Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe

ISBN-13: 9780415928168 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 448 str.

Pamela Smith; Paula Findlen

Opis

The beginning of global commerce in the early modern period had an enormous impact on European culture, changing the very way people perceived the world around them. This work assembles essays by leading scholars of cultural history, art history, and the history of science and technology to show how ideas about the representation of nature, in both art and science, underwent a profound transformation between the age of the Renaissance and the early 1700s. The essays address topics like the Dutch tulip-mania of 1637, the relationship between alchemy and commercial exchange in the Holy Roman Empire, the traffic in curiosities in Italy, and how Spanish sea charts reflected territorial claims in the 1500s.

Recenzje

"This beautifully-illustrated book explores the relations between the accumulations of profitable commodities and the production of enlightening knowledge in Europeans' relations with their external worlds, opening a new way of expressing the historical relation between the arts of depicting the world and the techniques for knowing it." -- Simon Schaffer, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
"Merchants and Marvels traces the paths by which many wonderful commodities were traded and collected in early-modern Europe. The editors and their contributors have produced a marvelous collection-a true Wunderkammer-to delight the mind." -- Jan Golinski, Department of History, University of New Hampshire
"A terrific collection, which gives the reader both wonderful new stories, and a vivid sense of how historians are beginning to study the material side of cultural history. These well-presented original essays deserve a wide public." -- Tony Grafton, Department of History, Princeton University
"Merchants and Marvels is wide-ranging and thought-provoking." -- Canadian Journal of History

Spis treści

Acknowledgments Introduction:Commerce and the Representation of Nature in Art and Science Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen Part 1. STRUGGLING WITH REALITY: Visualizing Nature and Producing Knowledge 1. Splendor in the Grass: The Powers of Nature and Art in the Age of Durer Larry Silver and Pamela H. Smith 2. Objects of Art/Objects of Nature: Visual Representation and the Investigation of Nature Pamela O. Long 3. Mirroring the World: Sea Charts: Navigation and Territorial Claims Alison Sandman 4. From Blowfish to Flower Still Life Paintings: Classification and Its Images, circa 1600 Claudia Swan 5. Strange Ideas and English Knowledge: Natural Science Exchange in Elizabethan London Deborah E. Harkness Part 2. NETWORKS OF KNOWLEDGE: Commerce and the Representation of Nature 6. Local Herbs, Global Medicines: Commerce, Knowledge and Commodities in Spanish America Antonio Barrera 7. Merchants and Marvels: Hans Jacob Fugger and the Origins of the Wunderkammer Mark A. Meadow 8. Practical Alchemy and Commercial Exchange in the Holy Roman Empire Tara E. Nummedal 9. Time's Bodies: Crafting the Preparation and Preservation of Naturalia Harold J. Cook 10. Cartography, Entrepreneurialism and Power in the Reign of Louis XIV: The Case of the Canal du Midi Chandra Mukerji 11. 'Cornelius Meijer inventor et fecit': On the Representation of Science in Late Seventeenth-Century Rome Klass van Berkel Part 3. CONSUMPTION, ART AND SCIENCE 12. Inventing Nature: Commerce, Art and Science in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities Paula Findlen 13. Nature as Art: The Case of the Tulip Anne Goldgar 14. Inventing Exoticism: The Project of Dutch Geography and the Marketing of the World, circa 1700 Benjamin Schmidt 15. Shopping for Instruments in Paris and London James A. Bennett EPILOGUES A World of Wonders, A World of One Lissa Roberts Questions of Representation Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann Contributors Index

O autorze

Pamela H. Smith is Associate Professor of History at Pomona College and the Claremont Graduate University. She is the author of The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire, winner of the 1995 Pfizer Prize in the History of Science. Paula Findlen is Professor of History and Director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford University. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, winner of the 1995 Marroro Prize in Italian History and 1996 Pfizer Prize in the History of Science.