Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Her previous publications include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994), for which she was awarded the 1995 Marraro Prize and the 1996 Pfizer Prize Merchants and Marvels (2001) with Pamela Smith and Beyond Florence (2003) with Michelle Fontaine and Duane Osheim.
Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums.
Italian patricians, their curiosity fuelled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry.
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