15 found
Order:
  1.  18
    Mining Tacitus: secrets of empire, nature and art in the reason of state.Vera Keller - 2012 - British Journal for the History of Science 45 (2):189-212.
    A new political practice, the ‘reason of state’, informed the ends and practices of natural study in the late sixteenth century. Informed by the study of the Roman historian Tacitus, political writers gathered ‘secrets of empire’ from both history and travel. Following the economic reorientation of ‘reason of state’ by Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), such secrets came to include bodies of useful particulars concerning nature and art collected by an expanding personnel of intelligencers. A comparison between various writers describing wide-scale collections, (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  2.  32
    Accounting for Invention: Guido Pancirolli’s Lost and Found Things and the Development of Desiderata.Vera Keller - 2012 - Journal of the History of Ideas 73 (2):223-245.
  3.  12
    The “New World of Sciences”: The Temporality of the Research Agenda and the Unending Ambitions of Science.Vera Keller - 2012 - Isis 103 (4):727-734.
    Lists foreground multiplicity: both of objects to be pursued and, for distant objects, of far-flung networks enabling their pursuit. The future-oriented or projective list stretches such networks not only around the world but forward through time. Research agendas are one kind of future-oriented, projective list. Sketching how such lists have functioned over time, from Francis Bacon's “The New World of Sciences, or Desiderata” to today's desiderata lists, suggests how an early modern model of imperial expansion has shaped, in unintended ways, (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  4.  11
    From the Archives of Scientific Diplomacy: Science and the Shared Interests of Samuel Hartlib’s London and Frederick Clodius’s Gottorf.Vera Keller & Leigh T. I. Penman - 2015 - Isis 106 (1):17-42.
    ABSTRACT Many historians have traced the accumulation of scientific archives via communication networks. Engines for communication in early modernity have included trade, the extrapolitical Republic of Letters, religious enthusiasm, and the centralization of large emerging information states. The communication between Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, Duke Friedrich III of Gottorf-Holstein, and his key agent in England, Frederick Clodius, points to a less obvious but no less important impetus—the international negotiations of smaller states. Smaller states shaped communication networks in an international (albeit (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  5.  33
    Drebbel's Living Instruments, Hartmann's Microcosm, and Libavius's Thelesmos: Epistemic Machines before Descartes.Vera Keller - 2010 - History of Science 48 (1):39-74.
  6.  21
    Towards a History of Projects.Vera Keller & Ted McCormic - 2016 - Ealry Science and Medicine 21 (5):423-444.
    This introduction argues for the value of projecting as a category of analysis, while exploring the contexts for its emergence and spread as a genre of intellectual and practical activity in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The emergence of the morally ambivalent figure of the “projector” in Elizabethan and Stuart England – initially in connection with confessional strife and attacks on corruption, and subsequently in relation to colonial expansion, experimental philosophy, and commercial and fiscal innovation – provoked defences of (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  7.  26
    Introduction: The Nature of Invention.Alexander Marr & Vera Keller - 2014 - Intellectual History Review 24 (3):283-286.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  8.  12
    Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives.Vera Keller, Anna Marie Eleanor Roos & Elizabeth Yale (eds.) - 2018 - BRILL.
    A collection of essays by an international team of scholars, _Archival Afterlives_ explores the posthumous fortunes of scientific and medical archives in early modern Britain. It demonstrates the sustaining importance of archival institutions in the growth of the “New Sciences.”.
    No categories
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. A More Perfect Union: Bacon’s Correspondence of Form and Policy.Vera Keller - 2016 - In Guido Giglioni, James A. T. Lancaster, Sorana Corneanu & Dana Jalobeanu (eds.), Francis Bacon on Motion and Power. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10.  2
    A “Wild Swing to Phantsy”: The Philosophical Gardener and Emergent Experimental Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World.Vera Keller - 2021 - Isis 112 (3):507-530.
    This essay traces the changing relationship between horticulture, agriculture, and philosophy across the seventeenth century, as the personae of the philosophical husbandman and the philosophical gardener intertwined and competed. At stake in the dynamics between them was the relationship between abstruse researches and practical applications in evolving experimental philosophy, as well as the aesthetic of experimental practices and rhetoric. Early seventeenth-century promoters of colonial projects, such as Virginian sericulture, situated the metropolitan pleasure garden, a place of whimsy and fantastical reasoning, (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11.  2
    Human Empire: mobility and demographic thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500–1800.Vera Keller - 2024 - History of European Ideas 50 (4):644-647.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12. Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725.Vera Keller - 2015 - Cambridge University Press.
    Many studies relate modern science to modern political and economic thought. Using one shift in order to explain the other, however, has begged the question of modernity's origins. New scientific and political reasoning emerged simultaneously as controversial forms of probabilistic reasoning. Neither could ground the other. They both rejected logical systems in favor of shifting, incomplete, and human-oriented forms of knowledge which did not meet accepted standards of speculative science. This study follows their shared development by tracing one key political (...)
    No categories
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  13.  90
    The Centre of Nature: Baron Johann Otto von Hellwig between a Global Network and a Universal Republic.Vera Keller - 2012 - Early Science and Medicine 17 (5):570-588.
    A large network of alchemical agents spread from the tiny, land-locked duchy of Saxe- Gotha-Altenburg outward across Europe. At its centre, Duke Friedrich I meticulously documented his interactions with many alchemical personalities during the 1670s and 1680s. The story of one such personality illustrates the changing meanings of distant alchemical knowledge both to the inner circle of courtly alchemists and to a larger alchemical republic. Born near Gotha, Johann Otto von Hellwig built his pan-European career on a youthful stay on (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  14.  13
    Katherine Eggert. Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England. ix + 351 pp., illus., bibl., index. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. $55. [REVIEW]Vera Keller - 2016 - Isis 107 (4):831-832.
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  15.  56
    The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossman. [REVIEW]Vera Keller - 2011 - Early Science and Medicine 16 (4):364-365.