Search results for ""Author Maria M. Portuondo""
The University of Chicago Press Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World
The discovery of the New World raised many questions for early modern scientists: What did these lands contain? Where did they lie in relation to Europe? Who lived there, and what were their inhabitants like? Imperial expansion necessitated changes in the way such scientific knowledge was gathered, and Spanish cosmographers in particular were charged with turning their observations of the New World into a body of knowledge that could be used for governing the largest empire the world had ever known. As Maria M. Portuondo here shows, this cosmographic knowledge had considerable strategic, defensive, and monetary value that royal scientists were charged with safeguarding from foreign and internal enemies. Cosmography was thus a secret science, but despite the limited dissemination of this body of knowledge, royal cosmographers applied alternative epistemologies and new methodologies that changed the discipline, and, in the process, how Europeans understood the natural world. "Secret Science" promises to enhance our understanding of early modern science and the scientific revolution by shedding light on a nation that has long been in the shadow of the Black Legend.
£80.00
The University of Chicago Press Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World
The discovery of the New World raised many questions for early modern scientists, and imperial expansion necessitated changes in the way scientific knowledge was gathered. Spanish cosmographers in particular were charged with turning their observations of the New World into a body of knowledge that could be used for governing the largest empire the world had ever known. As Maria M. Portuondo shows, this cosmographic knowledge had considerable strategic, defensive, and monetary value that royal scientists were charged with safeguarding from foreign and internal enemies. Cosmography was thus a secret science, but despite the limited dissemination of this body of knowledge, royal cosmographers applied alternative epistemologies and new methodologies that changed the discipline, and, in the process, how Europeans understood the natural world.
£30.59
The University of Chicago Press The Spanish Disquiet: The Biblical Natural Philosophy of Benito Arias Montano
In this book, historian Mar a M. Portuondo takes us to sixteenth-century Spain, where she identifies a community of natural philosophers and biblical scholars. They shared what she calls the "Spanish Disquiet"--a preoccupation with the perceived shortcomings of prevailing natural philosophies and empirical approaches when it came to explaining the natural world. Foremost among them was Benito Arias Montano--Spain's most prominent biblical scholar and exegete of the sixteenth century. He was also a widely read member of the European intellectual community, and his motivation to reform natural philosophy shows that the Spanish Disquiet was a local manifestation of greater concerns about Aristotelian natural philosophy that were overtaking Europe on the eve of the Scientific Revolution. His approach to the study of nature framed the natural world as unfolding from a series of events described in the Book of Genesis, ultimately resulting in a new metaphysics, cosmology, physics, and even a natural history of the world. By bringing Arias Montano's intellectual and personal biography into conversation with broader themes that inform histories of science of the era, The Spanish Disquiet ensures an appreciation of the variety and richness of Arias Montano's thought and his influence on early modern science.
£56.00
