Browsing by Subject "Early Modern"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Communities Of Healing: Domestic Medicine And Society In Early Modern Italy
    (2018-04) Beck, Emily
    Many scholars have employed a variety of means to investigate the interactions between the range of people who practiced medicine in the early modern period, from charlatans and midwives to physicians and surgeons. These non-academic practitioners have been marginalized by previous histories of medicine, which reflect both their absence in contemporary printed works as well as the origins of the history of medicine as a field that prioritized finding the roots of modern medical practice. Recovering lay histories requires looking beyond printed treatises to working texts such as formularies, recipe collections, and other ephemera. This project investigates the form, movements, and activities of lay healers and their practices in the medical marketplace of early modern northern and central Italy. In this project, I propose that the anonymous manuscript medical recipe books of laypeople can be dissected to provide further information about not only interactions between healers, but also the theories, supplies, context, and educational practices of non-professional healers. Influenced by works in microhistory, chapters one, two, and three present focused investigations of small groups of manuscripts in order to contextualize the practice of medicine in northern and central Italy. Chapter one examines three manuscript recipe books written by a Capuchin monk, showing how laypeople drew on the rhetoric of printed medical books and offered medical education to their brethren. Chapter three also draws on these manuscripts, but turns to questions of the patient population that the author anticipated his practice would treat. Although information about specific patients is generally lacking in manuscript recipe books, focusing on recipes for women provides a rich set of information from which to draw conclusions about the medical interactions between clerical men and women in surrounding communities. Chapter two is a comparison of recipe writings in manuscript recipe books and in the first pharmacopoeia in Florence, the Ricettario Fiorentino. This comparison lends itself to enlivening how historians understand the ways knowledge changed, circulated, was adopted, or was ignored by both professional and lay healers from the late fifteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries. In chapter four, I claim that manuscript recipe books provide a rich source of information about the material context in which laypeople created medicines and healed their patients. Rather than allowing incongruent themes like veterinary medicine, beauty aids, and mischief to fall to the side for thematic consistency, this chapter asserts that examining all these manuscript recipe book entries together leads to a more holistic picture of the landscape of lay healing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.
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    Philosophical Saltpeter: The Origins and Influence of Gunpowder Technology and the Paracelsian Aerial Niter
    (2019-01) Washa, Quincy
    This thesis re-appraises how the creation and inclusion of niter theories and salt principles played into the reformation of early modern scientific philosophies, suggesting that the adoption of these theories by major figures of the period calls for closer attention by historians of science. In particular, it raises the question of why and how such a humble, earthly mineral took on a supernatural role and became a staple in some of the leading scientific philosophies of the early modern era. I show that salt, or more specifically saltpeter, would not have assumed this identity without the growing importance and popularity accorded to gunpowder weapons beginning in the Renaissance. It was the hermetic alchemist, Paracelsus, who first developed a metaphysical notion of saltpeter and incorporated it into his natural cosmology. Historians of science, such as Allen Debus, Walter Pagel, and Henry Guerlac, have discussed Paraclesus’ first claim to treatment of niter theories and their association with the observed effects of gunpowder. However, I argue that additional evidence, found in Paracelsus’ writings, is needed to further demonstrate this historical connection and to identify differences in the understanding of Paracelsus’ conception and employment of salt as one of three principles of matter, alongside sulfur and mercury, together forming his celebrated tria prima. An examination of the parallel rise of gunpowder weapons and the utilization of saltpeter as their principle source of power showcases the philosophical links between science and emerging technologies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The transition of saltpeter from a primary component in a technological instrument to a conceptual manifestation of the fundamental structure of reality reflects an epistemological transfer of concepts from craft knowledge to metaphysical and philosophical beliefs. Such narratives may help us understand the development of early modern natural philosophers’ beliefs about causality, agency, and creation.
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    Post-pastoral possibilities: nature and the literary imaginary in Early Modern France.
    (2011-12) Wellman, Sara
    My dissertation argues for a new approach to early modern pastoral literature, reading representations of bucolic life not as escapist fantasies or political allegories, but as working models capable of transforming culture. I consider how pastoral texts from this period can inform ecocriticism, a growing field that studies the relationship between literature and the environment. As a corrective to the view that all pastoral literature romanticizes and masks the reality of the people and places it represents, ecocritic Terry Gifford has articulated a theory of the post-pastoral. The "post" is conceptual rather than temporal; it refers to texts that move beyond the idealizing "traps" of pastoral convention, texts that defy the stereotypes associated with this literary mode. I use this critical tool to explore the work of three early modern authors for whom the pastoral is a resolutely forward-looking mode that offers alternatives to existing social structures: Anne-Marie Louise d'Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, who imagines a "pastoral republic" in which the institution of marriage is abolished and women control their own destiny; Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle, who uses pastoral to introduce new scientific theories of nature; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who understands literary representations of nature and natural subjects to be powerful catalysts of social transformation.
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    Sensible Mathematics: The Science of Music in the Age of the Baroque
    (2019-12) Fix, Adam
    In this dissertation I analyze the relations between mathematics, music theory, and experimental sciences from the scientific revolution through the Enlightenment. Music in the early modern period was seen as a mathematical science. More so than other branches of mathematics, music also had a direct connection to human sensory perception. I show that music, interpreted as a kind of “sensible mathematics,” played a crucial though largely underappreciated role in uniting mathematical and empirical European scientific traditions. I describe the upheavals that saw music theory become unmoored and drift away from what came to be known as modern science. During the Enlightenment it landed in the domain of fine arts and aesthetics, a separation we typically see as self-evident today. By elucidating the role of music in the scientific revolution and its aftermath, while emphasizing the shift from premodern musical science to modern physico-mathematical acoustics, I reveal the profound—even paradoxical—tensions between science and the practical arts.
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    The Spectacle of the Suffering Body: Seventeenth-century Aesthetics of Violence
    (2015-07) Bowman, Melanie
    This dissertation treats the aesthetics and ethics of theatrical violence, focusing on late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in France. Tragedy took on the impossible task of presenting, to use Elaine Scarry’s formulation, “world-destroying” pain, using a variety of stage techniques to absorb, amplify, and dissimulate violence. It managed a constant alternation between terror and its foreclosure. Suffering is impossible to represent, and yet it regularly informs the way in which individuals and the theater of state conceive of power, learning, and productive work. Throughout, I consider the ways in which these figure amplify or circumvent an aesthetics of confrontation between tyrant and rebel. Daggers, bloody cloth, and female witnesses to violence absorbed, amplified, and dissimulated the strong affects associated with scenes of suffering bodies. In Chapter 1, I investigate how the weapon in plays such as "Didon se sacrifiant"(circa 1605), "Scédase" (circa 1610), and "Le Cid" (1637) absorb the affects and efficacy associated with sacrificial violence. These plays present violence as a compelling theatrical enactment that could spread itself like a contagion. Chapter 2 focuses on bloody cloth, which in "La mort d’Hercule" (1634), and "Cinna" (1639) both stands in for scenes of bodily suffering and facilitates a transformation from gore to glory. In Chapter 3 I study the shifting status of the witness to state violence by focusing on plays featuring female protagonists who survive brothers. In Garnier’s "Antigone" (1580), Rotrou’s 1637 play of the same name, Hardy’s "Mariamne" (circa 1610) and Tristan l’Hermite’s "La Marianne" (1637), sororal mourning increasingly masked suffering and violence.