scholarly journals Collecting uncollectables: Joachim Du Bellay

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Gro Bjørnerud Mo
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Creative Thinking ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Roman Architecture ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Lasting Effect ◽  
Classical Models

Lists of wonders have circulated for millennia. Over and over, such inventories of spectacular man made constructions have been rewritten, re-edited and reimagi-ned. Both the wonders and the lists of wonders, preferably of the seven, have had a profound and long-lasting effect, and have been abundantly imitated, copied and reworked. Renaissance creative thinking was obsessed with the seven wonders of the ancient world, and early-modern Europe experienced a surge of visual and verbal depictions of wonders. This article is about a remarkable list of seven wonders, included in one of Joachim Du Bellay’s canonical poems on Roman antiquities (Antiquités de Rome), published in Paris in 1558. Du Bellay shapes his list of wonders by exploring pat-terns of both repetition and mutability. Almost imperceptibly, he starts suggesting connections between 16th-century Rome and distant civilizations. Through the eyes of a fictive traveller and collector, the poet venerates the greatness and la-ments the loss of ancient buildings, sites and works of art, slowly developing a ver-bal, visual and open-ended gallery, creating a collection of crumbling or vanished, mainly Roman, architecture. This poetic display of ruins and dust in the Eternal City is nourished by the attraction of the inevitable destruction of past splendour and beauty. In the sonnets, Du Bellay imitates classical models and patterns. Whi-le compiling powerful images and stories of destruction, he combines techniques associated with both a modern concept of copy and more ancient theories of co-pia. In this context, this article also explores whether Pliny’s Natural History might be a source for the imaginary collection of lost sites and wonders in Du Bellay’s Antiquités.

scholarly journals Regulation and Intellectual Change at the Paris Goldsmiths’ Guild, 1660-1740

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 500-527
Author(s):  
Michael Bycroft
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Craft Guilds ◽  
Literary Techniques

Abstract Economic historians have shown that the regulations of craft guilds were a source of innovation rather than inertia in the economy of early modern Europe. Historians of science have shown that craftsmen contributed to the scientific revolution in the same time and place. But very little is known about the role of guild regulation in intellectual (as opposed to social, political and economic) change. This paper shows that regulation went hand-in-hand with intellectual change at the Paris guild of goldsmiths in the decades around 1700. In this period the wardens of the guild developed sophisticated techniques for organizing and disseminating their large archive of legal documents. They also published two books on the natural history of precious stones that broke with the learned tradition of writing on this topic. The reform of the archive and the reform of natural history were undertaken by the same goldsmiths, for similar reasons, using analogous literary techniques.

Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe*

1990 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 292-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Findlen
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
The Way

During The Sixteenth And Seventeenth centuries natural history, and to a certain extent science in general, rediscovered its capacity for playfulness in the form of the scientific joke. By scientific joke, I mean thelusus naturae, or joke of nature, and the lusus scientiae, or joke of knowledge, that populated the museums and scientific texts of the period. The relation between the natural paradox of lusus and the scientific demonstrations and experiments that were also lusus points to the way in which the dynamic between art and nature and between collector and audience unfolded in the spectacle of science.

Consuming maps and producing space. Explaining regional variations in the reception and agency of mapmaking in the Low Countries during the medieval and early modern periods

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
MAÏKA DE KEYZER ◽  
IASON JONGEPIER ◽  
TIM SOENS
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Linear Process ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Regional Variations ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Representations Of Space

ABSTRACTThe acceptance of mapmaking in medieval and early modern Europe was neither a uniform nor a linear process. Comparing two neighbouring regions in the Low Countries, we explain the varying appetite for maps and mapmaking first by unravelling how people dealt with space before the introduction of modern mapmaking and, second, by identifying the actors that actively promoted its adoption. In regions where local elites had already been considering space as a commodity with a preference for clear-cut, geometric forms before the introduction of mapmaking, the latter was enthusiastically accepted and rapidly became instrumental in propagating this ‘modern’ concept of space. Other regions did not develop this appetite for mapmaking and continued to prefer different and more negotiable representations of space.

Francis Bacon's Natural History and the Senecan Natural Histories of Early Modern Europe

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 197-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Jalobeanu
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Traditional Natural ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
Experimental History

AbstractAt various stages in his career, Francis Bacon claimed to have reformed and changed traditional natural history in such a way that his new “natural and experimental history” was unlike any of its ancient or humanist predecessors. Surprisingly, such claims have gone largely unquestioned in Baconian scholarship. Contextual readings of Bacon's natural history have compared it, so far, only with Plinian or humanist natural history. This paper investigates a different form of natural history, very popular among Bacon's contemporaries, but yet unexplored by contemporary students of Bacon's works. I have provisionally called this form of natural history 'Senecan' natural history, partly because it took shape in the Neo-Stoic revival of the sixteenth-century, partly because it originates in a particular cosmographical reading of Seneca's Naturales quaestiones. I discuss in this paper two examples of Senecan natural history: the encyclopedic and cosmographical projects of Pierre de la Primaudaye (1546–1619) and Samuel Purchas (1577–1626). I highlight a number of similarities between these two projects and Francis Bacon's natural history, and argue that Senecan natural history forms an important aspect in the historical and philosophical background that needs to be taken into consideration if we want to understand the extent to which Bacon's project to reform natural history can be said to be new.

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