Author: Claire Preston Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0191009970 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
The writing of science in the period 1580-1700 is artfully, diffidently, carelessly, boldly, and above all self-consciously literary. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century English Literature considers the literary textures of science writing — its rhetorical figures, neologisms, its uses of parody, romance, and various kinds of verse. The experimental and social practices of science are examined through literary representations of the laboratory, of collaborative retirement, of virtual, epistolary conversation, and of an imagined paradise of investigative fellowship and learning. Claire Preston argues that the rhetorical, generic, and formal qualities of scientific writing are also the intellectual processes of early-modern science itself. How was science to be written in this period? That question, which piqued natural philosophers who were searching for apt conventions of scientific language and report, was initially resolved by the humanist rhetorical and generic skills in which they were already highly trained. At the same time non-scientific writers, enthralled by the developments of science, were quick to deploy ideas and images from astronomy, optics, chemistry, biology, and medical practices. Practising scientists and inspired laymen or quasi-scientists produced new, adjusted, or hybrid literary forms, often collapsing the distinction between the factual and the imaginative, between the rhetorically ornate and the plain. Early-modern science and its literary vehicles are frequently indistinguishable, scientific practice and scientific expression mutually involved. Among the major writers discussed are Montaigne, Bacon, Donne, Browne, Lovelace, Boyle, Sprat, Oldenburg, Evelyn, Cowley, and Dryden.
Author: Charles E. Raven Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521310833 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 538
Book Description
Charles Raven's biography of the seventeenth-century English naturalist John Ray is one of the great works in the history of science. The author's command of Latin (the language in which all Ray's biological works were written) and his enthusiasm for natural history enabled him to interpret superbly to the modern reader John Ray's remarkable scientific work and to rescue Ray's reputation from undeserved neglect. Raven reveals the unique influence Ray had on the development of modern science and in particular explains sympathetically the key role of Ray's last, most popular and most influential work, The Wisdom of God, which was the forerunner of the great 'Darwinian' controversies between science and religion in the nineteenth century.
Author: Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004285326 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 465
Book Description
Francis Willughby together with John Ray revolutionized the study of natural history. They were motivated by the new philosophy of the mid 1600s and transformed natural history in to a rigorous area of study. Because Ray lived longer and more of his writings have survived, his reputation subsequently eclipsed that of Willughby. Now, with access to previously unexplored archives and new discoveries we are able to provide a comprehensive evaluation of Francis Willughby’s life and works. What emerges is a polymath, a true virtuoso, who made original and imaginative contributions to mathematics, chemistry, linguistics as well as natural history. We use Willughby’s short life as a lens through which to view the entire process of seventeenth-century scientific endeavor. Contributors are Tim Birkhead, Isabelle Charmantier, David Cram, Meghan Doherty, Mark Greengrass, Daisy Hildyard, Dorothy Johnston, Sachiko Kusukawa, Brian Ogilvie, William Poole, Chris Preston, Anna Marie Roos, Richard Serjeantson, Paul J. Smith and Benjamin Wardhaugh.
Author: John Ray Publisher: ISBN: Category : Naturalists Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
"This book ... is the outcome of a rediscovery in the Bodleian library of a number of letters of John Ray ... which form a necessary supplement to the volume of The correspondence," edited by Edwin Lankester, 1848.
Author: Claire Preston
Author: Charles E. Raven
Author: Edwin Lankester
Author: 
Author: John Ray
Author: Robert Bowes
Author: John Ray
Author: Stuart Max Walters
Author: John Ray
Author: Edwin Lankester