Kolonialphantasien in der Populären Naturwissenschaft der Frühen Neuzeit

2004 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-36
Author(s):  
Karl Guthke
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Space Exploration ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
Age Of Discovery

AbstractThe analogy between colonization and space exploration was by no means invented by H.G. Wells in his novel about the invasion of Mars, The War of the Worlds (1897), or the science fiction in its wake. The analogy goes back to the age of the Copernican Revolution, which put the Earth on a par with other planets and thus suggested that those, too, could be inhabited by man-like creatures. Since then, popularizers of astrophysics have nurtured the notion that "we" or "they" could fill the roles of colonizers and natives, though it remained a matter of debate who had to play which role. Among those given to such contemplation we find Bruno, Kepler, Wilkins, and Huygens, along with scientifically trained literati such as Francis Godwin, Fontenelle, Swift. Together, they constitute a noteworthy phenomenon of the early modern age of discovery and conquest.

Reading Olivier de Serres circa 1600: Between Economy and Ecology

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Conley
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Art And Science ◽  
French Renaissance ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of

Formerly belonging to the literary canon of the French Renaissance, and often associated with the ideology of a return to the country—even to Maréchal Pétain’s Travail et Patrie—Olivier de Serres’s Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600) remains a keystone in the history of agronomy. Threading the wisdom of ancient authors through his own experience, and staunchly Protestant in vision, Serres sets an agenda for the country gentleman and farmer. At once art and science, it deploys a limpid and vigorous style to argue for economy and productive management of the earth. This essay contends that today, despite its legacy, the work offers a vision and a savoury mode of writing vital to what we can make of ecology in the early modern age.

The Embalming Art in the Modern Age: The Mummies of Caroline, Letizia and Joachim-Napoleon Agar as Examples of Funerary Rites in the Napoleonic Empire

Nuncius ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Marinozzi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Kingdom Of Naples ◽  
History Of ◽  
Funerary Rites ◽  
The Right ◽  
Shed Light

In the early 1980s a systematic investigation was begun by G. Fornaciari and his staff of a series of mummies from central and southern Italy, and in particular of important Renaissance remains. The study of a substantial number of artificial mummies has shed light on the human embalming techniques connected with the methods and procedures described by medical and non-medical authors in the early modern period. This has made it possible to reconstruct the history of the art of mummification, from the ‘clyster’ techniques to the partial or total evisceration of the corpse, to the intravascular injection of drying and preserving liquors. In addition to the bodies of Aragonese princes and members of the Neapolitan nobility, interred in the Basilica of San Domenico in Naples are the remains of important French personages dating to the modern age. Among the tombs arranged in two parallel rows to the right of the balcony are four sarcophagi containing the bodies of the wife and three children of Jean Antoine Michel Agar, who served as the Minister of Finance of the Kingdom of Naples from 1809 to 1815. The type of wrapping used for the corpses of the children presents strong analogies to those of ancient Egyptian mummies.

Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

Apocalypticism and Globalization in the Early Modern World: A Medievalist’s Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Rubenstein
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
World History ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Age Of Discovery ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract The apocalyptic belief systems from early modernity discussed in this series of articles to varying degrees have precursors in the Middle Ages. The drive to map the globe for purposes both geographic and symbolic, finds expression in explicitly apocalyptic manuscripts produced throughout the Middle Ages. An apocalyptic political discourse, especially centered on themes of empire and Islam, developed in the seventh century and reached extraordinary popularity during the Crusades. Speculation about the end of world history among medieval intellectuals led them not to reject the natural world but to study it more closely, in ways that set the stage for the later Age of Discovery. These broad continuities between the medieval and early modern, and indeed into modernity, demonstrate the imperative of viewing apocalypticism not as an esoteric fringe movement but as a constructive force in cultural creation.

Augustine and the Humanists. Reading the City of God from Petrarch to Poliziano

10.54179/2102 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Della Schiava
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Western World ◽  
City Of God ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The City

Augustine and the Humanists fills a persistent lacuna by investigating the reception of Augustine’s oeuvre in Italian humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In response to the call for a more extensive and detailed investigation of the reception of Augustine’s works and thought in the Western world, numerous scholars have addressed the topic over the last decades. However, one of Augustine’s major works, De civitate Dei, has received remarkably little attention. In a series of case studies by renowned specialists of Italian humanism, this volume now analyzes the various strategies that were employed in reading and interpreting the City of God at the dawn of the modern age. Augustine and the Humanists focuses on the reception of the text in the work of sixteen early modern writers and thinkers who played a crucial role in the era between Petrarch and Poliziano. The present volume thus makes a significant and innovative contribution both to Augustinian studies and to our knowledge of early modern intellectual history.

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