Paula Findlen

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Last Man who Knew Everything

Athanasius Kircher

Michelle Fontaine

Duane J. Osheim

Moving beyond the long-dominant emphasis on Florence, this book explores the diversity of Italian urban and provincial life from the 11th through the 17th centuries. A group of 16 urban social, religious, and economic historians present essays that reflect this shift and illustrate some of the significant new research directions of the field.

The Contours of Medieval and Early Modern Italy

Beyond Florence

Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects – ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made – came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world. Now in its second edition, this book taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c. 1500–1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new essays on ‘encountering things’ to enrich the volume. These look at cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use, consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things themselves. Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early modern world and the history of material culture.

Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800

Early Modern Things

Wendy Wassyng Roworth

Catherine M. Sama

In the age of the Grand Tour, foreigners flocked to Italy to gawk at its ruins and paintings, enjoy its salons and cafés, attend the opera, and revel in their own discovery of its past. But they also marveled at the people they saw, both male and female. In an era in which castrati were "rock stars," men served women as cicisbei, and dandified Englishmen became macaroni, Italy was perceived to be a place where men became women. The great publicity surrounding female poets, journalists, artists, anatomists, and scientists, and the visible roles for such women in salons, academies, and universities in many Italian cities also made visitors wonder whether women had become men. Such images, of course, were stereotypes, but they were nonetheless grounded in a reality that was unique to the Italian peninsula. This volume illuminates the social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Italy by exploring how questions of gender in music, art, literature, science, and medicine shaped perceptions of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour.

Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour

Italy’s Eighteenth Century

In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory. Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.

Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy

Possessing Nature

Jacob Soll

Corey Tazzara

Although there is a rich historiography on Enlightenment Tuscany in Italian as well as French and German, the principle Anglophone works are Eric Cochrane’s Tradition and Enlightenment in the Tuscan Academies (1961) and his Enlightenment Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1973). It is high time to revisit the Tuscan Enlightenment. This volume brings together an international group of scholars with the goal of putting to rest the idea that Florence ceased to be interesting after the Renaissance. Indeed, it is partly the explicit dialogue between Renaissance and Enlightenment that makes eighteenth-century Tuscany so interesting. This enlightened age looked to the past. It began the Herculean project of collecting, editing, and publishing many of the manuscripts that today form the bedrock of any serious study of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari, Galileo, and other Tuscan writers. This was an age of public libraries, projects of cultural restoration, and the emergence of the Uffizi as a public art gallery, complemented by a science museum in Peter Leopold’s reign whose relics can still be visited in the Museo Galileo and La Specola.

Tuscan Enlightenment, 1737-1790

Florence After the Medici

Italy's Eighteenth Century

Thirteen of the most important critical essays on the Italian Renaissance are brought together in this volume. Brings together critical essays on the Italian Renaissance. Provides an ideal starting point for non-specialists studying this period. Includes new research as well as classic interpretations. Editorial apparatus helps students to engage with the material.

The Essential Readings

The Italian Renaissance

"As a study of late Renaissance naturalists, the science they practised, and the fit between that science and late Renaissance court life, the book has no rival."—Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

Pamela Smith

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. Merchants and Marvels 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.

Paula Findlen

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