![]() By the sixteenth century, their core concepts and procedures had been articulated through the spirit-packed world of Renaissance Neoplatonism and even through a Christianized version of the Jewish Kabbalah. These books synthesized workshop processes with theories on the nature of matter. Alchemy was based in Hermetic Greco-Egyptian texts and artisanal recipe books that had arrived in Europe via the Islamic world. Remembered in today's popular culture as the quest for gold or for immortality promised by the philosophers' stone, the alchemy of the early modern period also included medicine and the manufacture of chemical products. The roots of this hybrid kind of knowledge can be found in early writings on alchemy. The result was an early version of what we now recognize as experimental science. The seventeenth century joined explanatory theories of the natural world (previously the realm of theologians and university-trained philosophers) and sensory engagement with nature (the realm of artisans, who achieved their understanding through the mechanical arts). Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe focuses on the ways that Renaissance and Baroque rulers in particular enacted this attitude that knowledge could lead to power, by using beautifully made objects of science to express their own magnificence.ĭuring the Renaissance and early Enlightenment, also known as the early modern period, "science" was more expansive than it is today it included philosophy, theology, poetry, and alchemy. For Kepler and other seventeenth-century figures, anyone who mastered nature could master the world. So exclaimed astronomer Johannes Kepler in the preface to Dioptrice (1611). ![]() ![]() O telescope, instrument of much knowledge, more precious than any scepter! Is not he who holds thee in his hand made king and lord of the works of God! ![]()
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