by shadows or ‘mixed’ with other colors.


Marvell’s ‘Nymph Complaining’ and the Erotics of Vitalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 370-386
Author(s):  
Leah S. Marcus
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Natural World ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Bruno Latour ◽  
Hortus Conclusus

This enigmatic complaint has been studied in terms of a number of registers: political and ecocritical, relating to the English Civil War and its devastation of the countryside; Ovidian, relating to the Nymph’s desire to be metamorphosed into part of the natural world as a way of monumentalizing and assimilating her grief; ecclesiastical, relating to traditional images of the English Church as a hortus conclusus; and many others. This chapter briefly surveys these various strangs of meaning and then considers an understudied seventeenth-century context that helps tie them together: vitalist materialist thought, which posited an empathic relationship among humans, elements of nature, and even objects like stones, which we now are likely to consider inanimate. Recent vitalist materialist theorists like Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett interpret earlier vitalist ideas as a reaction against Descartes and his violent separation of the human from the non-human, which ruled out the potential for sub-human entities to feel emotion. But long before Descartes, vitalism flourished in England, thanks to Galenic and Paracelsian medicine, the Hermetic Books and Kabbala, and various other sources. In light of vitalist thinking in England at mid-century, Marvell’s poem can be read as a project for keeping the connections between humans and the natural world alive even amidst the wrenching changes alluded to in the poem.

Pre-Chemistry Concepts and Medical Therapy among Ancient Physicians through the Pre-Socratic Philosophers

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (9) ◽  
pp. 1470-1477
Author(s):  
Luigi Santacroce ◽  
Lucrezia Bottalico ◽  
Kastriot Haxhirexha ◽  
Skender Topi ◽  
Ioannis A. Charitos
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Medical Therapy ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Over Time

Background: Chemistry as experimental science began in the seventeenth century, when it began moving away from being one of the alchemical doctrines and toward analyzing matter and its transformations using scientific methods. Previously, the ancient Pre-Socratic philosophy through observation of nature was concerned with the laws that govern the natural world and the property of matter. Later, the Hellenistic Alexandrian culture took possession of the Hermetic doctrines of the Egyptians, mixing them with pre-Socratic thought and Gnosticism. At this historical moment, therefore, there was a fusion of the Greek philosophical patrimony and the Hellenistic and Alexandrian influences on medicine. The Hermetic gnosis evolved over time to become alchemy and then to usher in the birth of chemical science. Many doctors were wandering philosophers who dealt with cosmogony to understand the body and diseases and to discover new healing drugs for treatment, and thus they were the first chemist therapists. Methods: The influence of ancient physicians through the pre-Socratic philosophy for these prochemical theories and practice has been researched through ancient texts, so these texts have been referenced to determine the legacy of paleo-chemicals doctrines. Results: The study of various texts in particular from the Pre-Socratic age and the eminent physicians underline that, despite a different approach to the cosmogonic concepts of nature and the matter, the medicine of that age had an important influence on chemistry as an experimental science, especially concerning therapy with drugs. Conclusions: The Pre-Socratic philosophers have influenced the medical practice and guided it toward the concept of the properties of matter for medical treatment and an understanding of the causes of diseases.

Writing for the Inner Eye

2019 ◽  
pp. 178-209
Author(s):  
Peter Auger
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Thomas Heywood ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Extraneous Material

Abraham Cowley reacted against the tradition of divine poetry that Du Bartas embodied, arguing that scriptural poets needed to have technical expertise and spiritual insight. As later seventeenth-century poets like Thomas Heywood, John Perrot, and Samuel Pordage became aware of the limits of simply describing literal truths from the Bible and natural world, they reverted to allegorical and other figurative narrative structures that could accommodate higher truths to the human imagination and describe psychological experience. John Milton had known Sylvester’s translation since he was a teenager, but Paradise Lost makes purposeful allusions that surpass Devine Weekes, showing how difficult it is to apprehend divine truth, and how interpretation depends on our point of view. Lucy Hutchinson’s meditations on Genesis revise Du Bartas’ poetics to strip away extraneous material that distracts from scriptural truth.

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