The early modern genre of historia connected the study of nature and the                  study of culture from the early Renaissance to the eighteenth century. The ubiquity                  of historia as a descriptive method across a variety of disciplines -- including                  natural history, medicine, antiquarianism, and philology -- indicates how closely                  intertwined these scholarly pursuits were in the early modern period. The essays                  collected in this volume demonstrate that historia can be considered a key epistemic                  tool of early modern intellectual practices.Focusing on the actual use of historia                  across disciplines, the essays highlight a distinctive feature of early modern                  descriptive sciences: the coupling of observational skills with philological                  learning, empiricism with erudition. Thus the essays bring to light previously                  unexamined links between the culture of humanism and the scientific revolution.The                  contributors, from a range of disciplines that echoes the broad scope of early                  modern historia, examine such topics as the development of a new interest in                  historical method from the Renaissance artes historicae to the eighteenth-century                  tension between "history" and "system"; shifts in Aristotelian thought paving the                  way for revaluation of historia as descriptive knowledge; the rise of the new                  discipline of natural history; the uses of historia in anatomical and medical                  investigation and the writing of history by physicians; parallels between the                  practices of collecting and presenting information in both natural history and                  antiquarianism; and significant examples of the ease with which early                  seventeenth-century antiquarian scholars moved from studies of nature to studies of                  culture.

Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology) PDF

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