Consumerism and Symbolism

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Representing the Duke of Buckingham: Libel, Counter-Libel and the Example of The Emperor’s Favourite’

Notes on Contributors

Representation is often taken as a kind of picturing-at least insofar as to "picture" something is to stand proxy for that thing, and to stand proxy on the basis of some sort of shared resemblance. Given the diversity of fields in which a notion of representation has gained a foothold, the sort of resemblance assumed may vary depending on the function of the proxy: resemblance might be perceptual, or structural, or in respect of interest, or with respect to informativeness. Even so, resemblance remains a vague notion, and "picturing" scarcely less so. This compound vagueness may be part of the charm of the notion of representation, and part of what makes it useful for fields ranging from political theory to the philosophy of art to cognitive science. But the vagueness of such a version of representation does not prevent it being suspect, nor should it prevent us from developing alternatives. Of course, there may well be contemporary notions of representation that (when properly understood) do not involve a picture-theory or any close relative thereof. But my object here is not so much to identify any central component of contemporary uses of representation as it is to diagnose a certain diagnosis of modernity-that is, a diagnosis of modernity, or at least of modern philosophy, that sees it as caught under the spell of a picture-theory of representation, and that thereby sees us as in need of disenchantment.1 On this view, modernity is born in the coming-to-dominance of such a picture-theory in the early modern works of Descartes, the Port-Royal logicians, and Leibniz, to name just a few of the favored candidates within philosophy. Its dominance might be explained by the acceptance by many an early modern philosopher, whether of a "rationalist" or an "empiricist" bent, of a split between the inner and the outer, such that the outer, public world is forced to reenact itself upon the stage of the private theater of the mind. I intend all due respect to theatrical notions of representation, but explanation of the dominance of some version of "representation" needs to take account of the early modern interest in the public realm of signs and symbols (written, drawn, or spoken) as much as of the importance of seemingly private ideas. So on the one hand, it may well be true that some notion of representation was an implicit underpinning of much that is characteristic of seventeenth-century thought. On the other hand, it is doubtful that the earliest of early modern notions of representation is appropriately described as a picture-theory. Indeed, I think that at least some early modern conceptions of representation are completely alien both to what we might think of today as representation and to what is often diagnosed as the origins of that thought. And that is just the reason why those early modern conceptions deserve our attention. For if we truly do find ourselves in the grip of suspect notions of representation, and if they supposedly are part of the philosophical patrimony of modernity, then one way to free ourselves might be to practice a kind of historical "deconstruction" of that inheritance-one that finds resources in the tradition itself with which to challenge the problematic picture-theory. It is with the aim of challenging the picturetheory of representation that I propose to examine a concrete example of "picturing": namely, the painting Las Meninas with respect to what and how it represents. I make this proposal because the picture-theory cuts both ways: not only is representation often conceived as a sort of picturing,2 but pictures are taken to offer par-

Acknowledgments Felicity Henderson (bio), Sachiko Kusukawa (bio), and Alexander Marr (bio) these essays arise from a conference, “Curiously Drawn,” held at the Royal Society on June 21–22, 2012. The meeting was part of the activities of a research network, “Origins of Science as a Visual Pursuit,” that sought to bring together historians of science and historians of art to examine the historical role of images in the early Royal Society (see picturingscience.wordpress.com). This project, including the publication of this volume, was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom. We are grateful to the speakers and participants for their enthusiasm, and in particular to Professor Michael Hunter for acting as commentator-at-large to bring together the various themes that emerged from the meeting. We would like to record our special thanks to Keith Moore, Joanna McManus, Rupert Baker, and Joanna Corden at the Royal Society for their generous help, and to Susannah Gibson, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, for assisting with the activities of the network. We are grateful for the patience, support, and enthusiasm of Susan Green, the Director of the Huntington Library Press, in seeing through the publication of this volume. [End Page vii] Felicity Henderson felicity henderson is Lecturer in Archives and Material Culture at Exeter University. Her research focuses on the early history of the Royal Society, and she is currently preparing a scholarly edition of Robert Hooke’s diary for Oxford University Press. Sachiko Kusukawa sachiko kusukawa is Fellow in the History and Philosophy of Science, Trinity College, Cambridge. The author of Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (2012), she is now working on the graphic practices of the early Royal Society, for which she has been awarded a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, U.K. Alexander Marr alexander marr is University Lecturer in the History of Art, 1400–1700, at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He specializes in early modern art and architecture, particularly their intellectual and scientific aspects. He is the Director of the research project “Genius before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art & Science,” funded by the European Research Council. Copyright © 2016 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Reviewed by: The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine Bruce T. Moran James J. Bono. The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine. Vol. 1, Ficino to Descartes. Science and Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xi + 317 pp. $50.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paperbound). Where should one look for the dynamics of cultural and scientific change in early modern Europe? According to James Bono, the force of change has less to do with external conditions (e.g., the impact of printing, or social context) than with competing language theories—that is, assumptions and debates about the relation between words and things. On this account, language theory and science form “intersecting discourses” joined by means of metaphors common to each. In the case of late Renaissance science and medicine, the metaphors most frequently employed were those of the “Book” and the “Word.” The contest over narrative authority to interpret Scripture and the Book of Nature, argues Bono, led to new relationships between the languages of man and the Word of God. A number of theories regarding the nature and origins of language existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A Neoplatonic theory of language, formulated in large part by Marsilio Ficino, assumed such an intimate connection between the human word and the verbum dei as to make language the means of seizing the powers of nature. In this regard, Bono argues, Renaissance magic underscored a potentially disquieting relationship between language as a tool for acquiring knowledge and as an instrument of magical power. The Reformation advanced its own theory of language, one in which the human word became incapable of comprehending the “Word of God.” Without access to any “supernatural” language, an understanding of divine creation might still result from an exegetical reading of the “Book of Nature.” Whether truth rested in books or in nature became the focus of competing language theories, according to Bono, in a debate between Jean Fernel and William Harvey over spirits and the blood. Here, the contest of hermeneutic practices led finally to a rejection of Renaissance Neoplatonic narratives based on the assumption that ancient texts contained shadowy glimpses of divine wisdom that could be brought to light through philological studies. Both Fernel and Paracelsus viewed nature as an expression of the divine Word. And yet, as Bono shows, they developed different strategies for reading nature’s “text.” For Fernel ancient texts, although written in a “fallen,” “post-Babylonic” language, nevertheless contained a pure, hidden wisdom that [End Page 151] could be exhumed through exegetical expertise. Paracelsus, on the other hand, switched the direction of exegesis from the “Book” to “Nature.” In his “text” matter and spirit were interwoven in such a way as to allow the comprehension of the divine logos through the understanding of the signs and symbols imprinted by God in nature. In the hands of the Paracelsian Oswald Croll, the “text” of Paracelsus came to be reinscribed, in Bono’s view, by means of a “radical” Calvinist narrative of redemption and divine sovereignty. Another reading of the Book of Nature resulted from separating the knowledge of nature from theology. The principal agent in authorizing that reading was Francis Bacon, who transformed cultural narratives by recasting the biblical story of Adam and the Fall. Where Adam’s knowledge in the Garden of Eden brought with it dominion over nature, the fallen state of man subjected human beings to a distorted intellect and to sensory deceptions. These hindrances might be overcome, however, when human labor, experimental tools, and rigorous method mediated the engagement with nature. In this way, Bacon considered possible a “Great Instauration,” a restoration to something like an original Adamic perfection. Beyond the discussion of specific hermeneutic strategies, Bono’s book articulates a very important conceptual reorientation in which nature is defined less in terms of self-presenting material objects than as a “text,” the language of which depends upon a variety of narratives and linguistic assumptions. In this sense “science” itself gets redefined and embraces a broad range of discursive “practices” that are as much linguistic and rhetorical as...

Abstract: Women in early modern Italy were active participants in scientific inquiry and made vital contributions to the shaping of scientific culture. Yet their names are largely unfamiliar today–a problem that reverberates in the continued underrepresentation of women in STEM–partly because their contributions did not always come in the guise of published works. But the discourse of early modern natural philosophy took many other forms, unfolding in salons, academies, and private conversations, as well as on paper. A central challenge for studying the participation of women in early modern science is the emphasis traditionally placed by scholars on authorship, whether print or manuscript, when women did not always write or seek publication, and when scientific and philosophical debate often occurred in an oral context. Moreover, the project of natural philosophy, which encompassed a multifaceted set of concerns, often went hand in hand with that of literature, making it difficult to impose modern disciplinary distinctions. I argue that by considering the evidence presented in a broader variety of sources and contexts, we can begin to piece together a more coherent picture of early modern women's natural philosophical activities and opinions and restore their central role in scientific culture.

Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture Paula Findlen (bio) How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about the world! And it is all so novel, too. E. A. Burtt In the half-century since the “Scientific Revolution” became a meaningful description of the transformation of attitudes toward nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it seems to have enjoyed more lives than the Cheshire cat and to have remained as enigmatic. 1 Since its original formulation in the late 1940s, it has been the topic of a lively debate about the origins and character of modern approaches to nature and, more generally, knowledge. The result has been not only increased skepticism that the Scientific Revolution could be reduced to any single narrative, but also a profusion [End Page 243] of narratives about what constituted its fundamental characteristics. As Hayden White observes, “any given set of real events can be emplotted in a number of ways, can bear the weight of being told as any number of different stories.” 2 In the process, the Scientific Revolution, perhaps more than any other area of science studies, has become a testing ground for new approaches to the historical understanding of science and new ways of understanding the process of scientific change. Why should we feel so compelled to tell and retell this particular story in the history of science, when there are so many other episodes worthy of our attention? Surely part of the fascination lies in the sense that the Scientific Revolution is, in many respects, the original story in the history of science. From the sixteenth century onward, humanist natural philosophers—from the anatomist Andreas Vesalius to the astronomer Johannes Kepler—wrote the histories of various sciences in order to publicize the importance of their reformation of knowledge. By the eighteenth century they had become the story, protagonists of a narrative rewritten by new scholarly communities in search of modern ruptures with the past. 3 The crafting of scientific narrative has been a prolonged and self-conscious exercise in which scientists as well as historians have participated over the centuries—all the more so because neither the scientist nor the historian enjoyed distinct intellectual identities until fairly recently (quite often, as the case of the seventeenth-century statesman, historian, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon demonstrates well, they were the same person). Accordingly, we might see the Scientific Revolution as one of the fundamental experiments in narrating the history of science. While the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution has largely been a story of the rise of modern science that takes science in a fairly defined sense as its focal point, cultural approaches to the history of science suggest a variety of other possibilities that explore in greater detail the imagery that early modern Europeans had at their disposal when they attempted to describe nature. Such imagery was [End Page 244] not simply an afterthought to the study of nature; often it was so deeply embedded in the act of seeing and understanding nature that it would be impossible to separate how a particular natural philosopher viewed nature from how he viewed culture. 4 Defining nature and defining culture were complementary activities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If we wish to truly understand what it meant to do early modern science, then we need to think more carefully about what it meant to be early modern. The approach I am suggesting has already had a number of advocates. Several years ago, John Schuster remarked that “the Scientific Revolution consisted of a process of change and displacement among and within competing systems of natural philosophy,” and he recommended that historians look more carefully at the “privileged images, metaphors or models” that defined these different approaches to knowledge. 5 The literature exploring the fundamental cultural themes of the early modern period can be a rich resource for expanding our interpretations of the Scientific Revolution. 6 Since nature was never an isolated subject of study during this period but always part of some larger project, we should examine more closely those features of early modern society that best illuminate the place of...

Although the works of the authors of the Golden Age of Latin Literature play an important formative role for Early Modern philosophers, their influence in Early Modern thought is, nowadays, rarely studied. Trying to bring this topic to light once again and following the seminal works of Kajanto (1979), Proietti (1985) and Akkerman (1985), I will target Spinoza’s Latin sources in order to analyze their place in his philosophy. On those grounds, I will offer an overview of the problems of the reception of classical literature in Early Modernity and then dwell on the particular case of Ovid and Spinoza. The present paper will argue that although Spinoza’s references to Ovid fill a rhetorical purpose as suggested by the existing literature, these mentions have a prior philosophical motivation. That is, the references in the Ethics are not merely illustrative; instead, they indicate that Spinoza acknowledges Ovid’s beliefs about human experiences and deliberately elaborates on Ovid’s view to construct and defend his own theses. To this end, the paper will analyze some citations mapped by Proietti (1985) and add a new one in an attempt to enlarge the list of places and topics that merit further investigation. To conclude, I will point out how the references to Ovid are part of Spinoza’s own defense of the powers of imagination.

In the origins of Western philosophical thought, doctrines of physics intertwined with the debate between political philosophers. It is for this reason that Plato devoted his dialogues Theatetus and Parmenides to investigating and meeting the arguments of his principal philosophical adversaries. The doctrine of atomism, which developed under the influence of Parmenides’ philosophy, is one that Plato refutes directly. In the modern era of philosophy and science, a revived doctrine of atomism has been treated as apolitical. Atomistic postulates lay at the root of the doctrines of Early Modern philosophers and exert a great influence upon cultural and political teachings. In order to understand Early Modern Philosophy, therefore, and especially in order to examine Early Modern political science, one must address the atomistic theory of body which lies at the root of Early Modern metaphysics. In the metaphysical domain, or in the domain of natural philosophy, the Early Modern philosophers radically reduce the role that ordinary opinion may play in political and cultural life. The majestic declarations concerning the rights of man, and the gospel of utility characteristic of the political domain of Early Modernity, therefore conceal a shrunken influence fated for the demos in the new politics. In order to take the measure of the new political science, it is necessary to take the measure of the revived doctrines of atomism. If these doctrines can be disproved, by reviving Plato’s critique, we will be able to take a critical look at the political doctrines that lie upon the foundations of the politicized atomism.

There are many reasons to include texts written by women in early modern philosophy courses. The most obvious one is accuracy: women helped to shape the philosophical landscape of the time. Thus, to craft a syllabus that wholly excludes women is to give students an inaccurate picture of the early modern period. Since it seems safe to assume that we all aim for accuracy, this should be reason enough to include women writers in our courses. This article nonetheless offers an additional reason: when students are exposed to philosophical texts written by women, they learn that women have been, are, and can be philosophers. Given how underrepresented women are in philosophy, this finding is significant. If we aim to change the face of philosophy—so that it includes more women—we must include texts written by women in our syllabi. The article considers various obstacles faced by those who work to respond to this call to action.

2022BrillLeiden-BostonReview of Di Liscia, Daniel A., and Sylla, Edith D. (eds.) with the collaboration of Bakker, Paul J.J.M. Quantifying Aristotle (‘Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy and Science’, 34), pp. 479

Occasionalism: Causation and Divine Action in Early Modern Philosophy and Science

Teleology in Early Modern Philosophy and Science

Seeing and the transfer of spirits in early modern art theory

Contents: Introduction: making sense of the senses, Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker Part I Contemplating the Senses: The trouble with odours in Petrarch's De Remediis, Alessandro Arcangeli Natural magic, artificial music and birds at Francesco I de'Medici's Pratolino, Suzanne B. Butters Sight, science, and the still-life paintings of Juan SA!nchez CotA!n, Mindy Nancarrow. Part II Sustaining Body and Soul: Sensing death: the danse macabre in early modern Europe, Sophie Oosterwijk Peeling the onion: experiencing the senses in Bronzino's burlesque poem La cipolla, Robert W. Gaston Appetites: food, eating and the senses in 16th-century Italy, Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker The Villa Pamphilj on the Janiculum hill: the garden, the senses and good health in 17th-century Rome, Susan Russell. Part III Sensual Encounters: Thematizing vision in the Renaissance: the noli me tangere as a metaphor for art making, Lisa M. Rafanelli Touching looks: masculinizing the maternal-feminine in Poussin's Tancred and Erminia, Phillippa Plock In the hand of the beholder: Isabella d'Este and the sensual allure of sculpture, Geraldine A. Johnson Sensuality, sacred remains, and devotion in Baroque Rome, Alice E. Sanger Bibliography Index.