Dániel Margócsy

Mark Somos

Stephen N. Joffe

The current work provides bibliographic information, a worldwide census, ownership records, and a description of the annotations in all the copies of Vesalius’ Fabrica. It reconstructs the travels of the Fabrica across the globe since 1543 and its annotated readership.

A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions

The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius

In "Commercial Visions," Daniel Margocsy shows how entrepreneurial science has been with us since the Scientific Revolution. Product marketing, patent litigation, and even ghostwriting pervaded natural history and anatomy, the big sciences of the early modern era, and the growth of global trade during the Dutch Golden Age gave rise to a transnational network of such entrepreneurial science, connecting natural historians, physicians, and curiosi in such cities as Amsterdam, London, St. Petersburg, and Danzig. These practitioners were out to do business: they bought and sold exotica, preserved specimens, anatomical prints, and botanical atlases, and in their trade relied on particularly mercantile innovations, including postal networks, shipping, public transportation, and international banking. They also developed their own infrastructure for managing the long-distance monetary exchange of scientific knowledge and curiosities, while entrepreneurial rivalries, secrecy, and marketing strategies transformed the honorific, gift-based exchange system of the Republic of Letters into a competitive marketplace. Throughout this process, the Dutch naturalists contributed to the growth of modern science, imbuing its ethos and practices with financial undertones. "Commercial Visions "studies the interaction of commerce and science through the lens of recent scholarship on commodification, the circulation of knowledge, and the consumer revolution to argue that trade brought about a culture of scientific debate in the Netherlands that thoroughly influenced the visual epistemology of early modern science. Market competition pitted naturalists against each other, and compelled them to develop philosophical arguments to promote the representational claims of their imaging techniques. Margocsy s highly readable book will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in early modern science, culture, and art. "

Dániel Margócsy

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