People
The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science
Authors: Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, eds.
Early Modern Science offers a broad and detailed account of the ways in which the study of nature was transformed in Europe between ca. 1500 and ca. 1700. Chapters on how nature was studied, where, and by whom cover disciplines from astronomy and the mechanical arts to magic and natural
history; sites of knowledge from the laboratory and the battlefield to the library and the marketplace; and types of knowers from university professors and apothecaries to physicians and instrument makers.
Separate sections on “The New Nature” and “Cultural Meanings of Natural Knowledge” address the impact of the new natural knowledge on conceptions of nature, experience, explanation, and evidence, and on religion, art, literature, and European self-definition respectively. Contributions are written in clear, accessible prose by noted specialists, with extensive bibliographical notes. The volume offers scholars and general readers a synoptic overview of recent research on early modern science that has challenged the traditional view of the “Scientific Revolution” while emphasizing profound but diverse changes in natural knowledge during this key epoch in European history.
Contact
- Email: park28@fas.harvard.edu
- Phone: (617) 495-9922
Classes
- HS 112: Health, Medicine, and Healing in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
- HS 200: Research Methods in the History of Science
- HS 212: The Sciences of Life, Medicine and the Body in Medieval Renaissance Europe
- HS 215: Science and Culture in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Seminar
- Historical Study B-24: Utopia in the Age of the Scientific Revolution
Books & Publications
- Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985
- (with Lorraine J. Daston), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, New York: Zone Books, 1998
- Secrets of Women - Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection
- (with Lorraine J. Daston, co-editor), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Italian translation: Le meraviglie del mondo. Mostri, prodigi e fatti strani dal Medioevo all’Illuminismo, Rome: Carocci, 2000.
- German translation: Wunder und die Ordnung der Natur, 1150-1750, trans. S. Wohlfeil and Ch. Krueger, Frankfurt: Eichborn, 2002.
