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Vegetative powers : The roots of life in ancient, medieval and early modern natural philosophy
The volume analyzes the natural philosophical accounts and debates concerning the vegetative powers, namely nutrition, growth, and reproduction. While principally focusing on the early modern approaches to the lower functions of the soul, readers will discover the roots of these approaches back to the Ancient times, as the volume highlights the role of three strands that help shape the study of life in the Medieval and early modern natural philosophies. From late antiquity to the early modern period, the vegetative soul and its cognate concepts have played a substantial role in specifying life, living functions, and living bodies, sometimes blurring the line between living and non-living nature, and, at other moments, resulting in a strong restriction of life to a mechanical system of operations and powers. Unearthing the history of the vegetative soul as a shrub of interconnected concepts, the 24 contributions of the volume fill a crucial gap in scholarship, ultimately outlining the importance of vegetal processes of incessant proliferation, generation, and organic growth as the roots of life in natural philosophical interpretations.
Universities and Science in the Early Modern Period
The authors of this volume offer a fresh assessment of how this course of study affected generations of natural philosophers, from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia, from Italy to Scotland, even as it was increasingly modified to accommodate the new science. The fresh evidence gathered here emphasizes just how rigorously science was pursued by academics, notwithstanding institutional constraints. Individually, each paper illustrates the nexus of complexities specific locales made on the reception and transmission of scientific ideas; collectively, the papers offer a comparative framework that should prove invaluable in our evaluating the profound changes undergone by early modern universities during the era of Scientific Revolution.
Publishing Sacrobosco’s De sphaera in early modern Europe : Modes of material and scientific exchange
This volume focuses on the cultural background of the pivotal transformations of scientific knowledge in the early modern period. It investigates the rich edition history of Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera, by far the most widely disseminated textbook on geocentric cosmology, from the unique standpoint of the many printers, publishers, and booksellers who steered this text from manuscript to print culture, and in doing so transformed it into an established platform of scientific learning.
Platonism at the Origins of Modernity : Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy
Offers an overview of the range and breadth of Platonic philosophy in the early modern period. The book also addresses the impact of Platonism on major philosophers of the period, especially Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Shaftesbury and Berkeley.
Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse
This book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.
De sphaera of Johannes de Sacrobosco in the Early Modern Period : The Authors of the Commentaries
Explores commentaries on an influential text of pre-Copernican astronomy in Europe. It features essays that take a close look at key intellectuals and how they engaged with the main ideas of this qualitative introduction to geocentric cosmology.
Constructions of cancer in early Modern England : Ravenous natures
Cancer is perhaps the modern world's most feared disease. Yet, we know relatively little about this malady's history before the nineteenth century. This book provides the first in-depth examination of perceptions of cancerous disease in early modern England. Looking to drama, poetry and polemic as well as medical texts and personal accounts, it contends that early modern people possessed an understanding of cancer which remains recognizable to us today. Many of the ways in which medical practitioners and lay people imagined cancer – as a 'woman's disease' or a 'beast' inside the body – remain strikingly familiar, and they helped to make this disease a byword for treachery and cruelty in discussions of religion, culture and politics. Equally, cancer treatments were among the era's most radical medical and surgical procedures. From buttered frog ointments to agonizing and dangerous surgeries, they raised abiding questions about the nature of disease and the proper role of the medical practitioner.
