Gesellschaft im Exzess

Völlerei, Sexualität, das Sezieren von Leichen oder verschwenderisches Zurschaustellen des eigenen Reichtums: Im Exzess wurde - so die These des Buches - gesellschaftliche Ordnung gestaltet. Wie produktiv das Agieren im Übermaß sein konnte, beleuchtet Sarah-Maria Schober an Medizinern, die um 1600 in Basel lebten. Sie folgt den Ärzten an Orte, an denen sie Grenzen austesteten: in Bäder und Haushalte, an ihre Schreibtische und auf die anatomische Bühne. Damit bietet sie zugleich eine quellennahe Analyse einer städtischen Gesellschaft im späten 16. und frühen 17. Jahrhundert

The English Connection: Jacob and Johann Philipp Breyne, James Petiver and Plants: The Correspondence between the Breynes and Petiver from the 1690s

The article discusses the hitherto unknown correspondence between the Danzig (present-day Gdańsk) botanist Jacob Breyne, his son Johann Philipp Breyne, and James Petiver in the last decade of the seventeenth century. Their correspondence documents contacts between one of the most important naturalists of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the seventeenth century and members of the Royal Society. The content of the letters reveals how books, naturalia and various artefacts circulated between Western and East-Central Europe. It also reveals the principles of reciprocity and friendship followed by those who conducted inquiries into natural history

Establishing the facts: Conrad Gessner's epistolae medicinales between the particular and the general.

A town physician in Zurich, famous for his Historia Animalium and his Bibliotheca universalis, Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) was also an indefatigable letter-writer who left an abundant, though largely unpublished and unexplored, correspondence. In this dissertation, I examine his printed and manuscript letters and attempt to show how sixteenth-century epistolary practices shaped early modern knowledge of nature and of medicine. Letter writing and letter-reading represented a central part of early modern scholarly life, one of the means of self-presentation scholars had at their disposal in order to confirm their belonging to the Republic of Letters. This membership was reinforced by a constant flow of exchange of natural artefacts, books, and remedies. But letters did not merely circulate objects: their essential material was news. Medical letters were an important aspect of Gessner's medical practice. Patients and colleagues wrote to ask for epistolary consultations and tell their own case stories, providing him with fuel and experience to share in the exchange of particulars, and with questions he could circulate within the learned community. Standardised into historiae, information was submitted to the consensus of the correspondents' own networks and consolidated into generally agreed facts, capable of becoming the foundation for generalisation. Letters, however, did not cease to exist once their role in the epistolary dialogue was finished: they remained, very materially, among Gessner's notes and bookshelves. He incorporated them in his treatises, or cut and pasted them into his own collections of medical writings. Later, they were collected by his heirs, and turned into a published selection of Medical letters that constituted both a memorial to their master and a monument of knowledge made out of matters of fact, the essential content of early modern knowledge

Organizations of Knowledge

The "organization of knowledge" is a large and diffuse topic which can be studied at many different levels, ranging from the way an individual orders his or her understanding of the world privately or in publications, to the ways in which communities or institutions order knowledge, notably in pedagogical curricula and textbooks, professional structures, libraries and library catalogs and other collective projects. Although a few modern philosophers have addressed the problem of classifying knowledge, current practices of classification are mostly studied by anthropologists and sociologists. Modern cultures and subcultures engage in both explicit and tacit classifications of knowledge, but today any particular organization of knowledge is generally acknowledged to involve a number of arbitrary choices and its success is often measured by pragmatic criteria of effectiveness, such as ease of use and economic efficiency. But this skeptical attitude toward the possibility of any organization matching the reality of knowledge or of the world is a fairly modern development, articulated for example in Jean Le Rond d'Alembert's "preliminary discourse" to the Encyclopédie of 1751.History of Scienc

Dinge sammeln, Wissen schaffen: Die Geschichte der naturhistorischen Sammlungen in Basel, 1735-1850

Im Übergang vom 18. ins 19. Jahrhundert etablierte sich das Sammeln von Gegenständen in der Natur von einer Freizeitbeschäftigung einzelner Privatpersonen zur wissenschaftlichen Praxis. So entwickelten Forscher neue Antworten auf naturwissenschaftliche Fragen - beispielsweise zur Beschaffenheit der Natur oder der Entwicklung der Lebewesen. In den naturwissenschaftlichen Museen konnte dieses neue Wissen mit einem breiten Publikum verhandelt und etabliert werden. Anhand der Geschichte der naturhistorischen Sammlungen in Basel vollzieht der Autor nach, wie aus dieser Zeit nicht nur neue wissenschaftliche Disziplinen hervorgingen, sondern eine Gesellschaft entstand, in der Fragen über die Natur nicht mehr mit einem Verweis auf die biblische Schöpfungsgeschichte beantwortet werden konnten

Das Herbarium von Paul Hermann (1646-1695) in der Forschungsbibliothek Gotha

kein Abstract vorhandenno abstract availabl