Katharine Park

The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy

On the 17th of August 1308 Chiara of Montefalco died in the small Umbrian monastery of which she had been the abbess. Her fellow nuns did not take any steps to preserve her body. Nonetheless, for five days it remained uncorrupted and redolent of the odor of sanctity, despite the blazing summer heat. At that point— not wanting to tempt fate further—the community decided to embalm the precious relic. In the words of Sister Francesca of Montefalco, testifying some years later at Chiaras unsuccessful canonization procedure, “They agreed that [her] body should be preserved on account of her holiness and because God took such pleasure in her body and her heart.” They sent to the town apothecary for “balsam and myrrh and other preservatives,” as the apothecary himself testified, and they proceeded to the next step in contemporary embalming practice, which was evisceration.

Proof and Persuasion

Questions of proof and persuasion are important in the history of the sciences of any period, but they are particularly pressing in the case of early modern Europe. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw more self-conscious theoretical reflection on how to discover and confirm the truths of nature than any period before or since; the same period also manifested a huge range of practical strategies by which investigators of the natural world set about demonstrating their findings and convincing their audiences of their claims. Studying these strategies of proof and persuasion has opened up vistas of opportunity for historians of the sciences in early modern Europe. In a range of disciplines, from the social history of medicine to the history of philosophy, historians of the period have argued for the ineradicable significance of forms of proof and persuasion in understanding their various objects of inquiry. The rhetorical form of texts and even objects has come to be seen as constitutive of their meaning, not separable from it. Furthermore, an increasing number of studies have shown how early modern physicians, mathematical practitioners, and natural philosophers all exploited the different and historically specific resources of proof and persuasion that they had at their disposal. The study of proof and persuasion provides a further opportunity to the historian: It offers a means of bridging the gap between a text (or a practice) and its reception. As the reception, rather than the genesis, of developments in the sciences has become an increasingly important aspect of historiography, it has also become increasingly apparent that this reception history is often extremely difficult to reconstruct.

Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science

This essay reflects on the ambivalent reception of The Death of Nature among English‐speaking historians of early modern science. It argues that, despite its importance, the book was mostly ignored or marginalized by these historians (as opposed to historians interested in feminist or environmental studies) for a variety of reasons. These included the special role played by the “Scientific Revolution” in the grand narrative that increasingly shaped the historiography of science beginning in the 1940s and the subsequent “hyperprofessionalism” of the discipline as a whole. The essay concludes by placing Carolyn Merchant’s work in the context of feminist utopian writing of the late 1970s and calls for renewed attention to the history of the utopian genre as a resource for teachers and feminist scholars of the history of science.

Anatomy Theaters, Botanical Gardens, and Natural History Collections

At the end of the sixteenth century, the English lawyer and natural philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) began to fantasize about the locations for knowledge. The Gesta Grayorum (1594), a court revel performed before Queen Elizabeth I and attributed to Bacon, described an imaginary research facility containing “a most perfect and general library” and “a spacious, wonderful garden” filled with wild and cultivated plants and surrounded by a menagerie, aviary, freshwater lake, and saltwater lake. Spaces for living nature were complemented by a museum of science, art, and technology – “a goodly huge cabinet” housing artifacts (“whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff”), natural oddities (“whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced”), and gems, minerals, and fossils (“whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept”). The fourth and final component was a space in which to test nature, “a still-house, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and vessels as may be a palace fit for a philosopher’s stone.” The totality of these facilities, Bacon concluded, would be “a model of the universal nature made private.” This statement suggested a new idea of empiricism that privileged human invention and demonstration over pure observation and celebrated the communal aspects of observing nature over the heroic efforts of the lone observer. Nature had to be reconstructed within a microcosm, creating an artificial world of knowledge in which scholars prodded, dissected, and experimented with nature in order to know it better.

Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750

Part 1 The topography of wonder: marvels on the margins wonders of creation prodigious individuals and marvellous kinds wonder and belief. Part 2 The properties of things: collecting wonders artificial marvels wonders at court. Part 3 Wonder among the philosophers: the philosophers against wonder curiosity and the preternatural making wonders cease. Part 4 marvellous particulars: marvellous therapeutics preternatural history preternatural philosophy. Part 5 Monsters - a case study: horror - monsters as prodigies pleasure - monsters as sport repugnance - monsters as errors. Part 6 Strange facts: Baconian reforms strange facts in learned societies the sociability of strange facts the credibility of strange facts. Part 7 Wonders of art, wonders of nature: art and nature opposed the wonders of art and nature displayed the wonders of art and nature conjoined nature as artist, nature as art. Part 8 The passions of inquiry: ravening curiosity wonder and curiosity allied gawking wonder. Part 9 The enlightenment and the anti-marvellous: the unholy Trinity - enthusiasms, superstition, imagination vulgarity and the love of the marvellous natures decorum the wistful counter-enlightenment.

Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence

Katharine Park has written a social, intellectual, and institutional history of medicine in Florence during the century after the Black Death of 1348.Originally published in 1985.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.