ABSTRACT
The beginning of global commerce in the early modern period had an enormous impact on European culture, changing the very way people perceived the world around them. Merchants and Marvels assembles essays by leading scholars of cultural history, art history, and the history of science and technology to show how ideas about the representation of nature, in both art and science, underwent a profound transformation between the age of the Renaissance and the early 1700s.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|134 pages
Struggling with Reality
chapter 2|20 pages
Objects of Art/Objects of Nature
Visual Representation and the Investigation of Nature
chapter 3|26 pages
Mirroring the World
Sea Charts, Navigation, and Territorial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain
chapter 4|28 pages
From Blowfish to Flower Still Life Paintings
Classification and Its Images, circa 1600
chapter 5|24 pages
“Strange” Ideas and “English” Knowledge
Natural Science Exchange in Elizabethan London
part 2|134 pages
Networks of Knowledge
chapter 6|19 pages
Local Herbs, Global Medicines
Commerce, Knowledge, and Commodities in Spanish America
chapter 10|29 pages
Cartography, Entrepreneurialism, and Power in the Reign of Louis XIV
The Case of the Canal du Midi
chapter 11|18 pages
‘Cornelius Meijer inventor et fecit'
On the Representation of Science in Late Seventeenth-Century Rome
part 3|101 pages
Consumption, Art, and Science
chapter 12|27 pages
Inventing Nature
Commerce, Art, and Science in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities
chapter 14|23 pages
Inventing Exoticism
The Project of Dutch Geography and the Marketing of the World, circa 1700
part |26 pages
Epilogues
