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Title Science in the age of Baroque / Ofer Gal, Raz Chen-Morris, editors
Published Dordrecht ; New York : Springer, ©2013

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Description 1 online resource (vi, 313 pages)
Series International archives of the history of ideas ; v. 208
Archives internationales d'histoire des idées ; v. 208
Contents Order -- What Was the Relation of Baroque Culture to the Trajectory of Early Modern Natural Philosophy? / John A. Schuster -- "Bent and Directed Towards Him": A Stylistic Analysis of Kircher's Sunflower Clock / Koen Vermeir -- From Divine Order to Human Approximation: Mathematics in Baroque Science / Ofer Gal -- Vision -- "The Quality of Nothing:" Shakespearean Mirrors and Kepler's Visual Economy of Science / Raz Chen-Morris -- Agostino Scilla: A Baroque Painter in Pursuit of Science / Paula Findlen -- What Exactly Was Torricelli's "Barometer?" / J.B. Shank -- William Harvey and the Way of the Artisan / Alan Salter -- Excess -- Crossing the Pillars of Hercules: Francis Bacon, the Scientific Revolution and the New World / John Gascoigne -- The Hive and the Pendulum: Universal Metrology and Baroque Science / Nicholas Dew -- Chymical Philosophy and Boyle's Incongruous Philosophical Chymistry / Victor D. Boantza -- The Simulation of Nature and the Dissimulation of the Law on a Baroque Stage: Galileo and the Church Revisited / Rivka Feldhay
Summary This volume examines the New Science of the 17th century in the context of Baroque culture, analysing its emergence as an integral part of the high culture of the period. The collected essays explore themes common to the new practices of knowledge production and the rapidly changing culture surrounding them, as well as the obsessions, anxieties and aspirations they share, such as the foundations of order, the power and peril of mediation and the conflation of the natural and the artificial. The essays also take on the historiographical issues involved: the characterization of culture in general and culture of knowledge in particular; the use of generalizations like 'Baroque' and the status of such categories; and the role of these in untangling the historical complexities of the tumultuous 17th century. The canonical protagonists of the 'Scientific Revolution' are considered, and so are some obscure and suppressed figures: Galileo side by side with Scheiner;Torricelli together with Kircher; Newton as well as Scilla. The coupling of Baroque and Science defies both the still-triumphalist historiographies of the Scientific Revolution and the slight embarrassment that the Baroque represents for most cultural-national histories of Western Europe. It signals a methodological interest in tensions and dilemmas rather than self-affirming narratives of success and failure, and provides an opportunity for reflective critique of our historical categories which is valuable in its own right
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and indexes
Notes Print version record
In Springer eBooks
Subject Science -- History -- 17th century
SCIENCE -- History.
Droit.
Sciences sociales.
Sciences humaines.
Intellectual life
Science
Naturwissenschaften
SUBJECT Europe -- Intellectual life -- 17th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85045727
Subject Europe
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
Author Gal, Ofer
Chen-Morris, Raz
ISBN 9789400748071
9400748078
940074806X
9789400748064