Possessing nature : museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy / / Paula Findlen

• Autore: Findlen Paula
• Pubblicazione: Berkeley, CA : , : University of California Press, , [1994]; ©1994
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (468 p.)
• Disciplina: 508/.074/45
• Soggetto topico: Science museums - Italy - History; Science museums - Europe - History; Natural history museums - Italy - History; Natural history museums - Europe - History
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (pages 409-432) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Photo Credits -- Introduction -- Introduction Part I -- 1. "A World Of Wonders In One Closet Shut" -- 2. Searching For Paradigms -- 3. Sites Of Knowledge -- Introduction Part II -- 4. Pilgrimages Of Science -- 5. Fare Esperienza -- 6. Museums Of Medicine -- Introduction Part III -- 7. Inventing The Collector -- 8. Patrons, Brokers, And Strategies -- Epilogue: The Old And The New -- Bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.
• Altri titoli varianti: Museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy
• Titolo autorizzato: Possessing nature
• ISBN: 0-520-91778-2; 0-585-08148-4; 0-520-20508-1
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 996248348903316
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. di Salerno
• Serie: Studies on the History of Society and Culture