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Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy examines a revolutionary period in microscopical technology and practice. At first considered a mere toy, by 1900 the microscope rivaled the railway and telegraph as an emblem of modernity and enjoyed an astonishing diversity of applications. This technology could drive scientific debates on subjects like cell theory, vitalism, and bacteriology; guide workers in classrooms, laboratories, and businesses; and inspire a personal hobby or a mass entertainment. Victorian microscopy productively cuts across the ostensibly separate domains of science, religion, commerce, art, education, entertainment, and domestic life. Writing Embodiment reads nineteenth-century microscopy across scientific, literary, religious, and popular texts. It argues that Victorian microscopists saw their vision and cognition as fully embodied experiences, the images emerging through a material entanglement of bodies (observer, instrument, apparatus, object) in a dynamic, unstable system. These ideas echo the work of physiological psychologists, who proposed mind as a system of embodied, distributed, and dynamic processes shaped by automatic or unconscious reflex action, attention, mental training, and fatigue. Striving to regulate this complex system, microscopists circulated tropes of embodiment through the varied forms of nineteenth-century print culture. They adapted existing concepts (such as beauty, the sublime, natural theology, and fairylands), or coined new phrases (such as many-sided comprehension), to promote favored forms of embodiment and enculturate microscopy as a difficult but valuable pursuit. Beautiful Mechanism draws on important work in book history and periodical studies by emphasizing the circulation of these tropes in intermedial conversations across diverse print forms. Victorians understood wonder and skepticism not as incommensurate approaches to scientific observation but rather as complementary forms of embodiment. Romantic tropes of wonder solicit affective flows from observer to wriggling animalcule and back; while skeptical, realist tropes offer to train the reader's eye, hand, body, and judgment and to formalize microscopical practice. Microscopical narratives may manipulate wonder and skepticism in productive tension or create virtual storyspaces that enlist the reader in virtual witnessing. These tropes shape every level of microscopical interest and proficiency. By analyzing their use and circulation, Writing Embodiment illuminates wider patterns of Victorian thought on embodiment, scientific practice, and community.

Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880) provides a broad spectre of early modern manifestations of human fascination with fish – “fish” understood in the early modern sense of the term, as aquatilia: all aquatic animals, including sea mammals and crustaceans. It addresses the period's quickly growing knowledge about fish in its multiple, varied and rapidly changing interaction with culture. This topic is approached from various disciplines: history of science, cultural history, history of collections, historical ecology, art history, literary studies, and lexicology. Attention is given to the problematic questions of visual and textual representation of fish, and pre- and post-Linnean classification and taxonomy. This book also explores the transnational exchange of ichthyological knowledge and items in and outside Europe. Contributors: Cristina Brito, Tobias Bulang, João Paulo S. Cabral, Florike Egmond, Dorothee Fischer, Holger Funk, Dirk Geirnaert, Philippe Glardon, Justin R. Hanisch, Bernardo Jerosch Herold, Rob Lenders, Alan Moss, Doreen Mueller, Johannes Müller, Martien J.P. van Oijen, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Anne M. Overduin-de Vries, Theodore W. Pietsch, Cynthia Pyle, Marlise Rijks, Paul J. Smith, Ronny Spaans, Robbert Striekwold, Melinda Susanto, Didi van Trijp, Sabina Tsapaeva, and Ching-Ling Wang.

The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.

This book presents research on geographical naming on land and sea from a wide range of standpoints on: theory and concepts, case studies and education. Space and place naming or toponymy has a long tradition in the sciences and a renewed critical interest in geography and allied disciplines including the humanities. Place: location and cartographical aspects, etymology and geo-histories so salient in past studies, are now being enhanced from a range of radical perspectives, especially in a globalizing, standardizing world with Googlization and the consequent ‘normalization'of place names, perceptions and images worldwide including those for marketing purposes. Nonetheless, there are conflicting and contesting voices. The interdisciplinary research is enhanced with authors from regional, national and international toponymy-related institutions and organizations including the UNGEGN, IGU, ICA and so forth.