{"title":"Astrological Self-Government at the Fifteenth-Century Court of Bourbon","authors":"Steven Vanden Broecke","doi":"10.1163/15733823-20230064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-20230064","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In articulating the uses of their art, late-medieval astrologers often invoked the maxim that “the wise man will rule the stars” (sapiens dominabitur astris). However, it is by no means clear whether this invocation sought to emphasize ‘domination’ over the natural and social world, or the ontological self-government that is at stake in the pursuit of ‘wisdom’. Many historians have interpreted the past pursuit of astrology in terms of an interest in dominance over the natural and social world. Taking inspiration from a recent ‘ascetic turn’ in the history of early modern science and philosophy, however, this article argues that late-medieval astrology was approached and appreciated as an art of self-government (both in body and in soul) and uncovers what this entailed. In so doing, we also demonstrate that the undifferentiated view of astrology as a pre-modern counterpart of modern prospective knowledge practices is anachronistic.","PeriodicalId":49081,"journal":{"name":"Early Science and Medicine","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42527059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cabanis’ Kunst der Koexistenz lebender Systeme","authors":"T. Cheung","doi":"10.1163/15733823-20220061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-20220061","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Cabanis’ „Kunst der Koexistenz“ des Menschen in sozialen Ordnungen beruht auf dessen „tierischer Existenz“ als ein individuiertes physiologisches „Gesamtsystem“, das sich seinerseits aus verschiedenen, interagierenden „Reaktionszentren“ zusammensetzt und in einem bestimmten Verhältnis zur es umfassenden „Außenwelt“ steht. In diesem Aufsatz untersuche ich die Doppelstruktur physiologischer und sozialer „Koexistenz“ im Rahmen einer Existenzbedingungen und Entwicklungspotentiale umfassenden „Wissenschaft des Menschen“.","PeriodicalId":49081,"journal":{"name":"Early Science and Medicine","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46085986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Images & Color: The Strasbourg Printer Johann Schott (1477–1548) and His Circle","authors":"Domenico Bertoloni Meli","doi":"10.1163/15733823-20220060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-20220060","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000While most Renaissance scholars working on compendia of learning, geography, surgery, legal history, art history, the Reformation, and botany will be familiar with the name of Johann Schott, few have appreciated the range and impact of the Strasbourg printer’s publications. Here I discuss a handful among the over two hundred books and other materials he printed: Gregor Reisch’s Margarita Philosophica; the edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia with Waldseemüller’s maps; Hans von Gersdorff, Feldtbuch der Wundarzney; and – the main focus this essay – Herbarum vivae eicones, with figures by Hans Weiditz and text by Otto Brunfels. Schott can be seen as an architect or active agent of his publications; his innovative use of images and color can be seen as having progressively developed from his early prints to his celebrated herbal.","PeriodicalId":49081,"journal":{"name":"Early Science and Medicine","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46267995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In Search of the Unicorn’s Virtue in a Rhino Horn Cup: Consumption of Rhino Horns and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern Lisbon","authors":"Bruno A Martinho, António Manuel Lopes Andrade","doi":"10.1163/15733823-20220059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-20220059","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article focuses on the analysis of a medical consilium about a rhino horn written around 1570 by the Portuguese royal physician Jorge Godines to the Spanish ambassador in Lisbon. It sheds light on the processes of knowledge production concerning rhino and unicorn horns in early modern Lisbon. Through micro-historical analysis, we will demonstrate how demand, supply, and the availability of specimens, experience, information, and intellectual networks contributed to the establishment of a specific geography of scientific knowledge around the city. The analysis hopes to contribute to the disclosure of a more heterogeneous scientific landscape in early modern Europe, where practices of knowledge production depended very much on local contacts and on the agents’ individual trajectories.","PeriodicalId":49081,"journal":{"name":"Early Science and Medicine","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42757592","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Action at a Distance in Pre-Newtonian Natural Philosophy: An Introduction","authors":"R. Garau, Doina‐Cristina Rusu","doi":"10.1163/15733823-20220054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-20220054","url":null,"abstract":"All historians of science are familiar with the debates on the issue of action at a distance surrounding Newtonian physics.1 Even prior to Newton, however, action at a distance represented a major concern for natural philosophers and practitioners of the various arts in the early modern period.2 This is because certain phenomena – such as tides and magnetic attraction – appeared to display causation without bodily contact.3 The widespread belief in the action of remote stellar constellations and heavenly bodies provided the theoretical","PeriodicalId":49081,"journal":{"name":"Early Science and Medicine","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45412701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How to Send a Secret Message from Rome to Paris in the Early Modern Period: Telegraphy between Magnetism, Sympathy, and Charlatanry","authors":"Christoph Sander","doi":"10.1163/15733823-20220056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-20220056","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In 1558, the famous natural magician Giambattista della Porta was the first to allude to a method of transmitting secret messages by using manipulated magnetic compasses. Soon thereafter, this idea, known in modern historiography as ‘magnetic telegraphy’, was spelled out and advertised by many early modern scholars as a promising technology of communication by action at a distance. In 1609, Daniel Schwenter created the most sophisticated design for the fulfillment of this potential: two compass needles were to be magnetized in a highly codified procedure to establish a sympathetic bond between them. Used in a compass circumscribed by an alphabet, one needle would turn to a certain letter whenever the other needle was moved to that same letter. Through ‘sympathy’, it was thought that this could made to occur even over a distance of many miles. The idea’s first critic, the Jesuit, Leonardo Garzoni, was quick to dismiss it as charlatanry, and many later authors argued that the device could not work as there was no such ‘sympathy’ or magnetism between the two devices. Though only a fanciful pipe dream of natural magic, this pseudo-technology of a magnetic telegraph yet testifies to the imagination of early modern scholars in having prefigured the modern reality of instantaneous global communication.","PeriodicalId":49081,"journal":{"name":"Early Science and Medicine","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43679197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fascination and Action at a Distance in Francis Bacon","authors":"Doina‐Cristina Rusu","doi":"10.1163/15733823-20220055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-20220055","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Throughout his writings, Francis Bacon shows a great interest in the power of the imagination, both on other minds and on other bodies, a crucial part of natural magic. Convinced of the overall value of magic, Bacon nevertheless takes issue with the corrupt state into which he saw this discipline as having descended, overrun with false theories and invented stories. Bacon’s reform of experimental natural philosophy includes a naturalisation of magic, and this can be best illustrated when we look at his conception of fascination. In this paper, I show that the characteristics of this naturalisation are: (1) the definition of the object of study and the classification of phenomena; (2) the use of models and analogical thinking when the topic under study is difficult to observe; (3) the introduction of measurements and quantification of natural phenomena; (4) the need for replicability and diversification of experiments; and (5) the rejection of explanations in terms of occult qualities and their replacement with explanations in terms of the motion(s) of the spiritual matter emitted from the active body, which is impressed on the motion of the spiritual matter of the passive body.","PeriodicalId":49081,"journal":{"name":"Early Science and Medicine","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44046911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Distant Action of the Heavens in Girolamo Borri’s Tidal Theory","authors":"P. Omodeo","doi":"10.1163/15733823-20220057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-20220057","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The Aristotelian professor of natural philosophy and courtier at the Medici in Florence, Girolamo Borri, developed a theory based on heat to explain the tidal motions of the sea. In his dialogues on this phenomenon, he deemed that tides follow from the ‘moderate’ simmering of the waters as an effect of lunar light. His tidal theory displaced the theory of the Moon’s distant action on terrestrial waters from its traditionally astrological connotation. Moreover, his theory was not ‘empirical’ but rather inserted in a broad natural philosophical and cosmological framework. Although Galileo Galilei later dismissed heat-based explanations of the tides, such explanations are historically relevant as part of the larger scientific picture, in which controversies over the phenomenon of the tides of the sea fuelled cosmological, even post-Copernican assessments of the connection between terrestrial physics and incipient celestial physics.","PeriodicalId":49081,"journal":{"name":"Early Science and Medicine","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44997027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Explaining Astrological Influence with Cartesian Natural Philosophy: Peter Megerlin’s Manuscript Astrologia Cartesiana (ASHB1530, circa 1680)","authors":"R. Garau","doi":"10.1163/15733823-20220058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-20220058","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Action at a distance was one of the key features of astrology. Once a thriving discipline, astrology in the early modern period entered a crisis that ultimately culminated in its marginalization from the domain of scholarly recognition. Critics of astrology took issue, among other things, with the causative process of the supposed astrological action at a distance – traditionally based on the light shed by celestial bodies – denying that light could be a conduit of astrological influence. In response to such criticisms, some astrologers attempted to explain astrological influence based on different theoretical and natural-philosophical foundations, as, for instance, by employing Cartesianism. This paper focuses on the so far-unpublished manuscript Laurenziana ASHB1530, Astrologia Cartesiana, by the German astronomer, mathematician and astrologer Peter Megerlin (1623–1686), a professor in Basel. It shows Megerlin’s eclectic use of Cartesian elements in his treatment of the natural-philosophical bases of astrology, paying particular attention to his attempt to explain astrological influence on corpuscularian grounds. It also contributes to the reconstruction of Megerlin’s biographical and scholarly profile, focusing on the significance of his engagement with Copernican cosmology and astrology in seventeenth-century Basel.","PeriodicalId":49081,"journal":{"name":"Early Science and Medicine","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43446505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}