Merchants and Marvels

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. The essays address intriguing topics like the Dutch tulip-mania of 1637, the relationship between alchemy and commercial exchange in the Holy Roman Empire, the traffic in "curiosities" in Italy, and how Spanish sea charts reflected territorial claims in the 1500s. Antonio Barrera, James A. Bennett, Klaas van Berkel, Harold, J. Cook, Paula Findlen, Anne Goldgar, Deborah Harkness, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Pamela Long, Mark Meadow, Chandra Mukerji, Tara Nummedal, ""Merchants and Marvels is wide-ranging and thought-provoking.."-Canadian Journal of History Spis treści:Introduction Part I: Struggling With Reality: Visualizing Nature and Legitimating Knowledge 1. Splendor in the Grass-Maria genetrix as the Image of Nature's Miracles, Larry Silver and Pamela Smith; 2. Objects of Art/Objects of Nature: Image and Knowledge in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Pamela Long; 3. Squandering Away Science: Classification and Its Images Around 1600, Claudia Swan; 4. Inventing Nature: The Traffic in Curiosities in Early Modern Italy, Paula Findlen; 5. The Scientific Community on Lime Street, London, in the Sixteenth Century, Deborah Harkness 6. Mirroring the World: Sea Charts, Navigation, and Territorial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Alison Sandman; Part II Networks of Knowledge: The Commerce of Science and Art 7. Local Herbs, Global Medicines, Antonio Barrera; 8. Merchants and Marvels: Hans Jacob Fugger and the Origins of the Wunderkammer, . Mark Meadow; 9. Tata Nummedal, "Pratical Alchemy and Commerical Exchange in the Holy Roman Empire' 10. Tulipmania and the Disappearance of the Object, Anne Goldgar; 11. Time is Money: Crafting the Preparation and Preservation of Naturalia, Harold J. Cook; Part III: Technology, Science and Art 12. Engineering, Art, and Science: The Dutch Engineer Cornelis Meijer in the Late Seventeenth Century, Klaas van Berkel; 13. 'Inventing Exoticism: The Project of Dutch Geography and the Marketing of the World, ca. 1700', Benjamin Schmitt; 14. Entrepreneurialism, Land Management, and Cartography during the Reign of Louis XIV, Chandra Mukerji; 15. Trading in Mathematics, James A. Bennett, Epilogue