Recent studies have fruitfully examined the intersection between early modern science and visual culture by elucidating the functions of images in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge. Given its rich archival sources, it is possible to extend this line of research in the case of the Royal Society to an examination of attitudes towards images as artifacts—manufactured objects worth commissioning, collecting, and studying. Drawing on existing scholarship and material from the Royal Society Archives, I discuss Fellows’ interests in prints, drawings, varnishes, (...) colorants, images made out of unusual materials, and methods of identifying the painter from a painting. Knowledge of production processes of images was important to members of the Royal Society, not only as connoisseurs and collectors, but also as those interested in a Baconian mastery of material processes, including a “history of trades.” Their antiquarian interests led to discussion of painters’ styles, and they gradually developed a visual memorial to an institution through portraits and other visual records. (shrink)

This volume offers an important re-evaluation of early modern philosophy. It takes issue with the received notion of a 'revolution' in philosophical thought in the 17th-century, making the case for treating the 16th and 17th centuries together. Taking up Charles Schmitt's formulation of the many 'Aristotelianisms' of the period, the papers bring out the variety and richness of the approaches to Aristotle, rather than treating his as a homogeneous system of thought. Based on much new research, they provide case studies (...) of how philosophers used, developed, and reacted to the framework of Aristotelian logic, categories and distinctions, and demonstrate that Aristotelianism possessed both the flexibility and the dynamism to exert a continuing impact - even among such noted 'anti-Aristotelians' as Descartes and Hobbes. This constant engagement can indeed be termed 'conversations with Aristotle'. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of PicturesSachiko KusukawaIf not for the attractive plant with overhanging flute-like flowers that was named after him, Leonhart Fuchs (1501–66) is best known today as one of the pioneers of accurate representations of plants in histories of scientific illustrations.1 The pictures in Fuchs’s Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants (1542) have been appreciated usually for their “naturalistic” features (i.e., pictures drawn from observing (...) a plant specimen), as well as for their tendency to discard individual blemishes and portray a universal or ideal “type” of a plant where several varieties of species could be incorporated into one bush, or where various stages of the same plant may be depicted in one figure.2 On the other hand no historian of botany who has examined the text these pictures accompanied has found that such qualities as observation from nature or a sense of “ideal type” contributed to Fuchs’s theoretical understanding of [End Page 403] plants: he lacked any sense of the family genera or Linnean classification, for he had simply adopted an alphabetical ordering.3Fuchs himself considered his pictures remarkable—as he was at pains to point out—and he believed his pictures were absolutely crucial for his commentary on plants. My immediate aim in this paper, therefore, is to offer an interpretation of Fuchs’s Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants which does not split the work into artistically positive and botanically negative elements. As I shall argue, the uniqueness and so the controversial nature of Fuchs’s enterprise lies in the kind of argument and procedure he believed to be valid for an academic study of plants. More generally, I hope to use this reassessment of Fuchs’s work to show how pictures could be as controversial as texts and how the uses of texts and pictures together form past acts which require historical explanation. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.The Artists. Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium, 1542, verso of last folio page. Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.In 1542 Fuchs published his Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants Belaboured with Great Expense and Vigilance with More than Five Hundred Live Images of Plants Attached. It begins with a picture of Fuchs, the author, at the age of forty-one and ends with that of the artists (fig. 1). Although the division of labor depicted here seems to have been a standard one for printing illustrated books in this period,4 it is unusual that we know their names. Albrecht Meyer did the drawings from life, Heinrich Füllmaurer transferred the drawings to woodblocks, and Veit Rudolf Speckle cut those woodblocks.5 Fuchs was proud of one of the artists in particular: “the woodcutter [sculptor] Veit Rudolf Speckle, by far the best in Strasbourg, excellently imitated the admirable industry of painters: he has so skilfully expressed the outlines of each picture by carving [sculpendo] that he seems to compete with the painter for glory and victory.”6 A comparison between the painter and the sculptor had been a favorite topic in the Renaissance genre of paragone—Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Castiglione, and Michaelangelo composed treatises on it—where the [End Page 404] relative merits of various mimetic arts were discussed.7 Fuchs’s comment on Speckle is more nuanced, however, than a polite competition between the arts over their mimetic skills: Fuchs announces that Speckle is worthy of praise in producing a picture—normally the domain of the painter (pictor)—with the specialized skill of carving of the cutter (sculptor). This is surely an appreciation of the particular skill involved in producing replicable pictures for printed books, just as Erasmus had, a generation earlier, acknowledged in Albrecht Dürer’s prowess at engraving the potential for reproducibility in a print culture.8 Indeed, of the artists involved in printing, it was the woodcutter who could expect to be paid most in this period—nearly fifteen times more than the artist who originally drew the pictures.9 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Atriplex. Theodore Dorsten, Botanicon, 1540, fol. 35r. Reproduced... (shrink)

This is an important volume of seventeen essays that historicizes observation as a practice, concept and ideal. It belongs to the historiographical tradition of scrutinizing central aspects of the scientific enterprise such as experiments and objectivity that once appeared too self-evident to be probed. The challenge of historicizing such a significant idea is that it has to be a collective enterprise.The volume starts with three essays that provide a chronological survey of the period from 500 to 1800. Katherine Park, covering (...) the period from 500 to 1500, explains how observation for Cicero and Pliny had nothing to do with experiment or systematic investigation, but rather was a collective and largely anonymous process, associated with originary phrases of natural knowledge of a distant past and intelligible even by the illiterate. It was the basis for conjectural knowledge that lacked causal explanation. Observation of celestial events occurred from time to time, but in the context o .. (shrink)

Images in the service of scientific knowledge (broadly construed) in early modern Europe have received much scholarly attention in recent years. Given that this was a period where there was a large...

In this paper, I discuss a drawing that substituted for an engraving in a copy of Philosophical Transactions once owned by Thomas Kirke (1650–1706, FRS 1693). I suggest that prints allowed Kirke to train his eye as well as his hand. His case is useful for raising further questions about visual representations in early modern science.

This paper examines the inter-relationship between image, text and object in the Codex Kentmanus, which is one of the earliest records of the plants in the botanical garden at Padua, studied by Johannes Kentmann . The manuscript shows that “observation” for Kentmann involved a gradual process of assimilating knowledge from other physicians, apothecaries, and books in order to make the plants which were originally encountered at a specific time and place into a more generalised object of study for learned physicians.

This paper examines the inter-relationship between image, text and object in the Codex Kentmanus, which is one of the earliest records of the plants in the botanical garden at Padua, studied by Johannes Kentmann . The manuscript shows that “observation” for Kentmann involved a gradual process of assimilating knowledge from other physicians, apothecaries, and books in order to make the plants which were originally encountered at a specific time and place into a more generalised object of study for learned physicians.

The four papers in this volume arise out of a research project, “Making Visible: The visual and graphic practices of the early Royal Society,” funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom.1 The project sought to understand how visual resources and practices contributed to, and shaped the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge in the first fifty years of the Royal Society. The Royal Society, as an early institution dedicated to promoting natural knowledge, has received substantial (...) scholarly attention from historians of science, aided by a rich administrative archive that has been preserved virtually unbroken since its foundation.2 Because modern cataloguing of manuscripts... (shrink)

Philip Melanchthon, humanist and colleague of Martin Luther, is best known for his educational reforms, for which he earned the title Praeceptor Germaniae. His most influential form of philosophical writing was the academic oration, and this volume, first published in 1999, presents a large and wide-ranging selection of his orations and textbook prefaces translated into English. They set out his views on the distinction between faith and reason, the role of philosophy in education, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, astronomy and astrology, (...) and the importance of philosophy to a true Christian, as well as his views on Classical philosophical authorities such as Plato and Aristotle and on contemporaries such as Erasmus and Luther. Powerfully influential in their time, inspiring many Protestant students to study philosophy, mathematics and natural philosophy, they illuminate the relationship between Renaissance and Reformation thought. (shrink)

Philip Melanchthon, humanist and colleague of Martin Luther, is best known for his educational reforms, for which he earned the title Praeceptor Germaniae. His most influential form of philosophical writing was the academic oration, and this volume, first published in 1999, presents a large and wide-ranging selection of his orations and textbook prefaces translated into English. They set out his views on the distinction between faith and reason, the role of philosophy in education, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, astronomy and astrology, (...) and the importance of philosophy to a true Christian, as well as his views on Classical philosophical authorities such as Plato and Aristotle and on contemporaries such as Erasmus and Luther. Powerfully influential in their time, inspiring many Protestant students to study philosophy, mathematics and natural philosophy, they illuminate the relationship between Renaissance and Reformation thought. (shrink)

This is a brief review of the significance of Martin Rudwick’s article, ‘The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science 1760–1840’, published in this journal 40 years ago.