‘For the Sciences Migrate, Just Like People’: The Case of Botanical Knowledge in the Early Modern Iberian Empires

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Ran Segev
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Botanical Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Juan De Cardenas ◽  
Unique Vantage

Abstract In his writings, Francis Bacon emphasized the interrelatedness between the migration of people and knowledge, arguing that Europeans of his time had surpassed the greatest civilizations because of their ability to traverse the world freely. Concentrating on Spanish observers who investigated New Spain’s flora, this article bridges theory and practice by examining the Iberian roots of Bacon’s views. The article examines scientific approaches for acquiring bioknowledge by Iberians who specialized in European medicine, including Francisco Hernández, Juan de Cárdenas and Francisco Ximénez. While the article recognizes the contribution of travellers and expatriates to Spain’s bioprospecting project, it also points to the ways in which the limitations of the transfer of botanical information was acknowledged, and discusses its meaning. By presenting the complexities in the communication of knowledge, I argue, naturalists in the colonies could highlight their unique vantage point in relation to “armchair” specialists in the metropole.

Camming

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Mixed Methods Study ◽  
Sex Industry ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
The World ◽  
Unique Vantage

Camming is based on a five-year mixed-methods study of the erotic webcam industry, and tells a pornographic story about the multibillion-dollar online sex industry colloquially called “camming.” Through camming, millions of people from all over the globe have found decent wages, friendship, intimacy, community, empowerment, and pleasure. This deeply rich book is filled with the stories of a diverse sample of cam models from around the world. This book is not a utopian tale. Cam models, like all sex workers, must grapple with exploitation, discrimination, harassment, and stigmatization. Using an intersectional lens, Jones is attentive to how the overlapping systems of neoliberal capitalism, White supremacy, patriarchy, cissexism, heterosexism, and ableism shape all cam models’ experiences in this new global sex industry. This thorough examination of the camming industry provides a unique vantage point from which to understand and theorize around gender, sexuality, race, and labor in a time when workers globally face increasing economic precariousness and worsened forms of alienation, and desperately desire to recapture pleasure in work. Despite the serious issues cam models face, Jones’s focus on pleasure will help people better understand the motivations for engaging in online sex work, as well as the complex social interactions between cam models and customers. In Camming, Jones pioneers an entirely new subfield in sociology—the sociology of pleasure. The sociology of pleasure can provide new insights into the motivation for social behavior and assist sociologists in analyzing social interactions in everyday life.

scholarly journals THE SOCIAL, PERSONAL, AND SPIRITUAL DYNAMICS OF GHOST STORIES IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-359
Author(s):  
LAURA SANGHA
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
And Gender

AbstractIn early modern England, spectral figures were regular visitors to the world of the living and a vibrant variety of beliefs and expectations clustered around these questionable shapes. Yet whilst historians have established the importance of ghosts as cultural resources that were used to articulate a range of contemporary concerns about worldly life, we know less about the social and personal dynamics that underpinned the telling, recording, and circulation of ghost stories at the time. This article therefore focuses on a unique set of manuscript sources relating to apparitions in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England to uncover a different vantage point. Drawing on the life-writing and correspondence of the antiquarian who collected the narratives, it lays bare concerns about familial relations and gender that ghost stories were bound up with. Tracing the way that belief in ghosts functioned at an individual level also allows the recovery of the personal religious sensibilities and spiritual imperatives that sustained and nourished continuing belief in ghosts. This subjective angle demonstrates that ghost stories were closely intertwined with processes of grieving and remembering the dead, and they continued to be associated with theological understandings of the afterlife and the fate of the soul.

scholarly journals Entre mondanité et libertinage : figures de l’amitié dans les romans de Charles Sorel

2017 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Patricia Gauthier
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
Charles Sorel ◽  
The Social ◽  
Comic Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Unique Vantage

BETWEEN WORLDLY FRIENDSHIP AND LIBERTINAGE : FIGURES OF FRIENDSHIP IN CHARLES SOREL’S NOVELSFriendship was an essential ferment in the advent of a new kind of sociability in the seven­teenth-century France. The comic novel — and especially Sorel’s works— with its ambition to accurately portraiting the world, provides a unique vantage point for observing this phenomenon. Whether honest friendship is praised or mocked, Sorel offers various images of a link between the characters that is often tantamount to belonging to the same environment. As a criterion of social dis­crimination, friendship is shown in an ambivalent light: thus, Lysis is mocked by his friends because he does not control gallantry codes Berger extravagant. Yet, the purpose is not to denigrate a virtue regarded as fundamental in the social life. The reason why Neophile and Polyandre are friends yet love rivals Polyandre, just as are Francion and Cléandre Francion, is that narrative techniques shift the painting of friendship towards an aesthetic of varietas meant to make it plausible. Thus the characters embody different variations of the stereotype of worldly friendship, allowing the reader to question its role in the society of the time. This worldly aspect is complemented by Sorel with another one in which the society of friends constitutes a crucible for other values that are capable to transcend the artifice of the most commonly shared social codes to assert a libertine credo Francion.

Examples and experience: on the uncertainty of medicine

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN PENDER
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical History ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Medical Theory ◽  
The Common ◽  
Medical Writers

After a brief account of the uncertainty of medicine in early modern thought, this paper focuses on two supple, sophisticated accounts of medicine by ‘non-medical’ writers – Michel de Montaigne's views of medical theory and medical practice and Francis Bacon's proposals for renovating both – in which the claims of individual sufferers are set against the normativity of medicine as a whole. From around 1500 to around 1680, in the common ensemble of both learned and popular invective, medicine was disparaged as poor philosophy and worse practice, even as the ‘lowest of professions’. In remarkably broad, elegant interventions, Montaigne argues that medicine is based on ‘examples and experience’ (and ‘so is my opinion’, he adds), impugning its universalizing claims with the tractable experience of his own embodiment, with his own historia and consilium, while Francis Bacon enlists dietetics, Hippocratic case-taking and medical history in his broad programme for the reform of medicine. He more or less accepts Montaigne's argument for particularity in medical theory and practice, but presses the particular into service in his reformist programme. Like many sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century scholars and physicians frustrated with Galenic methods and models, both turn to Hippocratic practice and to hygiene and dietetics as salves for an ailing discipline. Finally, I argue that both writers enquire into viable means for inflecting learned medicine with particular experience, and both settle on rhetorical tools – analogy and exemplarity – as the means by which universalized medical models might be particularized or reformed.

The Mine and the Furnace: Francis Bacon, Thomas Russell, and Early Stuart Mining Culture

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 630-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cesare Pastorino
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The World ◽  
Mechanical Arts ◽  
Mining Culture

AbstractNotwithstanding Francis Bacon's praise for the philosophical role of the mechanical arts, historians have often downplayed Bacon's connections with actual artisans and entrepreneurs. Addressing the specific context of mining culture, this study proposes a rather different picture. The analysis of a famous mining metaphor in The Advancement of Learning shows us how Bacon's project of reform of knowledge could find an apt correspondence in civic and entrepreneurial values of his time. Also, Bacon had interesting and so far unexplored links with the early modern English mining enterprises, like the Company of Mineral and Battery Works, of which he was a shareholder. Moreover, Bacon's notes in a private notebook, Commentarius Solutus, and records of patents of invention, allow us to start grasping Bacon's connections with the metallurgist and entrepreneur Thomas Russell. Lastly, this paper argues that, to fully understand Bacon's links with the world of Stuart technicians and entrepreneurs, it is necessary to consider a different and insufficiently studied aspect of Bacon's interests, namely his work as patents referee while a Commissioner of Suits.

“All in a Garden Green”: Shakespeare's Staging of Garden Imagery

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Deborah Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Audience Interaction ◽  
The Many ◽  
Green World

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

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