143 research outputs found
CONFERENCE : Is a Crocodile a Work of Art? Seeing Objects in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities par Paula Findlen
No full textLIEU : New York, Bard Institute, 38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall DATE : Mercredi 8 avril 2015 18h00 - 20h00 Cette intervention de Paula Findlen aura lieu dans le cadre du Séminaire d'Histoire Culturelle. Pour en savoir plus sur Paula Findlen : https://history.stanford.edu/people/paula-findle
Possessing nature: museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy
No full textIn 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
Paula Findlen (dir.), Early Modern Things Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800
No full textLes objets ont une histoire. C’est ce que nous dit le volume collectif édité par Paula Findlen. En six parties, les auteurs donnent la parole aux « choses ». Le terme employé par tout un chacun pourrait sembler, au premier abord, relativement simple, creux et vide. Pourtant, les diverses approches de l’ouvrage, qualitativement égales, permettent de discuter avec des morceaux de culture matérielle, du ginseng à l’horloge, en passant par des oiseaux. Loin d’être immobiles, ces histoires insiste..
Gusto for Things : A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome
No full textForeword: Early Modern Romans and Their Things, by Paula Findlen
Acknowledgments A Note on Roman Coins and Money
Introduction Part One. The Nature of Goods
Chapter One. The Function of Goods
Chapter Two. Reflecting on Things
Part Two. Material Goods
Chapter Three. Furniture
Chapter Four. Furnishings and Clothing
Part Three. Immaterial Things
Chapter Five. The Great Collections
Chapter Six. Paintings
Chapter Seven. Ostentatious Things
Chapter Eight. Books
Conclusionhttps://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_facbooks/1019/thumbnail.jp
Trading at the edge of empires : Francesco Carletti's world, ca. 1600
No full textPublished online: 23 January 2026In narrating his circumnavigation of the world at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Florentine Francesco Carletti became the first European merchant to leave an account of travel on existing commercial routes. A repentant ex-slave trader and smuggler turned dealer in Chinese goods, Carletti travelled “at the edge of empires,” providing a unique perspective on the promise and peril of a connected globe. With his long stays in Lima, Mexico City, Manila, Nagasaki, Macao, and Goa, as well as travels across the Americas, the Pacific, and Asia, Carletti documents a changing world in which European powers and traders interacted and often clashed with other empires and polities. Trading at the Edge of Empires brings together 24 scholars to situate and unpack how Carletti’s travels illuminate our understanding of trade, slavery, empire, religion, language, ethnography, cartography, cosmography, and material culture in the early modern world.-- 1. Brian Brege, Paula Findlen, and Giorgio Riello, Introduction: Trading at the Edge of Empires. Francesco Carletti’s World
-- Part I: Trade, Traders, and Travelers
-- 2. Brian Brege, Francesco Carletti and his Associates, the Medici, and the Interstices of Global Commerce
-- 3. Corey Tazzara, Francesco Carletti on Trade and Empire in the East Indies
-- 4. Lucio Biasiori, Carletti’s Eye between Metaphor and Experience
-- Part II: Ethics, Religion, and Slavery
-- 5. Trevor Burnard, Travelling the Global Selling Slaves: The Dark Side of Carletti’s World
-- 6. Stuart M. McManus, “At the Limits of the Law of a Number of Nations”: Carletti and Slavery in Maritime Asia
-- 7. Eugenio Menegon, Carletti and Religion: Christianity and Asian Traditions in the Ragionamenti
-- 8. Inha Park, Francesco Carletti’s Surprising Legacy: Antonio, Antonio Corea, and Corea
-- Part III: On the Edge of Global Empires
-- 9. Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, Francesco Carletti and the Spanish Empire: Networks and the Theories of Free Trade
-- 10. Daniela Bleichmar, Travels in the Spanish Indies, on the Ground and on the Page
-- 11. Jorge Flores, Carletti’s Experience of Portuguese Asia
-- 12. Marika Keblusek and Claudia Swan, Carletti’s Case: Trade in the Crosshairs of the VOC Part IV: Language, Vision, and Values
-- 13. Mackenzie Cooley, Of Cocks and Commerce: Sex, Money, and Value in Carletti
-- 14. Anne Gerritsen, Letters, Language and Hieroglyphs: Francesco Carletti’s Observations on Language in China and Japan
-- 15. Miki Sugiura, Carletti in Nagasaki: The Actuality of a Material World Part V: Ethnography, Cartography, and Cosmography
-- 16. Ines G. Županov, Boccaccio in the Tropics: Carletti’s Ethnographic Fragments
-- 17. Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Customs and Manners Strange to Us”: Cultural Diversity in Francesco Carletti
-- 18. Michela Bussotti, A Chinese Atlas and its Italian Description: A New but Unaware Knowledge of the Geography of China
-- 19. Guido van Meersbergen, Francesco Carletti and the World of Sex: Global Bodies and Colonial Desire
-- Part VI: Appraising Global Things
-- 20. Paula Findlen, Carletti's Curiosities: Observing Nature between Florence and the World
-- 21. Lia Markey, Collecting the World in Carletti’s Florence
-- 22. Rebecca Earle, Bread and Fruit: Food in Francesco Carletti’s Ragionamenti
-- 23. Giorgio Riello, Commodifying the World: Carletti’s Global Cargoes
-- Part VII: Returns
-- 24. Brian Brege, Back in Florence: Francesco Carletti’s World in Light of New Archival Discoveries
-- 25. Luca Molà, Italian Travel Narratives and Francesco Carletti's Ragionamenti: A Comparative Overvie
Calculations of faith: mathematics, philosophy, and sanctity in 18th-century Italy (new work on Maria Gaetana Agnesi)
No full textAbstractThe recent publication of three books on Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799) offers an opportunity to reflect on how we have understood and misunderstood her legacy to the history of mathematics, as the author of an important vernacular textbook, Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventú italiana (Milan, 1748), and one of the best-known women natural philosophers and mathematicians of her generation. This article discusses the work of Antonella Cupillari, Franco Minonzio, and Massimo Mazzotti in relation to earlier studies of Agnesi and reflects on the current state of this subject in light of the author’s own research on Agnesi
Forests, Woods, Roads Agricultural Landscapes as Instruments for the Material Administration of an Eighteenth-Century Tuscan Periphery
No full textOn 21 October 1767, the grand duke of Tuscany, Peter Leopold, signed a motu proprio, a copy of which was sent to the court geographer and mathematician, the Jesuit Leonardo Ximenes (1716–86). The motu proprio was about the necessity of obtaining a complete and accurate survey of the forests of the Maremma of Siena, “to understand their conditions and examine how to administer and use them in the most advantageous and profitable manner.” The burden of this task was not to be borne by Ximenes alone. Peter Leopold had two more people in mind. The two other people were Enrico Van Buggenhout, inspector of forestry, and a construction expert known as Imbert. The grand duke ultimately sought to establish control over the management of an important natural resource produced by the Maremma of Siena, that is, wood, and especially the cerro, a local oak tree, and other trees large enough to be used for naval and building construction. He also asked the three deputies to divide the territory under examination into one or two districts (circondari), in order to make it easier to number trees and estimate their value, and he promised to support them in their hard task by providing “any aides they deemed necessary.” The boundaries of the district did not stand for an administrative division of the grand duchy, but rather as spaces artificially constructed to systematize and facilitate control of the natural productions of the region, especially different wood varieties. Finally, Peter Leopold suggested that the three deputies write a detailed report at the end of their survey and propose strategies for the future improvement of the Maremma, “in the interest of the grand duchy and the universal good.” This article will examine the deputies’ survey of the district of the town of Capalbio, at the border with the Papal States and part of the grand duke’s own domain. The survey’s report offers an interesting perspective on the political economy of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany at the end of the 1760s. It shows how concerns with wood production were related to commercial—rather than merely agricultural—questions of wealth production and administration, as well as to the preservation of state sovereignty. The article will focus particularly on Leonardo Ximenes’ exchanges with some of the most renowned public officials in the grand duchy, as well as with the engineer Donato Maria Fini, from whom he and the other deputies—by order of the grand duke—had commissioned a large map, portraying the district of Capalbio
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