The first book for which I had title-envy was Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost (1965). At once mysterious and memorable, the phrase on the cover promised (at least to my undergraduate eyes) a kind of history that was shadowy and unfamiliar. Thanks to the success of the social history it launched, the work now looks surprisingly straightforward: its facts and figures documenting premodern English society—its class structures, marriage practices, literacy rates, and so on—make the past (...) feel found. So much so that the very existence of so much data threatens to belie the claim of the title.But loss, for Laslett, is not absence; it is, rather, the condition of change through time, and his book was written to show precisely how much England had been transformed during the long course of the Industrial Revolution. In this sense, his title might serve for almost any account of people, places, or things that are no longer as they were.Worlds do nonetheless get lost, and we do not have to travel very far back into the past to become aware of the gaps in the record. Martin Mulsow has written a book that, finally, does justice to the precarious nature of what becomes history, and this new translation (sensitively rendered and beautifully produced) will prevent this magisterial work of German intellectual history from being lost on Anglophone readers. As a title, Knowledge Lost is not, to be sure, as catchy as Laslett's formulation. Nor does it capture the nuance of the name given to the original German publication (issued by Suhrkamp in 2012): Prekäres Wissen. What Mulsow recovers with a combination of historical narrative, historiographical analysis, and good old-fashioned sleuthing is the fragility of knowledge (and of those who traded in it) in early modern Europe.In a nice neologism, Mulsow names this group the Wissenprekariat (or “intellectual precariat”): his “knowledge underclass” includes radicals, obsessives, and cranks, but also mainstream scholars who simply became what Michel Foucault liked to call “infamous”—both scandalous, that is, and obscure. What makes the book essential reading even for those with little interest in the fringes of the Renaissance or Enlightenment is the anatomy of precarity itself, a state that shadows knowledge in many times and places. With a nod toward the “material turn” in historical writing, Mulsow pays particular attention to the risks involved in certain media or types of transmission. But he also looks at the social, disciplinary, and ideological forces that drive certain forms of knowing—and the figures with whom they are associated—underground.Thus his book amounts to nothing less than an alternative intellectual history of the early modern period, one that offers countless correctives to the received narratives that continue to favor the successful publications of major thinkers. But it is also a book for our own time. Mulsow's “Concluding Word” attempts to be optimistic, and he ends with a tantalizing list of the other unwritten histories that this one calls for—including “a history of maskings,” “a history of the ways knowledge could be appropriated on note cards that could easily be lost,” and “a history of the generational transfer of embarrassing knowledge.” His final paragraph acknowledges that “many kinds of precarity have declined” since the seventeenth century: now “we can insure ourselves against many risks, and... packages are reliably delivered.” Written only ten years ago, these words seem to come from another world we have lost, one before disrupted supply chains and the resurgence of populist politicians bringing back forms of precarity we thought we had left behind. If ever a book needed a new afterword, it is this one. (shrink)

For several decades, historians have realized the limitations of analysing the historical past of science as a mere succession of theories. One of the most stimulating messages that the reinvention of the discipline has launched is that although there are obvious intellectual elements that promote the development and progress of science, there are also social, economic, and institutional aspects to consider. The history of science is no longer just a history of scientific ideas and theories, but also a (...) history of institutions, communities, spaces, objects, and practices as well as a history of the complex interaction among all these dimensions. Accompanying this new panorama is a broad consensus among scholars to accept that major social changes have inexorably some impact on scientific practice and vice versa. This premise, now widespread, is especially relevant to the history of early modern science and the question of its roots because it has allowed the introduction of new agents and spaces previously excluded from the domain of scientific development. In other words, this enriched perspective has multiplied both the processes of knowledge construction and the arenas in which these processes were undertaken. More specifically, historical research is no longer limited to spaces traditionally linked to the construction of science; it now embraces less orthodox ones. Within this broadened field of inquiry, practical knowledge and the objects of material culture have come to occupy a central place. This special issue explores how the new directions in which the history of science has expanded have a direct impact on the study of Iberian science in the Atlantic world. (shrink)

Early modern medicine was much more dependent on the senses than its contemporary counterpart. Although a comprehensive medical theory existed that assigned great value to taste and odor of medicaments, historical descriptions of taste and odor appears imprecise and inconsistent to modern eyes. How did historical actors move from subjective experience of taste and odor to culturally stable agreements that facilitated communication about the sensory properties of medicaments? This paper addresses this question, not by investigating texts, but (...) by going straight to the sensory impression, which certain substances convey. The aim is not to overwrite or rectify historical descriptions but to investigate whether modern methodologies for sensory assessment can be enlisted to understand the past. We draw on history of science for framing and research questions, pharmaceutical science for knowledge of pharmaceuticals and preparations, and food and meal science for assaying procedures and protocols. We show that sensory evaluation can yield precise descriptions that would not have been alien to early modern medicine makers. However, there are problems with translating descriptions of taste between different historical contexts. By comparing contemporary descriptions of sensations with eighteenth‐century ones, the article discusses how sensory descriptions are highly dependent on context, and subject to historical change. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century the microscope opened up a new world of observation, and, according to Catherine Wilson, profoundly revised the thinking of scientists and philosophers alike. The interior of nature, once closed off to both sympathetic intuition and direct perception, was now accessible with the help of optical instruments. The microscope led to a conception of science as an objective, procedure-driven mode of inquiry and renewed interest in atomism and mechanism. Focusing on the earliest forays into microscopical research, (...) from 1620 to 1720, this book provides us with both a compelling technological history and a lively assessment of the new knowledge that helped launch philosophy into the modern era. Wilson argues that the discovery of the microworld--and the apparent role of living animalcula in generation, contagion, and disease--presented metaphysicians with the task of reconciling the ubiquity of life with human-centered theological systems. It was also a source of problems for philosophers concerned with essences, qualities, and the limits of human knowledge, whose positions are echoed in current debates about realism and instrument-mediated knowledge. Covering the contributions of pioneering microscopists (Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam, Malpighi, Grew, and Hooke) and the work of philosophers interested in the microworld (Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, Locke, and Berkeley), she challenges historians who view the abstract sciences as the sole catalyst of the Scientific Revolution as she stresses the importance of observational and experimental science to the modern intellect. (shrink)

Critically exploring medical thought in a cultural milieu with no discernible influence from the European Enlightenment, _Being Human_ reveals an otherwise unnoticed intersection of early modern sensibilities and religious values in traditional Tibetan medicine. It further studies the adaptation of Buddhist concepts and values to medical concerns and suggests important dimensions of Buddhism's role in the development of Asian and global civilization. Through its unique focus and sophisticated reading of source materials,_ Being Human_ adds a crucial chapter in (...) the larger historiography of science and religion. The book opens with the bold achievements in Tibetan medical illustration, commentary, and institution building during the period of the Fifth Dalai Lama and his regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso, then looks back to the work of earlier thinkers, tracing a strategically astute dialectic between scriptural and empirical authority on questions of history and the nature of human anatomy. It follows key differences between medicine and Buddhism in attitudes toward gender and sex and the moral character of the physician, who had to serve both the patient's and the practitioner's well-being. _Being Human_ ultimately finds that Tibetan medical scholars absorbed ethical and epistemological categories from Buddhism yet shied away from ideal systems and absolutes, instead embracing the imperfectability of the human condition. (shrink)

This article considers the emergence of world environmental history as a rapidly growing but undertheorized research field. Taking as its central problematic the gap between the fertile theorizations of environmentally-oriented social scientists and the empirically rich studies of world environmental historians, the article argues for a synthesis of theory and history in the study of longue dureesocio-ecological change. This argument proceeds in three steps. First, I offer an ecological reading of Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern (...) class='Hi'>World-System. Wallerstein's handling of the ecological dimensions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is suggestive of a new approach to world environmental history. Second, I contend that Wallerstein's theoretical insights may be effectively complemented by drawing on Marxist notions of value and above all the concept of “metabolic rift,” which emphasize the importance of productive processes and regional divisions of labor within the modern world-system. Finally, I develop these theoretical discussions in a short environmental history of the two great “commodity frontiers” of early capitalism – the sugar plantation and the silver mining complex. (shrink)

Several fields of research associated with the history of the early modern Iberian world have experienced a significant boost in recent decades: Iberian science as it relates to the Atlantic world, the history of European colonial empires, and the study of knowledge production in Latin American cultures. This expansion has coincided with a renewed interest of historians of the early modern period in practical knowledge and artisanal cultures. This paper presents an updated (...) historiographic review of both lines of research as well as of their close interconnections. In addition, it offers a re-interpretation of Iberian imperial science in the context of the European maritime expansion through the lens of artisanal epistemology. (shrink)

The world soul was often a target of attack in early modern natural philosophy, on grounds of impiety and explanatory vacuity. But it also played an important role in debates about two of the most important questions in natural philosophy: how does nature depend on God, and what explains nature’s organization? As an answer to those questions, it lived on through the early modern period, sustained especially by philosophers who argued that individuals in nature cannot (...) be understood in isolation from the whole. I argue that in this guise, it served as an alternative model of explanation in a context that increasingly emphasized explanation in terms of laws of nature, and that this reflects the fact that these two models represent two fundamentally competing approaches to natural philosophical explanation. (shrink)

Did early modern European states make themselves sacred? The historian Paolo Prodi insisted that they did, whereas for the philosopher Giorgio Agamben sacred and secular power were so indistinguishable that the question was moot. This group of articles seeks to explain and explore the approaches of these two accomplished Italian scholars to the problem of early modern sacralisation. This introduction reviews the context in which Prodi and Agamben worked, sketches brief biographies, and describes the arguments that (...) they advanced which are most relevant to early modern history. Their work emerged from the debate on secularisation in the German-speaking lands, the confessionalisation thesis as it was advanced by German historians of Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Catholic Reform, and twentieth-century Catholic thought about the relationship between religion and totalitarian states. Both Prodi and Agamben belonged to traditions that sat at an angle to the liberalism that underpins historical and philosophical thought in the English-speaking world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Abraham, Planter of Mathematics":Histories of Mathematics and Astrology in Early Modern EuropeNicholas PopperFrancis Bacon's 1605 Advancement of Learning proposed to dedicatee James I a massive reorganization of the institutions, goals, and methods of generating and transmitting knowledge. The numerous defects crippling the contemporary educational regime, Bacon claimed, should be addressed by strengthening emphasis on philosophy and natural knowledge. To that end, university positions were to be created (...) devoted to "Artes and Sciences at large," rather than to the professions. High salaries would render lecturers "able and sufficient," undistracted from their task. Most famously, he argued that teaching of the "operatiue studie of many Scyences" should involve sophisticated technical education. The study of natural philosophy demanded not only books, but globes, astrolabes, and other "instrumentals." Most significantly, yielding reliable and meaningful knowledge from experiential gleanings required a rigorous system of deductive reasoning.The legacy of this colossal proposal has earned Bacon honored status as devisor of the scientific method.1 But Bacon's educational reform extended [End Page 87] beyond the methods of producing and transmitting knowledge. To facilitate more efficient "vse and administration" of the knowledge produced by his system, he also demanded a searching examination of the history of learning. This history would provide a mirror enabling his contemporaries to deploy the fruits of his method, by considering how learning in the past had been used successfully or ill-advisedly. Producing this history was the ambition of the Advancement, for he explained: "no man hath propounded to himselfe the generall state of learning to bee described and represented from age to age, as many have done the works of Nature, & the State civile and Ecclesiastical." He continued:And yet I am not ignorant that in divers particular sciences, as of the Iurisconsults, the Mathematicians, the Rhetoricians, the Philosophers, there are set down some smal memorials of the Schooles, Authors, and Bookes: and so likewise some barren relations touching the Invention of Arts, or usages. But a iust story of learning, containing the Antiquities and Originalls of Knowledges, & their Sects; their Inventions, their Traditions; their diverse Administrations and Managings; their Flourishings, their Oppositions, Decayes, Depressions, Oblivions, Removes, with the causes, and occasions of them, and all other events concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world; I may truly affirme to be wanting.2Bacon thus positioned himself not only as a Father of Modern Science, but also a Father of the History of Science.Following Bacon's suggestion, I will examine the "small memorials" of the history of mathematics—and particularly the mathematical art of astrology—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My conclusion, however, will not bear out Bacon's claims. Despite his frustration, Bacon was only one of many early modern scholars appraising the role of mathematics within history. And he devoted less energy than others to mapping its origins and tracing its transmissions between communities. In fact, Bacon's 1605 proposal for a history of mathematics was already out-of-date. Discussions [End Page 88] of the history of mathematics had been rife on the continent and in England throughout the previous century.3The evidence that Renaissance scholars inherited was sprawling and inconclusive. Several genealogies for mathematics could be found within classical Greek, Latin, and patristic references. One lineage claimed mathematics began in ancient Assyria, where the priestly caste, the Chaldeans, practiced a form of mathematics that seemed a corrupt admixture of philosophy, medicine, and religion, and relied heavily on observation of the heavens. Other scholars traced the origins to Egypt, claiming that the field developed to survey lands frequently flooded by the Nile. The real problem for ancient, late antique, and medieval scholars had not been the origins of mathematics, but what exactly mathematics were. For some, the term strictly referred to the quadrivium: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. But for others, mathematics' origins amongst the Egyptians or Chaldeans inextricably linked it to forms of astrological divination, augury, and necromancy that were unsavory to both Latin and Christian traditions. Mathematici were included alongside ghastly lists of Magi, Brahmins, Aruspices, Genethliaci, and other diabolic practitioners of idolatrous magic. These might or might not be distinguished from mathematici such as Pythagoras... (shrink)

The article discusses in a broader historical context the well-known thesis of V. I. Lenin that capitalism was formed as a result of a change in the behavior of large merchants, who, after the state achieves political unity and forms a unified market, switch from trade to the organization of production. Researchers of the 17th century Siberia do not find historical confirmation of Lenin’s scheme, however, it is quite applicable to other countries of the early modern period and (...) to the mechanism of the early stage of the colonial expansion of European powers (I. R. Sokolovsky, 2019). At the same time, J. Diamond’ research pointed out the boundary between “normal” human behavior in the new lands and the behavior of the colonizers of the early modern period. This boundary is a rational or quasi-rational accounting of one’s actions. M. Heidegger calls this approach Gestell. Gestell considers the surrounding world as a calculated resource for self-increasing profit. Using the example of a Swiss wine merchant who died in North America in 1736, the Italian micro-historian K. Ginzburg showed how the merchants and “capitalists” actually acted and what the Gestell that determined their actions looked like in everyday life: predatory appropriation of material and labor resources is gradually getting a solid base of rational calculation. (shrink)

While the link between navigation and astronomy is quite evident and its history has been extensively explored, the prognosticatory element included in astronomical knowledge has been almost completely left out. In the early modern world, the science of the stars also included prognostication known today as astrology. Together with astronomical learning, navigation also included astrology as a means to predict the success of a journey. This connection, however, has never been adequately researched. This paper makes the (...) first broad study of the tradition of astrology in navigation as well as its role in early modern globalization. It shows how astrological doctrine had its own tools for nautical prognostication. These could be used when dealing with the uncertainty of reaching the desired destination, to inquire about the condition of a loved one, or an important cargo. It was widely used, both in time and geographical context, by navigators and cosmographers for weather forecasting and elections for the start of a successful voyage. (shrink)

Sir Anthony Kenny tells the fascinating story of the development of philosophy from the early 19th to the late 20th century. He guides the reader through the ideas of such great thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Marx, Wittgenstein, and Russell. This volume concludes Kenny's magisterial New History of Western Philosophy.

Ancient Models in the Early Modern Republican Imagination, edited by Wyger Velema and Arthur Weststeijn, approaches the early modern republican political imagination from a fresh perspective. While most scholars agree on the importance of the classical world to early modern republican theorists, its role is all too often described in rather abstract and general terms such as "classical republicanism" or the "neo-roman theory of free states". The contributions to this volume propose a different (...) approach and all focus on the specific ways in which ancient republics such as Rome, Athens, Sparta, and the Hebrew Republic served as models for early modern republican thought. The result is a novel interpretation of the impact of antiquity on early modern republicanism. (shrink)

In 1578, the Anglo-Italian author, translator, and teacher John Florio wrote that English was 'a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Dover, it is woorth nothing'. Learning Languages in Early Modern England is the first major study of how English-speakers learnt a variety of continental vernacular languages in the period between 1480 and 1720. English was practically unknown outside of England, which meant that the English who wanted to travel and trade with the wider (...) world in this period had to become language-learners. Using a wide range of printed and manuscript sources, from multilingual conversation manuals to travellers' diaries and letters where languages mix and mingle, Learning Languages explores how early modern English-speakers learned and used foreign languages, and asks what it meant to be competent in another language in the past. Beginning with language lessons in early modern England, it offers a new perspective on England's 'educational revolution'. John Gallagher looks for the first time at the whole corpus of conversation manuals written for English language-learners, and uses these texts to pose groundbreaking arguments about reading, orality, and language in the period. He also reconstructs the practices of language-learning and multilingual communication which underlay early modern travel. Learning Languages offers a new and innovative study of a set of practices and experiences which were crucial to England's encounter with the wider world, and to the fashioning of English linguistic and cultural identities at home. Interdisciplinary in its approaches and broad in its chronological and thematic scope, this volume places language-learning and multilingualism at the heart of early modern British and European history. (shrink)

This volume provides a much needed, historically accurate narrative of the development of theories of space up to the beginning of the eighteenth century. It studies conceptions of space that were implicitly or explicitly entailed by ancient, medieval and early modern representations of the cosmos. The authors reassess Alexandre Koyré’s groundbreaking work From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe and they trace the permanence of arguments to be found throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. By adopting (...) a long timescale, this book sheds new light on the continuity between various cosmological representations and their impact on the ontology and epistemology of space. Readers may explore the work of a variety of authors including Aristotle, Epicurus, Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus, John Wyclif, Peter Auriol, Nicholas Bonet, Francisco Suárez, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, Libert Froidmont, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke. We see how reflections on space, imagination and the cosmos were the product of a plurality of philosophical traditions that found themselves confronted with, and enriched by, various scientific and theological challenges which induced multiple conceptual adaptations and innovations. This volume is a useful resource for historians of philosophy, those with an interest in the history of science, and particularly those seeking to understand the historical background of the philosophy of space. (shrink)

This e-book written in Hungarian seeks to reconstruct “the aesthetic” in the modern sense of the word, from the mid-17th century to the 1730s, through the texts of mainly British authors such as John Dennis, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Francis Hutcheson, George Berkeley, sometimes using their Spanish and French predecessors for contextualization. It assumes that “the aesthetic” is an unprecedented type of experience that had to be discovered, or rather invented; it is therefore more than a discussion (...) of some old, always existing quality or sensibility in a new theoretical guise. If the words “(school) philosophy”, “art” and “criticism” can be associated with the mostly systematic theories of aesthetics that emerged in the wake of Alexander G. Baumgarten as a loose characterisation, then the words “(popular) theology”, “nature” and “exercise” are even more so with the earlier texts that are on the table here, which played a role in the formation of “the aesthetic”. It seems that in this period, “the aesthetic” is understood above all as a new and intimate link between the sensual and the supernatural or spiritual, in which the former is not just an apropos or disposable means to the latter, but an indispensable and ever-present component that provides a constitutive framework for experience. Its unprecedented modernity lies in its nisus to capture the divine in the sensual and to make it present as sensual. In this new experiential form, both the “nature” of the transcendence and the spiritual economics of the beholder are reconfigured. The new “aesthetic” is connected to and associated with the full experience of life, the joy of existence, the openness to the transcendent through the sensuality of the natural or everyday world, the interplay of external determination and internal spontaneity, the enchanted state of mind experienced in a waking dream, the reinterpretation of the relationship between reality and fiction, the intense existential experience of spiritual and emotional movement provided by walking, wandering, boating or cheerful imagination. (shrink)

Happiness in World History traces ideas and experiences of happiness from early stages in human history, to the maturation of agricultural societies and their religious and philosophical systems, to the changes and diversities in the approach to happiness in the modern societies that began to emerge in the 18th century. In this thorough overview, Peter N. Stearns explores the interaction between psychological and historical findings about happiness, the relationship between ideas and popular experience, and the (...) opportunity to use historical analysis to assess strengths and weaknesses of dominant contemporary notions of happiness. Starting with the advent of agriculture, the book assesses major transitions in history for patterns in happiness, including the impact of the great religions, the unprecedented Enlightenment interest in secular happiness and cheerfulness, and industrialization and imperialism. The final, contemporary section covers fascist and communist efforts to define alternatives to Western ideas of happiness, the increasing connections with consumerism, and growing global interests in defining and promoting well-being. Touching on the experiences in the major regions of Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America, the text offers an expansive introduction to a new field of study. This book will be of interest to students of world history and the history of emotions. (shrink)

The study of space and place is unquestionably becoming an important research focus in the humanities and social sciences. And while there is an expanding body of theoretical work on the importance of these concepts in various disciplines, less attention has been paid to how spatial ideas and approaches can actually be deployed to understand the societies, cultures, and mentalities of the past. In this volume, leading experts explore the uses of space in two respects: how spatial concepts can be (...) employed by or applied to the study of history, and how spaces and spatial ideas were used for practical and ideological purposes in specific periods. Together, the contributors represent a comprehensive range of disciplines concerned with space and history, including archaeology, social history, intellectual history, imperial history, geography, and cartography, allowing for an unusually broad variety of case studies and perspectives"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

From 1538 the new Protestant church of Henry VIII provided a system of registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials in all parishes of England and Wales. This chapter re-examines the original motives behind the creation of this system, and explores the reasons for its effectiveness and persistence over the ensuing three centuries in Britain by surveying the comparative history of identity registration systems among the British overseas in the early modern period. A review of the variety of (...) measures for registration set up in the North American and Caribbean colonies during the course of the seventeenth century confirms the importance of the security of property-holding in an increasingly commercial world as a motive for creating such systems. However, this review also indicates the importance of whether or not effective social security systems, giving entitlements to relief, accompanied these early identity registration schemes. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to argue that there existed a very prominent view of signs and signification in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe which can help us to understand several puzzling aspects of baroque culture. This view, called here "pansemioticism," constituted a fundamental part of the baroque conception of the world. After sketching the content and importance of pansemioticism, I will show how it can help us to understand the (from a modern perspective) rather puzzling concept of (...) the polymath, or polyhistor, which constituted the ideal of the baroque scientist. In this context I will also discuss a seventeenth century phenomenon essentially connected with polyhistorism, namely that of the early modem polyhistorical collections, the Wunderkamnmern. Since such a study needs a clearly determined focal point, we will concentrate on the last three quarters of the seventeenth century and will mainly discuss works by German authors of the time. (shrink)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 20, Issue 1, Page 208-211, January 2012.

Not long ago, historians of philosophy realized with some excitement the canonical texts of the early modern period could be rendered increasingly intelligible if they were read not as discussing a series of atemporal “purely philosophical” questions, but as embedded in the issues raised by contemporaneous events such as the scientific revolution. To take an often-discussed example, it was hoped that, so contextualized, Locke’s notoriously puzzling distinction between primary and secondary qualities would fall into place as an expression (...) of his colleague Boyle’s corpuscularianism. But even so contextualized, Locke’s texts and many others remained puzzling. Part of the problem, we are now learning, is that the very concept of the scientific revolution itself needs to be contextualized. Historians of philosophy relied too heavily on an understanding of the scientific revolution constructed with an eye to our present-day understanding of science which overprivileges the physical sciences and papers over differences flourishing in the early modern period. In The Invisible World, Catherine Wilson, a philosopher, takes matters into her own hands and, through an examination of the history of the microscope, contributes important evidence for the need to enrich our understanding of the nature of science in the period from 1620 to 1720. (shrink)

This paper examines the manner in which the early modern scholarly debate concerning the true age of the world was shaped by philological and text-critical scholarship on the work of the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Traditionally, historians have earmarked the late seventeenth century as a time of uncertainty and crisis for biblical chronologists, as scholars became increasingly aware of corruptions within existing versions of scripture and of the manner in which scriptural chronology was contradicted by pagan (...) sources. I hope to show how, in response to these doubts, scholars during this period also developed a pronounced interest in the chronology – and consequently the textual history – of the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, whom scholars considered the oldest and therefore best surviving witness to the original state of the biblical text in the time of the Apostles. I have drawn two important conclusions from this development. Firstly, I show that the development of philological and text-critical scholarship on non-biblical texts was a direct result of theological issues relating to biblical authority and chronology. Secondly, I argue that this philological scholarship was key to undermining orthodox faith in the stability and reliability of the biblical text itself. (shrink)

Historians and cultural critics face special challenges when treating the nonhuman natural world in the medieval and early modern periods. Their most daunting problem is that in both the visual and written records of the time, nature seems to be both everywhere and nowhere. In the broadest sense, nature was everywhere, for it was vital to human survival. Agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine, and the patterns of human settlement all have their basis in natural settings. Humans also marked (...) personal, community, and seasonal events by natural occurrences and built their cultural explanations around the workings of nature, which formed the unspoken backdrop for every historical event and document of the time. Yet in spite of the ubiquity of nature's continual presence in the physical surroundings and the artistic and literary cultures of these periods, overt discussion of nature is often hard to find. Until the sixteenth century, responses to nature were quite often recorded only in the course of investigating other subjects. In a very real sense, nature went without saying. As a result, modern scholars analyzing the concept of nature in the history of medieval and early modern Europe must often work in deeply interdisciplinary ways. This challenge is deftly handled by the contributors to Engaging with Nature, whose essays provide insights into such topics as concepts of animal/human relationships; environmental and ecological history; medieval hunting; early modern collections of natural objects; the relationship of religion and nature; the rise of science; and the artistic representations of exotic plants and animals produced by Europeans encountering the New World. "As scholars of medieval and early modern Europe increasingly embrace environmental perspectives and animal studies, Engaging with Nature will be recognized as a landmark collection in the field. Taken together, the essays in this volume provide a synthetic overview of critical developments in the many disciplines that are now incorporating the approaches of natural and environmental studies. Each essay represents a substantial advance in scholarship and thought in its particular field. This is an essential collection for literary and cultural historians, and for historians of economy and society, art and ideas." --Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania "Engaging with Nature vividly captures the breadth and depth of human interactions with the natural world in premodern Europe. Its multidisciplinary approach generates new questions about how Europeans understood and connected with nature and delves into issues that will interest the specialist and the general reader alike. The book challenges readers to rethink not just the history of human engagement with nature but also the many ways the past has influenced our modern conceptions of ecology and environment." --James Masschaele, Rutgers University "This substantial collection of articles is far more than a response to current obsessions with climate change. It is a thought-provoking demonstration of the inter-disciplinary character of research on medieval history and culture. Students of medieval and early-modern society and economy, literature, philosophy, and art, will find much that is new in these essays, and much to provoke their own thinking about the vexed relationship of human societies with their natural surroundings." --Fredric Cheyette, Emeritus professor of history, Amherst College "Engaging with Nature is a deeply pleasurable volume to read. Using an incredible range of primary and secondary sources, the authors richly realize the methodological promise inherent in the emergent field of medieval and pre-modern studies on the history of nature." --Kathleen Biddick, Temple University "Engaging with Nature is a collection of impeccable scholarship that will make a highly original contribution to the emergent field of medieval and pre-modern studies on the history of nature." --Claire Sponsler, University of Iowa. (shrink)

In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in early-modern philosophy, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of John Locke's critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in writers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Nicole, Pufendorf, Boyle, Malebranche and Locke. Locke, Language and Early-Modern (...) Philosophy demonstrates that new developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors because it was seen as an obstacle to both knowledge and society. She thereby uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern epistemology, morality and politics. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, philosopher Paul Russell addresses major figures and central topics of the history of early modern philosophy. Most of these essays are studies on the philosophy of David Hume, one of the great figures in the history of philosophy. One central theme, connecting many of the essays, concerns Hume's fundamental irreligious intentions. Russell argues that a proper appreciation of the significance of Hume's irreligious concerns, which runs through his whole philosophy, serves to (...) discredit the deeply entrenched framework for understanding Hume - and much of early modern philosophy - in terms of the idea of "British Empiricism". In a substantive introduction, Russell outlines how his various insights overlap and connect to each other. -/- The volume is organized thematically into five sections: metaphysics, free will, ethics, religion, and general interpretations of Hume's philosophy. The collection also features a previously unpublished essay on Hume's atheism and an essay on Adam Smith's views on religion and ethics that has not been previously published in English. -/- Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy presents the reader with Russell's substantial and significant set of interconnected observations and insights on the matters and figures of the greatest importance in early modern philosophy. These essays not only provide different and original perspectives on the subject, they also show that the various issues addressed are very relevant to each other, as well as to a number of major topics in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This book offers a collection of contributions on medieval, early modern, and contemporary perspectives on social ontology. Since the 1990s, social ontology has emerged as a vibrant research area in contemporary analytical philosophy. Questions concerning the nature and properties of social groups, institutions, facts, and objects like money and marriage, have been thoroughly discussed. However, the historical perspective has been largely neglected. One of the central aims of this volume is to show that relevant views on social ontology (...) can be found in medieval and early modern philosophy (ca. 1200-1700 C.E.), when, for example, the ontological status of money, law, and the sacraments was hotly debated. We see, furthermore, diverging positions between Aristotelian-inspired authors, who resort to a more naturalistic view of the emergence of the social realm, and authors like Olivi and Ockham, who emphasize the role of human free will and contractualist agreements. This book is the very first to address historical and contemporary social ontologies. Both historians of philosophy and philosophers will benefit from this juxtaposition, which fosters a better understanding of historical positions and approaches by using today’s conceptual and analytical tools, and allows the contemporary debate to gain new perspectives by confronting its own medieval and early modern history. (shrink)

This paper aims to take the measure of the strand of early modern anti-clericalism that was conveyed by the term “priestcraft”. Priestcraft amounted to the claim that priests had usurped civil power and accumulated material wealth by systematically deceiving the laity and its secular rulers. Religion as it was practised and avowed by believers in early modern Europe was left tainted by this charge since manifold aspects of religious practice and belief fell under the pall of (...) the suspicion that they were merely part of the ruse perpetrated through the centuries by greedy and power-hungry priests. While the English language was particularly effective in condensing this claim into the term in question, mistrust of the clergy informed numerous discourses unfolding in diverse confessional and intellectual contexts. The present article seeks to draw attention to the thematic richness of priestcraft as an object of historical inquiry by identifying the multiple ways in which this trope made its presence felt in the early modern world. (shrink)

In early modern China, natural history and medicine were shifting along with the boundaries of the empire. Naturalists struggled to cope with a pharmacy's worth of new and unfamiliar substances, texts, and terms, as plants, animals, and the drugs made from them travelled into China across land and sea. One crucial aspect of this phenomenon was the early modern exchange between Islamic and Chinese medicine. The history of theriac illustrates the importance of the recipe (...) for the naturalization of foreign objects in early modern Chinese medicine. Theriac was a widely sought-after and hotly debated product in early modern European pharmacology, and arrived into the Chinese medical canon via Arabic and Persian texts. The dialogue between language and material objects was critical to the Silk Road drug trade, and transliteration was ultimately a crucial technology used to translate drugs and texts about them in the early modern world. (shrink)

_Sensibility in the Early Modern Era_ investigates how the early modern characterisation of sensibility as a natural property of the body could give way to complex considerations about the importance of affect in morality. What underlies this understanding of sensibility is the attempt to fuse Lockean sensationism with Scottish sentimentalism – being able to have experiences of objects in the world is here seen as being grounded in the same principle that also enables us to (...) feel moral sentiments. Moral and epistemic ways of relating to the world thus blend into one another, as both can be traced to the same capacity that enables us to affectively respond to stimuli that impinge on our perceptual apparatus. This collection focuses on these connections by offering reflections on the role of sensibility in the early modern attempt to think of the human being as a special kind of sensitive machine and affectively responsive animal. Humans, as they are understood in this context, relate to themselves by sensing themselves and perpetually refining their intellectual and moral capacities in response to the way the world affects them. Responding to the world here refers to the manner in which both natural _and_ man-made influences impact on our ability to conceptualise the animate and inanimate world, and our place within that world. This book was originally published as a special issue of the _Intellectual History Review. _. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century the new science was introduced through the works of Bacon, Hooke, Boyle, Power, and others. The advocates of the new science promised to divulge the inner workings of nature and to help man overcome his painful fallen state by means of controlling nature. The new sciences of mechanism and corpuscularism were to be based on objective experiments that would reveal the secret inner natures of minerals, vegetables, animals, the sun, moon, and stars. These experiments were done (...) with new and improved telescopes and microscope with magnifications of up to 100 times. One early critic of the new science was Margaret Cavendish. Cavendish was skeptical of the ambitious claims, methodology, instruments, and institutions of the new science. In her work, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, Cavendish argued against “experimental and dioptrical writers,” provided her own account of the natural world, investigated aspects of chemistry, medicine, and the nature of heat and color, as well as many other topics in natural philosophy (OEP 10). While many think Cavendish landed on the wrong side of history with respect to her skepticism regarding microscopes and telescopes, her criticisms of the new science were wide ranging and she was by no means the only one to question the value of such experiments and instruments. While several commentators, like Eve Keller (1997), have argued that Cavendish was against all things experimental, several recent commentators, Emma Wilkins (2014) and Deborah Boyle (2018), have tried to show the much more complicated relationship between Cavendish and the Royal Society and medical studies, respectively. In addition, some commentators, such as Lisa Sarasohn (1984, 2010) and Eve Keller (1997), have argued that Cavendish’s criticisms of the new science are based on her belief that Nature, as a representation of the feminine, was under attack by the experimentalists desire to “penetrate” and “manipulate” her for their own ends. While it is certainly true that Cavendish and many of the experimentalists personified nature as a woman, and that Cavendish does portray the men as trying to make her into something she is not, I agree with Deborah Boyle (2004) that these descriptions are not the focus of her objections to experimentalism. Rather than hold that Cavendish is concerned with, as Sarasohn claims, “the sexual implications for both women and nature of the new philosophy” (2010: 147), it seems that Cavendish’s objections were largely based on her philosophical commitments. However, I believe there is one aspect of the new science that Cavendish does critique from a feminist perspective, and that is what she sees as its institutional nature and its exclusion of women on the basis of sex, and to this I will turn in the last section of the chapter.1 My aim is to address Cavendish’s three major critiques of the new science. The chapter is divided as follows: The first section provides a brief overview of Cavendish’s views on the nature of bodies and perception. The second regards her critique of the methods and aims of the new science as represented by Bacon and Boyle. The third section examines her critique of Hooke and the instruments of experimentalism. The final section lays out her feminist critique of the institution of the new science. (shrink)

In the Early Modern era of encyclopedias, the Bible functioned as a tool for managing and organizing the superabundance of information. From Johann Alsted to Johann Scheuchzer, this paper traces the use of the Biblical encyclopedia and the ways that the Bible was deployed to control the data that flooded the world of Early Modern scholarship. In a variety of contexts, the Bible served as a structure for generating meaningful statements from informational noise. In turn, (...) the use of the Bible as a principle of organization would have profound implications for the status of the Bible in Early Modern scholarly culture. (shrink)