Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica in early modern scholarship

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Fay Barton

Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica (1556) is generally considered a mining text that had some important technical innovations but lacked broader philosophical consequences. This article shows that the opposite is true: Agricola's geological ideas, though innovative, had little immediate impact, but he inverted the contemporary concept of scholarship and its relation to artisanal knowledge by giving Latin scholarly form to the kind of observation-based studies of the earth that had previously been reserved for treatment in the vernacular. In doing so, he extended the early 16th-century trend toward observation-based medical practice to the study of the earth.

Author(s):  
L.E. Murr ◽  
V. Annamalai

Georgius Agricola in 1556 in his classical book, “De Re Metallica”, mentioned a strange water drawn from a mine shaft near Schmölnitz in Hungary that eroded iron and turned it into copper. This precipitation (or cementation) of copper on iron was employed as a commercial technique for producing copper at the Rio Tinto Mines in Spain in the 16th Century, and it continues today to account for as much as 15 percent of the copper produced by several U.S. copper companies.In addition to the Cu/Fe system, many other similar heterogeneous, electrochemical reactions can occur where ions from solution are reduced to metal on a more electropositive metal surface. In the case of copper precipitation from solution, aluminum is also an interesting system because of economic, environmental (ecological) and energy considerations. In studies of copper cementation on aluminum as an alternative to the historical Cu/Fe system, it was noticed that the two systems (Cu/Fe and Cu/Al) were kinetically very different, and that this difference was due in large part to differences in the structure of the residual, cement-copper deposit.


Author(s):  
Sophie Chiari

Sophie Chiari opens the volume’s last section with an exploration of the technology of time in Shakespeare’s plays. For if the lower classes of the Elizabethan society derived their idea of time thanks to public sundials, or, even more frequently in rural areas, to the cycles and rhythms of Nature, the elite benefited from a direct, tactile contact with the new instruments of time. Owning a miniature watch, at the end of the 16th century, was still a privilege, but Shakespeare already records this new habit in his plays. Dwelling on the anxiety of his wealthy Protestant contemporaries, the playwright pays considerable attention to the materiality of the latest time-keeping devices of his era, sometimes introducing unexpected dimensions to the measuring of time. Chiari also explains that the pieces of clockwork that started to be sold in early modern England were often endowed with a highly positive value, as timekeeping was more and more equated with order, harmony and balance. Yet, the mechanization of time was also a means of reminding people that they were to going to die, and the contemplation of mechanical clocks was therefore strongly linked to the medieval trope of contemptus mundi.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-628
Author(s):  
Franziska Neumann

Premodern Organizations. Membership and “Formal Organization” in the Saxon Mining Administration of the 16th Century This article examines the emergence of early modern “formal organisations”. It uses the term “formal organisation” as a heuristic instrument – or with Peter von Moos: as a “controlled anachronism”. That is, formal organizations did not exist in historical reality in the contemporary sense. But as an ideal type, the concept allows us to get a better impression of the specific conditions, ambiguities, and longer-term dynamics of the formation of administrative structures.


2020 ◽  

Stretching back to antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment. But during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, individuals across Europe increasingly designed, experienced, and described a new world of motion: one characterized by continuous, rather than segmented, movement. New spaces that included vistas along house interiors and uninterrupted library reading rooms offered open expanses for shaping sequences of social behaviour, scientists observed how the Earth rotated around the sun, and philosophers attributed emotions to neural vibrations in the human brain. Early Modern Spaces in Motion examines this increased emphasis on motion with eight essays encompassing a geographical span of Portugal to German-speaking lands and a disciplinary range from architectural history to English. It consequently merges longstanding strands of analysis considering people in motion and buildings in motion to explore the cultural historical attitudes underpinning the varied impacts of motion in early modern Europe.


Author(s):  
Elwira Buszewicz

The main aim of this paper is to analyze several early-modern Neo-Latin poems written by Polish authors; the poems deal (in different ways) with old age. The poets undertake a kind of intertextual game with the reader, applying various stereotypes and clichés. On can speak about a “semiotic landscape” of old age. The authors taken into consideration are Jan Kochanowski, Grzegorz of Sambor, Thomas Treter (16th century) and Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, Albert Ines (17th century).


2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Plemmenos

This paper deals with the involvement of Greek clergy in secular poetry and music in early-modern Balkans. This trend began in late-16th century, and involved the production of large anthologies and treatises on Ottoman music. This paper offers insights into the motives of those clergymen, the reception of their works by laymen and clerics, and the reaction of the official church. 


2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mihály Balázs

Although in recent years there has been an upsurge in the research of the history of early modern spirituality, this research has paid hardly any attention to the Unitarian denomination. The reasons for this lie beyond the scope of the present study: between the late 16th century and the late 18th century the denomination had to refrain from the use of printing, and thus, the manuscript versions of prayer texts were threatened by loss and destruction. It is a unique paradox, however, that the first edited protestant Hungarian prayer book of considerable length was published precisely by this denomination in 1570/1571. The first part of the paper explores the concept of the prayer book based on Johann Habermann’s famous Gebetbüchlein, and compares it to the greatest achievements of the same sort within this period, the Catholic Péter Pázmány’s and the Calvinist Albert Szenci Molnár’s works. This section is followed by a survey of the vivid reception of Heltai’s work, with particular focus on the way the Unitarian author’s work was used in the Lutheran community of Lőcse. The concluding part argues that building on the foundations of this tradition, as well as on the heritage of Calvinist prayer culture, an unparalleled Unitarian prayer literature developed in the 17th-18th centuries, which deserves the attention of comparative research.


2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Federico Italiano

AbstractThe epic poem of Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516–1532), one of the most influential texts of Renaissance writing, shows not only a precise cognition of early modern cartographic knowledge, as Alexandre Doroszlaï has illustrated it in Ptolemée et l’hippogriffe (1998), but also performs a complex transmedial translation of cartographic depictions. The journeys around the globe of the Christian paladins Ruggiero and Astolfo narrated by Ariosto are, in fact, performative negotiations between literary and cartographic processes. Riding the Hippograph, the hybrid vehicle par excellence, Ruggiero and Astolfo fly over the Earth as if they were flying over a map. Their journeys do not merely transmedially translate the course to the West pursued by Early Modern Europe. Rather, by translating the map Ariosto performs a new geopoetics that turns away from the symbolic dominance of the East (or “Ent-Ostung”, as Peter Sloterdijk has usefully called it) and offers us one of the first poetic versions of modern globalization.


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