scholarly journals Il Museo di Storia Naturale dell'Università degli Studi di Firenze VOL. 1 LE COLLEZIONI DELLA SPECOLA

The Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence, founded in 1775 by the Grand Duke Peter Leopold, is the oldest scientific museum in Europe. Firenze University Press opens the series dealing with the six sections of the Museum with this book on La Specola, situated in Palazzo Torrigiani, which represented the original nucleus. The articles in the first section reconstruct the historic background, the foundation of La Specola and the genesis and development of the collections. The second part considers the anatomical waxes, the entomological collections, and those of the vertebrates and the invertebrates, with a view to providing a description of the precious specimens that is at once precise and accessible. Finally, the third section completes the picture, retracing the important research activity that has accompanied the history of La Specola and reporting on the scientific projects in which the personnel are engaged. The largest collection in the world of anatomical wax models and the vast zoological collection are illustrated by the people directly involved in the related research, and by a superb selection of original photos produced specially for this publication.

2012 ◽  

The Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence, founded in 1775 by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo d'Asburgo Lorena, is one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific museums in the world. The fourth volume on the Collections of the Mineralogy and Lithology Section, published like the previous volumes by the Firenze University Press, fits perfectly in the series dedicated to the collections of the University's Museum System. The first part of the book describes in great detail the paths that led to the formation of the collections, starting with those dating to the Medici period and arriving at the specimens collected during recent expeditions. The second part illustrates and documents the extraordinary specimens of minerals, hardstone carvings and meteorites which represent the material patrimony of this section. Particular attention is given to the holotypes, the Elban Collection and the minerals of pegmatites, as well as the methods and solutions adopted to realize the project of the new museum exhibition set-up. The third and last part describes the studies carried out on the materials: from the minerals of the systematic collections to the rock specimens that recount not only the geodiversity of a region but also the history of a city.


Author(s):  
Jacopo Moggi Cecchi ◽  
Roscoe Stanyon

This volume is dedicated to the Anthropological and Ethnological section of the Natural History Museum. First the historical journey of the collections is traced from the antique nucleus of the Medici to the foundation of the National Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology, when Florence was the capitol of Italy, and the discipline of anthropology was born. The second part illustrates the multivariate collections from all over the globe. They are a precious record of the past and present biological and cultural diversity of our species opening wide horizons that rigorously connect science to the many faces of human culture, including art. The third section is dedicated to current research and opens new prospectives on the significance of ethnological and anthropological collections due to new technology and in light of a new appreciation of the museum as a living “zone of contact”.


The Natural History Museum of the University of Florence, founded in 1775 by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, is one of the oldest scientific museum in the world. With this third volume on the collections of the Geology and Paleontology Section, Firenze University Press continues its series dedicated to the six Sections of the Museum. The first part of the volume shows a detailed and fascinating descriptions of the history of this museum section's collections, the contribution of scholars who from the 17th century endeavoured to expand and study the Florentine geological-paleontological collections, and the importance of the collections to the development of modern geological-paleontological thinking. The second part describes and documents the collections, that are presented in geo-chronological order, divided into the Invertebrate, Vertebrate, Paleobotanical and Geological collections. In the last part are presented the most important activities and research projects, based on this important cultural heritage, carried out by the paleontologists of the University of Florence.


Al-Albab ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Suraya Sintang ◽  
Rosdiana Onga ◽  
Siti Aidah Hj Lukin ◽  
Asmady Idris

Borneo Island is the third largest island in the world, rich in natural resources, biodiversity and cultural diversity. The uniqueness of Borneo is that it is home to three countries; Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei Darussalam, each with their own valuable cultural heritage. One of the unique aspects of the Borneo archipelago is the shared wealth of civilizations derived from the dissemination of Islam. Treasures known as the “Borneo Islamic Heritage" are not only valuable as cultural artefacts that need to be preserved, but they can also be elevated and commercialised as regional economic drivers. This paper discusses the Idahan manuscript written in Jawi script as one of the treasures of Islamic intellectual legacy in Borneo. The method of study is based on content analysis which depicts the descriptive history of the discovery of the Idahan Jawi manuscript. This manuscript not only serves as evidence of the early embrace of Islam in Sabah, but also as a reference to matters pertaining to religion and the laws of Islamic jurisprudence. This factor leads the Idahan community be considered as the first native people embracing Islam at the east coast of Sabah. The contribution of this study is to enhance understanding of the development of Islamic heritage in Borneo Island and to inculcate the spirit of solidarity among the people living in the region.


Substantia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
Stefano Dominici ◽  
Gary D. Rosenberg

A group of scientists interested in history of science and fascinated by the figure of Nicolaus Steno (1638-1686) gathered in Florence for the 350th anniversary of the publication of his De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento prodromus dissertationis. A public conference held at Palazzo Fenzi on 16 October 2019 and a geological fieldtrip on the following day were occasions to discuss different points of view on the last published work of the Danish natural philosopher, dedicated to "solids naturally enclosed in other solids" (De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento, or De solido in short). The title of the gathering, "Galilean foundation for a solid earth", emphasized the philosophical context that Steno found in Florence, where in 1666-1668 he established tight human and philosophical bonds with renowned Italian disciples of Galileo Galilei and members of the Accademia del Cimento. For participants to the 2019 gathering, the Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence, hosting some of Steno's geological specimens, and the region of Tuscany itself, formed the perfect location to discuss the phenomena that Steno had observed from 1666-1668, the motivations for his research, the methodology of his discovery and, generally stated, the European scientific context which informed his inquiry. Some of the talks given in that meeting are included within this volume, kindly hosted by Substantia, International Journal of the History of Chemistry published by the Florence University Press. In addition some of the invited speakers who were unable to attend, also contributed a paper to this publication. The collection is about earth science in the early modern period, when the study of minerals, rocks, and the fossilized remains of living things did not yet form a distinct path to knowledge about earth history, but was an integral part of the wider "philosophy of nature".


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaas Berkel ◽  
Guus Termeer

The University of Groningen has been an international university since its foundation in 1614. The first professors formed a rich international community, and many students came from outside the Netherlands, especially from areas now belonging to Germany. Internationalization, a popular slogan nowadays, is therefore nothing new, but its meaning has changed over time. How did the University of Groningen grow from a provincial institution established for religious reasons into a top-100 university with 36,000 students, of whom 25% come from abroad and almost half of the academic staff is of foreign descent? What is the identity of this four-century-old university that is still strongly anchored in the northern part of the Netherlands but that also has a mind that is open to the world? The history of the university, as told by Klaas van Berkel and Guus Termeer, ends with a short paragraph on the impact of the corona crisis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 618-634
Author(s):  
Angela J. Linn ◽  
Joshua D. Reuther ◽  
Chris B. Wooley ◽  
Scott J. Shirar ◽  
Jason S. Rogers

Museums of natural and cultural history in the 21st century hold responsibilities that are vastly different from those of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the time of many of their inceptions. No longer conceived of as cabinets of curiosities, institutional priorities are in the process of undergoing dramatic changes. This article reviews the history of the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, Alaska, from its development in the early 1920s, describing the changing ways staff have worked with Indigenous individuals and communities. Projects like the Modern Alaska Native Material Culture and the Barter Island Project are highlighted as examples of how artifacts and the people who constructed them are no longer viewed as simply examples of material culture and Native informants but are considered partners in the acquisition, preservation, and perpetuation of traditional and scientific knowledge in Alaska.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Yenni Patriani

This paper is about the history of the spread of Islam in Bengkulu region, Indonesia. Sumatra is the sixth islands of the world and the third islands of Indonesia in size after Borneo and Papua. Bengkulu is located in the south of Sumatra. The Arab civilization and cultural relics in Indonesia were numerous, especially in the Bengkulu region of Sumatra. These effects were in fact derived from the power of the Islamic religion. One of the objectives of this research is to highlight the efforts of Arab and Indonesian scholars in spreading Islam in the Bengkulu region, and to clarify the history of Bengkulu before the introduction of Islam, which began with the entry of the monastic buddies during the era of King Ajay Brinah Sikalawi Libung. These are the following questions: How was the life of the people of Bengkulu before the introduction of Islam? What are the Arab cultural and cultural monuments in Bengkulu? To answer these questions, we relied on the descriptive approach.


Author(s):  
Raúl Fuentes Navarro

This paper takes up previous works by the author and reformulates them to argue that there are increasingly clear indications of the adoption of “post-disciplinary” modalities in the institutionalized practices of knowledge production on communication in various regions of the world. Faced with the growing epistemic fragmentation and dispersion of this academic field, and the evident transformations of the sociocultural practices that are its references and subject matters, post-disciplinary research may represent a useful alternative consistent with the very history of the university institutionalization of this specialty, in which contributions from the humanities and social sciences converge, with apparent independence from the different conditions of national higher education systems. Some of the more developed formulations of this perspective and their strategic implications for university practices in the field are analysed.


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