Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.

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. Paula Findlen has directed the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, the Science, Technology and Society Program, and is co-founder of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford. 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. 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. 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. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Studies on the History of Society and Culture 20). Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. In Possessing Nature, Paula Findlen vividly recreates the lost world of late Renaissance and Baroque Italian museums and demonstrates its significance in the history of science and culture. Click here to purchase from Rakuten Kobo In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry.

Possessing Nature by Paula Findlen