Stones, Snowflakes, and Insect Eggs

Nuncius ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-363
Author(s):  
Rebecca Zorach
Keyword(s):  
Mechanical Property ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Insect Eggs ◽  
Broad Category ◽  
Natural Entities ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Modern Europe

Abstract This paper takes as its broad context the evolution of the place of geometry in ways of thinking about nature and art in early modern Europe. Considering a set of questions about how Nature creates geometric forms, particularly in minerals but also in other kinds of natural beings, the paper explores the concept of “figure” as it appears in Conrad Gessner’s De rerum fossilium, where figure appears as a broad category that cuts across abstract geometry, artifactual images, and shape appearing within natural entities. Gessner is placed within changing ideas about the role of geometry as an intellectual pursuit or, rather, a mechanical property of nature conceived as inanimate and rule-bound.

John Locke: The Philosopher as Christian Virtuoso

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Nuovo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Christian Philosophy ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Empirical Stance

The purpose of this book is to present the philosophical thought of John Locke as the work of a Christian virtuoso. In his role as ‘virtuoso’, an experimental natural philosopher of the sort that flourished in England during the seventeenth century, Locke was a proponent of the so-called ‘new philosophy’, a variety of atomism that emerged in early modern Europe. But he was also a practicing Christian, and he professed confidence that the two vocations were not only compatible but mutually sustaining. Locke aspired, without compromising his empirical stance, to unite the two vocations in a single philosophical endeavor with the aim of producing a system of Christian philosophy. Although the birth of the modern secular outlook did not happen smoothly or without many conflicts of belief, Locke, in his role of Christian virtuoso, endeavored to resolve apparent contradictions. Nuovo draws attention to the often-overlooked complexities and diversity of Locke’s thought, and argues that Locke must now be counted among the creators of early modern systems of philosophy.

The High Point (I): The ‘Court Jews’ (1650–1713)

1997 ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Close Collaboration ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
High Point ◽  
Effective Leaders ◽  
Modern Europe

This chapter assesses the age of the ‘Court Jew’ (1650–1713), which marked the zenith of Jewish influence in early modern Europe. The remarkable role of the Jews in European affairs at that time rested on the solid foundations laid during the Thirty Years War. By 1650, a scattered but socially closely intertwined élite of provisioners and financiers had emerged who were simultaneously agents of states and the effective leaders of Europe's Jewish communities. Sometimes, they showed a strong sense of commitment to one particular government, but this was, in fact, both unusual and untypical. Generally, Jewish court factors, or Hoffaktoren as they were known in Germany, lived outside the states which they served. Not infrequently, they acted for several governments at once. Most typical of all, the close collaboration and interdependence between them, interlocking with the correspondence between kehillot in different countries, made their activity more thoroughly international and specifically Jewish than the banking and contracting of later times. Assuredly, the system centred on Germany, Austria, and Holland, but it ramified far beyond these limits, exerting an appreciable influence also on affairs in Spain, Portugal, the Spanish Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Italy, England, and Ireland.

scholarly journals The Determinants of International Migration in Early Modern Europe: Evidence from the Maritime Sector, c. 1700–1800

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-167
Author(s):  
Alexander Klein ◽  
Jelle van Lottum
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Chain Migration ◽  
Migration Flows ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Geographical Characteristics

ABSTRACTThis article offers the first multivariate regression study of international migration in early modern Europe. Using unique eighteenth-century data about maritime workers, we created a data set of migration flows among European countries to examine the role of factors related to geography, population, language, the market, and chain migration in explaining the migration of these workers across countries. We show that among all factors considered in our multivariate analysis, the geographical characteristics of the destination countries, size of port towns, and past migrations are among the most robust and quantitatively the most important factors influencing cross-country migration flows.

Knowledge in Motion

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
The Hours ◽  
Modern Europe

This chapter focuses on “itineraries of matter,” or objects as traveling carriers of cultural practices and meanings, in the early modern world. It examines the role of red in the transmission of knowledge back and forth among European vernacular practitioners and text-oriented scholars in their production and reproduction of knowledge about natural things. To this end, the chapter takes us to the heat and dangers of vermillion production in early modern Europe: the hours of firing, stirring, stoking, hammering, chemical manipulation, and anxious waiting that produced the red pigments highly valued by painters and illuminators to bring blood to life. Vermillion production was dangerous and exacting, and yet its underlying techniques traveled rapidly across early modern Europe (and beyond) together with the webs of interlinked homologies—an entourage of lizards, blood, gold, alchemical formulas, and vernacular knowledge—which formed the foundations of early modern science.

The Renaissance of Conversation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Default Mode ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Changing Role

This chapter focuses upon the transformation from roughly 1400 to 1700 of the conception of conversation itself, both within treatises touching on theories of conversation and in the practice of the literary genre of dialogue, that literary emulation of sermo whose changing form registered conversation’s transformations. This transformation began with the Renaissance humanists, who intensified the Petrarchan abstraction of conversation-as-metaphor from actual conversation. The changing role of Renaissance conversation was linked to the simultaneous expansion of oratory’s ambitions, which inspired both the use of conversation as a refuge from oratory and, in a revolutionary riposte, the counter-claim that conversation should expand the scope of its subject matter supplant oratory. The innovative genre of Utopian dialogue provided a climax to this last development, by transforming the old debate as to the optimus status rei publicae into a conversation, and thus incorporating the ends of political action within the genre of sermo. Finally, in seventeenth-century France, the preceding expansion of conversation culminated in a revolutionary triumph, as conversation replaced oratory as the default mode of rhetoric. These changes collectively set the stage for the centrality of conversation in the intellectual world of early modern Europe.

COURT STUDIES AND THE COURTS OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1229-1238 ◽  
Author(s):  
HANNAH SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Court Culture ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
English Court ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Historical Revisionism ◽  
Internal Forces ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Anglo American

A court in exile: the Stuarts in France, 1689–1718. By Edward Corp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi+386. ISBN 0-521-58462-0. £55.00.Vienna and Versailles: the courts of Europe's dynastic rivals, 1550–1780. By Jeroen Duindam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+349. ISBN 0-521-82262-9. £60.00.Intrigue and treason: the Tudor court, 1547–1558. By David Loades. Harlow: Pearson, 2004. Pp. x+326. ISBN 0-582-77226-5. £19.99.Queenship in Europe, 1660–1815: the role of the consort. Edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii+419. ISBN 0-521-81422-7. £60.00.Court culture in Dresden: from Renaissance to Baroque. By Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xv+310. ISBN 0-333-98448-X. £47.50.Over the last three decades, the royal or princely court has become an established feature of the historiographical landscape of early modern Europe. The subject of a forest of monographs and theses, the theme of a plethora of university undergraduate courses, it has even gained an Anglo-American academic society (and accompanying journal) dedicated to ‘court studies’. While the first wave of Anglophone court historians, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, considered it necessary to state explicitly, as David Starkey did in his introduction to the seminal The English court, that the study of the early modern court was a legitimate historical activity, such a stance is no longer necessary. Indeed, few political historians would now omit the court from their narratives, even if their principal focus was directed elsewhere. In The English court, Starkey presented his enterprise, and that of his co-contributors, as part of a broader process of historical revisionism. But, by the late 1990s, court studies had itself become subject to its own internal forces of revisionism. The books reviewed here not only illustrate the diversity of projects undertaken by scholars of the court; they also critique the interpretations and approaches of an earlier generation of court historians.

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