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The essays and original visualizations collected in
Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore the relationships among natural things, ranging from pollen in a gust of wind, to a carnivorous pitcher plant, to a shell-like skinned armadillo, and the humans enthralled with them.
List of contents
Introduction: Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds
Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım
On the Design
Zoë Sadokierski and Katie Dean
Part I: Manipulated
1. Pollen: The Sexual Life of Plants in Mesoamerica
Helen Burgos-Ellis
2. Bezoar: Medicine in the Belly of the Beast
Mackenzie Cooley
3. Canal: Cross-Cultural Encounters and Control of Water
Alexander Statman
4. Ambergris: From Sea to Scent in Renaissance Italy
Mackenzie Cooley and Kathryn Biedermann
Part II: Felt
5. Squid: Natural History as Food History
Whitney Barlow Robles
6. Coffee: Of Melancholic Turkish Bodies and Sensory Experiences
Duygu Yıldırım
7. Manchineel: Power, Pain, and Knowledge in the Lesser Antilles
Thomas C. Anderson
8. Pitcher Plant: Drowning in her Sweet Nectar
Elaine Ayers
Part III: Preserved
9. Leaf: The Materiality of Early Modern Herbals
Julia Heideklang
10. Armadillo: An Animal in Search of a Place
Florencia Pierri
11. Bird: Living Names of Félix de Azara’s Lost Collection
Anna Toledano
12. Brain: Objecthood, Subjecthood, and the Genius of Gauss
Nicolaas Rupke
Epilogue: Nature’s Narratives
Paula Findlen
Afterword: The Disorder of Things
Alan Mikhail
Index
About the author
Mackenzie Cooley is an intellectual historian who studies the uses, abuses, and understandings of the natural world in early modern history. She is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at Hamilton College.
Anna Toledano is a historian of science and a museum professional. Her academic research focuses on natural history collecting in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America.
Duygu Yıldırım is a historian of knowledge working on the comparative and connected histories of science and medicine in the early modern Mediterranean and in the Ottoman Empire. She is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Summary
The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore the relationships among natural things, ranging from pollen in a gust of wind, to a carnivorous pitcher plant, to a shell-like skinned armadillo, and the humans enthralled with them.
