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This article uses early modern studies of the salamander to reveal how a natural historical practice focused on the collection of textual testimonies facilitated the rise of the experimental regime that replaced it. Sixteenth-century naturalists emphasized broad collection of evidence—regardless of how credible—ensuring that their works reported salamanders’ widely-doubted ability to live in fire. Late seventeenth-century scholars similarly practiced compilation, but they prioritized the discernment of relationships between texts rather than their accumulation. In the case of the salamander, they separated testimonies into traditions of credulity and criticism, producing the illusory impression that moderns newly rejected an ancient and vulgar conviction that salamanders lived in fire. The claim that salamanders live in fire disappeared not because it was debunked experimentally, but because naturalists’ shifting practices of reading enabled them to forge an experimental tradition that stigmatized the belief and then removed the grounds for repeating it.

PRINTING A MEDITERRANEAN WORLD: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography. By SEAN ROBERTS, xii and 293pp.; maps, diagrs., ills., index. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978067406648. Sean Roberts' Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography provides an absorbing examination of the status of geographical knowledge in the Renaissance Mediterranean world. Focusing on the production and circulation of Francesco Berlinghieri's remarkable Geographia, Roberts situates the study of geography within two of the central features of this period: the humanist restoration of knowledge of classical antiquity and the relationship between Ottoman and Italian authorities. The end result is a vivid picture of a political and intellectual culture whose engagement with geographical knowledge challenges many assumptions concerning Renaissance scholarship and early modern interactions between Muslim and Christian powers. John approaches Berlinghieri's work less as a discourse or a representation of space than as a material artifact whose multiple copies possessed distinctive significance depending on specific details of their construction and the unique contexts into which they circulated. Together, these objects served as a "connective tissue" forging a community of readers whose own experiences ascribed Berlinghieri's work multiple, often conflicting, meanings. In elaborating this vision, Roberts draws on an impressive array of analytic frameworks, deploying contemporary scholarship in anthropology, Italian literature, history of economic thought, as well as his home discipline of art history. But his guiding muse is book history, and numerous of his most penetrating insights--concerning the relationship between print and manuscript in the early days of movable type, how classical antiquity was packaged and distributed by early modern humanists, and how readers lent their own interpretations to the text --derive from questions of central importance to this field. Indeed, Roberts' insistence that modern scholars have often mischaracterized fundamental aspects of Quattrocento culture stems from his conviction that they have been insufficiently attentive to the material forms in which knowledge was constituted, a claim borne out by the unusual richness of his study. Much of the fascination of Roberts' work derives from his astute choice of subject, for Berlinghieri's Geographia is a profoundly intriguing text. Berlinghieri was a prominent figure in Quattrocento Florence, well connected to humanist luminaries like Marsilio Ficino as well as to the ruling Medici family. The work, produced from 1465-82, contained thirty-one maps nestled between a poetic reworking of Ptolemy's Geography. Dante's Inferno provided the model for the metric form, the choice of Florentine vernacular, and the conceit of the poem, in which Ptolemy whisks Berlinghieri and a companion to the skies, whence he describes the surface of the terrestrial earth. While Ptolemy's text contained unadorned lists of toponyms and his dry enumeration of cartographical method, Berlinghieri expanded descriptions of places by invoking the historical and mythological events for which they had been the setting, while the conversational form of the poem enlivens the technical discussion. The text, Roberts argues, is better thought of as an emulation of the ancient work for Renaissance purposes and in a typically Renaissance idiom rather than a translation. The various journeys of individual copies only add to the fascination of the work. While Lorenzo de Medici and Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino received luxurious manuscript copies, printed editions--often with hand-colored maps and other personalization--were circulated to prominent courts throughout Italy and beyond. Most notably, copies were sent to the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II in Constantinople and to his half-brother and would-be usurper Cem, taking refuge in Savoy. …

Historical study flourished in early modern Europe, as scholars and counselors adapted venerable genres and modes of analysis and devised new methods and techniques. Their works intended to advance political ends by augmenting their readers’ strategic acumen, familiarizing them with recent events, or deciphering broad providential patterns at work. Early modern England witnessed the importation of every significant form of historical work produced in this period, and these methods came to occupy a central, if variegated, place in its political culture. Above all, the interpretive model of ‘politic history’ and the techniques of continental antiquarianism became powerful ways to intervene in English politics, and editions, translations, and adaptations were disseminated by those both endorsing and challenging royal policy. At the same time, other readers plumbed their histories for empirical information, hoping that their mastery of foreign lands would earn them advancement within the regime.

This contribution argues that the study of early modern archives suggests a new agenda for historians of early modern science. While in recent years historians of science have begun to direct increased attention toward the collections amassed by figures and institutions traditionally portrayed as proto-scientific, archives proliferated across early modern Europe, emerging as powerful tools for creating knowledge in politics, history, and law as well as natural philosophy, botany, and more. The essay investigates the methods of production, collection, organization, and manipulation used by English statesmen and Crown officers such as Keeper of the State Papers Thomas Wilson and Secretary of State Joseph Williamson to govern their disorderly collections. Their methods, it is shown, were shared with contemporaries seeking to generate and manage other troves of evidence and in fact reflect a complex ecosystem of imitation and exchange across fields of inquiry. These commonalities suggest that historians of science should look beyond the ancestors of modern scientific disciplines to examine how practices of producing knowledge emerged and migrated throughout cultures of learning in Europe and beyond. Creating such a map of knowledge production and exchange, the essay concludes, would provide a renewed and expansive ambition for the field.

This article investigates the long-term transformations in England’s documentary storage regime wrought by the Reformation. Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries famously resulted in the dispersal and destruction of many medieval texts and records, but he and his successors sponsored efforts to retrieve lost materials, which they then used in the formation of ecclesiastical policy. Elizabethan counselors expanded the scope of this project, applying their expertise in gathering records to secular issues and assiduously preserving their own documents. During James I’s reign, the Earl of Salisbury’s patronage gave new authority to the State Paper Office, encouraging the consolidation of a centralizing archive that integrated earlier methods of collection, preservation, and indexing in its operation and construction. The article thus offers an analytic trajectory tying the practices of Reformation to the development of expanding national archives in the seventeenth century.

Francis Bacon's 1605 Advancement of Learning proposed to dedicatee James I a massive reorganization of the institutions, goals, and methods of generating and transmitting knowledge. The numerous defects crippling the contemporary educational regime, Bacon claimed, should be addressed by strengthening emphasis on philosophy and natural knowledge. To that end, university positions were to be created devoted to "Artes and Sciences at large," rather than to the professions. High salaries would render lecturers "able and sufficient," undistracted from their task. Most famously, he argued that teaching of the "operatiue studie of many Scyences" should involve sophisticated technical education. The study of natural philosophy demanded not only books, but globes, astrolabes, and other "instrumentais." Most significantly, yielding reliable and meaningful knowledge from experiential gleanings required a rigorous system of deductive reasoning.The legacy of this colossal proposal has earned Bacon honored status as devisor of the scientific method.1 But Bacon's educational reform extended beyond the methods of producing and transmitting knowledge. To facilitate more efficient "vse and administration" of the knowledge produced by his system, he also demanded a searching examination of the history of learning. This history would provide a mirror enabling his contemporaries to deploy the fruits of his method, by considering how learning in the past had been used successfully or ill-advisedly. Producing this history was the ambition of the Advancement, for he explained: "no man hath propounded to himselfe the generall state of learning to bee described and represented from age to age, as many have done the works of Nature, & the State civile and Ecclesiastical." He continued:And yet I am not ignorant that in divers particular sciences, as of the Jurisconsults, the Mathematicians, the Rhetoricians, the Philosophers, there are set down some smal memorials of the Schooles, Authors, and Bookes: and so likewise some barren relations touching the Invention of Arts, or usages. But a iust story of learning, containing the Antiquities and Originalls of Knowledges, & their sects; their Inventions, their Traditions; their diverse Administrations and Managings; their Flourishings, their Oppositions, Decayes, Depressions, Oblivions, Removes, with the causes, and occasions of them, and all other events concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world; I may truly affirme to be wanting.2Bacon thus positioned himself not only as a Father of Modern Science, but also a Father of the History of Science.Following Bacon's suggestion, I will examine the "small memorials" of the history of mathematics-and particularly the mathematical art of astrology-in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My conclusion, however, will not bear out Bacon's claims. Despite his frustration, Bacon was only one of many early modern scholars appraising the role of mathematics within history. And he devoted less energy than others to mapping its origins and tracing its transmissions between communities. In fact, Bacon's 1605 proposal for a history of mathematics was already out-of-date. Discussions of the history of mathematics had been rife on the continent and in England throughout the previous century.3The evidence that Renaissance scholars inherited was sprawling and inconclusive. Several genealogies for mathematics could be found within classical Greek, Latin, and patristic references. One lineage claimed mathematics began in ancient Assyria, where the priestly caste, the Chaldeans, practiced a form of mathematics that seemed a corrupt admixture of philosophy, medicine, and religion, and relied heavily on observation of the heavens. Other scholars traced the origins to Egypt, claiming that the field developed to survey lands frequently flooded by the Nile. The real problem for ancient, late antique, and medieval scholars had not been the origins of mathematics, but what exactly mathematics were. …

Harvey and GauricoIn 1590 Gabriel Harvey read his copy of Luca Gaurico's 1552 Tractatus Astrologicus, a collection of genitures and commentaries for cities and individuals.1 Harvey had spent the previous twenty-five years at Oxford and Cambridge, mastering Greek and Latin, earning renown as a rhetorician, and promoting English letters. He was a well-known partisan of the French CaIvinist Peter Ramus, whose works on curriculum reform had sparked vicious controversies in the English universities. But Harvey read Gaurico far removed from the schools where he had acquired fame and notoriety as an orator and poet. He had recently relocated to London, where he daily faced a dense, active city unlike his native Saffron Walden and the university towns. Nevertheless he read as he always had, carefully recording his reactions in the margins of the printed text, filling blank spaces with his own commentaries on the subjects presented by Gaurico. The notes disclose an experience of reading that intervened in contemporary debates regarding technology, astrology and utility.2 They also place Harvey among a group of scholars in London in the 159Os, such as Francis Bacon and Hugh Plat, who were examining the benefits local artisans might offer the commonwealth and reconsidering the intellectual status of craft knowledge.Harvey read and annotated Gaurico on several occasions, but the particular strain of notes that I will follow, united by a common ink and hand, engages the learning and erudition of Gaurico's subjects.3 Concentrated almost exclusively in Book Four, which discussed learned men, these annotations evaluate the poets, philosophers, philologists, and others whom Gaurico had canonized as especially learned.There are only spare annotations prior to Book Four. On the title page of Book Two, devoted to churchmen, Harvey observes the quality of the individuals Gaurico presented and details his own method of evaluation:The most excellent Exemplars of this century [are] in Gaurico, and Cardano: Giovio, and Guiccardini. There are as many of the wisest men as of the greatest actors. Still others live, whether inferior, equal, or superior. And it is of interest to every skillful artificer, to know those most outstanding in their class, and the most celebrated professors of all. Certainly it is very profitable to observe exquisitely the most perfect artificers either of the world or of neighboring nations, or at least of your own people, and to consider with most cunning reason what it is, where it comes from, and what is most excellent. But seriously, and solidly, and always to the point, seeing that singular things are efficacious and are useful to polytechnoscopy. It is judicious to avoid all trivial detail, and to consider only the most pregnant theorists and practitioners of operating.4The notion of a sophisticated form of active knowledge labeled "polytechnoscopy" is the most striking element of this passage. This term seems to have been Harvey's own invention, with no direct precedents; nor was it adopted or used by others after him.Harvey repeatedly referred to polytechnoscopy in his notes. A carefully designed triptych annotation on the title page of Book Four clarifies it as a category uniting practice and knowledge. To the left Harvey wrote, "it is my task to observe the most excellent examples of this age which are useful for polytechnoscopy." On the right, "a polytechnic, polymechanic, polydaedalic, and almost panepistemic book; and likewise sufficiently polychristian. For philologists should be skimmed through; while polytechnics should be examined closely; as I did not only in the Lives of Giovio, but also in those of Laertius, Eunapius, Philostratus, and others."5 The related Greek descriptors "polymechanic" and "polydaedalic" shed further light on polytechnoscopy. This constellation of terms refers to a method of garnering information by deploying technical knowledge. While not a systematic discipline, its practices-active applicability, craft expertise, observation of experienceconstitute a significant realm of learning. …

One can hardly envy the temptations confronting an alchemist in the early modern Holy Roman Empire. As Tara Nummedal shows in her fascinating Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire, practitioners of the art hoped to use their knowledge to generate precious minerals and gain spectacular wealth. Chasing such ambitions carried considerable risk. The proclaimed ability to elicit valuable metals from baser materials rendered the alchemist suspect in the eyes of his (or her) contemporaries. But the danger was not, as Nummedal reveals, a public perception that only diabolic intervention could transform valueless dross into gold and silver. Rather, the princes who patronized alchemists gambled their own resources and credit on the projects, and the practitioner's failure to meet expectations could precipitate earthly punishments hardly less gruesome than that which met Dr Faustus.

Review of Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 245pp, HB $70.00 ISBN 9780521886765; PB $22.99, ISBN 9780521714167