Nova Scientia: Early Modern Scientific Literature and Latin
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News Archive
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06/12/2022: Inaugural lecture of Dominik Berrens
Having earned his venia legendi in Classical Philology and Neo-Latin Studies with his monograph Naming New Things and Concepts in Early Modern Science: The Case of Natural History, Dominik Berrens gave his inaugural lecture on Letters in Herodotus (“Briefe bei Herodot”) at the Centre of Ancient Cultures (Zentrum für Alte Kulturen) in Innsbruck. His talk was followed by a discussion and a reception.
30/11/2022: Dalberg-Preis 2022 for Dominik Berrens
Our team member Dominik Berrens was awarded the Dalberg-Preis 2022 of the Akademie gemeinnütziger Wissenschaften zu Erfurt for his book Naming New Things and Concepts in Early Modern Science: The Case of Natural History. The ceremony took place in Weimar on November 30, 2022. Congratulations!
31/07–5/08/2022: IANLS Leuven 2022
The 18th congress of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies (IANLS) was held in Leuven, Belgium, from Sunday, July 31, to Friday, August 5, 2022. The congresses of the IANLS, which take place every three years, bring together researchers working on Neo-Latin literature from a wide range of discipline. Also the NOSCEMUS project was present in Leuven with a a couple of talks.
While Domink Berrens took a look at Carl Linnaeus’ naming and etymology of the banana in his Musa Cliffortiana (1736) Martin Korenjak presented the history of Atlas as a title for books composed of a series of terrestrial maps. Irina Tautschnig examined the use of antiquarian similes in Benedict Stay’s voluminous scientific didcatic poem Philosophia recentior (1755–1792).
In the IANLS business meeting, our colleague Stefan Zathammer was elected to the Digital Advisory Board and appointed as the new web-master.
01/07/2022–02/07/2022: Workshop “Saeva Scientia: Polemics and Defamation in Early Modern Science”
In an ideal world, scientific discourse would be a universal, inclusive, and unemotional debate on the right interpretation of facts and data without distinction of person. However, ideals are difficult if not impossible to reach. Instead of better arguments or a new interpretation of data, we often find attacks that target the opponent as a person (ethnicity, beliefs, social status, gender, ...) or the form in which a thesis is presented (orthography, style, choice of literary genre, …). Through this procedure, a scientific opinion that contradicts one’s own convictions is marked as irrelevant from the outset, because the speaker or the form in which an opinion is presented is defamed. Early modern science is by no means free from such essentially unscientific attacks.
In the workshop, we want to take a closer look at such scientific invectives as literature and inter alia try to answer the following questions: Who was attacked (e.g., whole groups or single persons, living persons or ancient/medieval predecessors, …)? What is criticised instead of the actual argument (e.g., faith, linguistic skills, …)? In what form is the criticism expressed (e.g., mentioned en passant or in a full-blown attack, literary genre, …)? Another interesting aspect are strategies to anticipate and avoid inappropriate attacks. These strategies could be on a linguistic level, for example, through the use of formulas of modesty, downplaying the impact of one’s own achievements, open admittance of deficiencies in language, or on a formal level by proposing revolutionary ideas in a genre that allowed for more licenses such as poetry, mythological narration, or dialogue.
28/03/2022: Erika Cremer-Fellowship for Johanna Luggin
Update 21/06/2022
One of Austria’s leading newspapers, Die Presse, has recently interviewed Johanna on the award of this fellowship, her research, thoughts on working in the field of Neo-Latin especially for young researchers and more: https://www.diepresse.com/6135873/die-wissenschafts-pr-der-neuzeit.
Original 29/03/2022
On March 28, 2022 Johanna Luggin was granted the Erika-Cremer Fellowship by Innsbruck University. This fellowship supports female researchers intending to finish their Habilitation within the next three years. Johanna will finalize her monograph on the place of rhetorics in Neo-Latin scientific texts. As part of the award ceremony, vice rector Ulrike Tanzer underlined that this fellowship should be seen as a signal for women in academia. In his laudatio, our Principal Investigator Martin Korenjak presented Johanna’s academic achievements and also mentioned that she is an important and integral member of our ERC research team.
30/03-02/04/2022: RSA Dublin 2022
The 68th annual meeting of the RSA was held in Dublin from Wednesday, March 30, to Saturday, April 2, 2022. Our project was also represented by several talks at this important conference for the study of the early modern period.
Ovanes Akopyan gave a paper on the work De natura by the humanist physician and scholar Nicola Biese. Domink Berrens, Irina Tautschnig, and Stefan Zathammer looked at Neo-Latin scientific literature from a philological perspective in their panel “Philology of Science: The Application of Philological Methods to Scientific Texts.” In his talk, Stefan Zathammer presented the possibilities of automatic text recognition in the study of large text corpora. Domink Berrens traced the process of naming newly discovered animals in the early modern period, using Conrad Gessner as an example. Irina Tautschnig showed how Jakob Balde jokingly reflected on Copernicus and his system.
The interdisciplinary lecture series “Positionen der Literaturwissenschaft” introduces BA students to current research in literary studies. Our colleague Irina Tautschnig gave an insight into Neo-Latin liminary poems, presenting her work on the paratext of Johannes Hevelius’s Selenographia.
23/11/2021: Guest Talk by Dietmar Till “Persuasive and non-persuasive rhetorical concepts between antiquity and modernity”
On Tuesday, 23rd November, Dietmar Till, professor of rhetoric at the university of Tübingen, will give a virtual guest talk about “Persuasive and non-persuasive rhetorical concepts between antiquity and modernity”. The talk will be in German, will be streamed via zoom and is open to all interested listeners. Please find and abstract and the zoom link in the invitation.
12–13/11/2021: ERC NOSCEMUS and LBI Workshop “Pathos in Neo-Latin Scientific Writing”
Update 17/11/2021
From 12th until 13th November 2021, a hybrid workshop on the topic of “Pathos in Neo-Latin Scientific Writing”, co-organized with the LBI for Neo-Latin Studies, was held in Innsbruck. A close look at Neo-Latin scientific works—be they encyclopaedic treatises or dialogues, experiment reports or monographs—shows, in a stunning number of cases, high emotions, enthusiastic expressions of gratitude, praise, wonder and much more. Eleven contributions asked for the motivation behind such emotional outbursts in Neo-Latin scientific texts, its specific stylistic expressions, contemporary theoretical reflections about the style of scientific discourse, literary models for stylistic expressions, specific generic traditions and the role of physico-theology in the employment of pathos.
The speakers treated the complex question of authority in new science texts, spoke about Francis Bacon’s varied appeals to the passions, about techniques of persuasion applied by naturalists of the Old Confederation, and their ancient models; about pathos in early modern dissertations and disputations, in microscopic literature and in poetry. The papers were followed by vivid discussions among the participants present in Innsbruck as well as the speakers and participants who joined online.
Original 1/11/2022
The upcoming ERC NOSCEMUS workshop, to be held on the 12th–13th November 2021 in Innsbruck, is co-organized with the LBI for Neo-Latin Studies and dedicated to the topic of “Pathos in Neo-Latin Scientific Writing”: A close look at Neo-Latin scientific works—be they encyclopaedic treatises or dialogues, experiment reports or monographs—shows, in a stunning number of cases, high emotions, enthusiastic expressions of gratitude, praise, wonder and much more. Thus we find Tycho Brahe arduously defending the mathematical disciplines in an oration of 1621; Athanasius Kircher describing the intriguing and horrific features of nature in a careful tableau of a volcanic eruption in his Mundus subterraneus (1665); or Johannes Kepler filling his Astronomia nova (1609) with grand style and emotional appeals to the reader along the way to his discovery of celestial motions.
What was the motivation behind such emotional outbursts in Neo-Latin scientific texts? To what ends did these authors use the rhetorical device of pathos in their works and how exactly did they go about it? This workshop will investigate the application of this tool, discussing i.a. the following topics:
the specific stylistic expressions of pathos in scientific texts and criteria for their differentiation;
contemporary theoretical reflections about the style of scientific discourse;
literary models for stylistic expressions (g. Lucretius, Seneca) and innovative deviations;
specific generic traditions, g. the dialogue, didactic poem, oration, prose treatise, letter;
historical changes to the phenomenon through the centuries ( 1550–1850);
the role of physico-theology in the employment of pathos.
Last weekend, researchers from different philological and historical disciplines met to discuss current research projects on early modern textual and intellectual cultures in the workshop “Gelehrte Netzwerke in der Frühen Neuzeit: Aktuelle Forschungsansätze”, co-organised by the German-studies network “Frühe Neuzeit – Südost” and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies. Our colleague Irina Tautschnig gave an overview of her book project on Copernicus in Neo-Latin poetry, which was followed by a lively interdisciplinary discussion.
23–25/09/2021: PONTES X – Ancient Literature and the Scientific Revolution
From 23 to 25 September 2021, PONTES X took place in a hybrid format, with participants in Innsbruck and on the screen. Sixteen papers traced continuities and innovations between ancient and early modern scientific literature. The case studies explored the various literary forms that characterised scientific writing from the invention of print to the late eighteenth century, e.g. aphorisms, dialogues, historiae, didactic epics and epigrams. A fruitful and stimulating final discussion brought together the insights of the individual papers. The conference ended with an excursion to the chamber of art and wonders in Ambras Castle.
26/06/2021: Talk by Irina Tautschnig
On June 25–26, Simon Zuenelli and Irina Tautschnig organised the online workshop “The Ancient Greek Book Epigram in Context”. In the two-day event, the ancient Greek book epigram was contextualised both synchronically, in comparison to other forms of ancient paratext, and diachronically, in comparison to medieval and early modern book epigrams. Irina Tautschnig contributed a case study on book epigrams in early modern scientific publications, namely the book epigrams in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s multi-volume natural history. The talk focused on those Latin and Greek poems which evoke the epic hero Ulysses as a foil for Aldrovandi and showed how they transform Aldrovandi’s natural history into an epic endeavour.
The June issue of the German newspaper “Politik & Kultur” has a focus section on insects and culture. Our colleague Dominik Berrens contributed a short piece on insects in antiquity, which builds on his doctoral dissertation. You can find the article on page 26.
12/05/2021: Guest Talk by Julia Heideklang
On Wednesday, 12th May 2021, Julia Heideklang (HU Berlin) will give the talk: “Botanics in the Making. Writing and Reading 16th-century Herbals”.
21/04/2021: Paper by Johanna Luggin at RSA Virtual 2021
Our colleague Johanna Luggin participated in a seminar session at the Virtual Meeting of the RSA on “Patronage and Innovation: How Patronage Shaped Textual Culture in the Early Modern World” with a contribution on “William Gilbert's De magnete: The Patronless Novelty”. The session aimed to study patronage as an agent of change in the early modern world and discussed pre-circulated case studies in the form of video presentations. After reflections on their case studies by the four contributors, a response by Susanna de Beer summarized common themes, questions and problems of all papers, stimulating a lively and fruitful discussion of the topic.
14/04/2021: Paper by Irina Tautschnig at RSA Virtual 2021
Our colleague Irina Tautschnig participated in the virtual conference of the RSA with a paper on the manuscript poems in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus. In the paper, Irina gives an overview of the handwritten verses in the printed books and shows how they document the owners' perception of the Copernican system or are used as an instrument to shape the reaction of other readers. The paper was pre-circulated and discussed in a fruitful and stimulating seminar on Neo-Latin literature.
25/03/2021: Die Posie der Dinge
The collected volume “Die Poesie der Dinge. Ziele und Strategien der Wissensvermittlung im lateinischen Lehrgedicht der Frühen Neuzeit” on Neo-Latin didactic poetry, edited by Ramunė Markevičiūtė and Bernd Roling, contains a contribution by Johanna Luggin, presenting the didactic and poetic strategies in a poem about the human brain, Cerebrum(1727), by Claude Griffet.
01/12/2020: Debating the Stars in the Italian Renaissance
Ovanes Akopyan recently appeared on two podcasts to discuss his book entitled “Debating the Stars in the Italian Renaissance: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem and Its Reception” (Brill, 2021). You can check out Ovanes’ conversations with Luis Ribeiro (University of Lisbon) and Dan Attrell (University of Toronto), respectively, on YouTube:
In Debating the Stars, Ovanes Akopyan sheds new light on the astrological controversies that arose in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries after the publication of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem (1496). This treatise has often been held responsible for a contemporary reassessment of the status of astrology, a discipline that attracted widespread fascination in the Renaissance. Akopyan’s reconstruction of the development of Pico’s views demonstrates that the Disputationes was a continuation of rather than a drastic rupture with the rest of his legacy. By investigating the philosophical and humanist foundations for Pico’s attack on astrological predictions, Akopyan challenges the popular assumption that the treatise was written under Girolamo Savonarola’s spell. He shows instead how it was appropriated ideologically by pro-Savonarolan circles after Pico’s death. (Brill)
01/12/2020: Archives of Natural History 47.2
The latest issue ofArchives of Natural History47.2 (2020)contains an article by our team member Dominik Berrens. In his paper, Dominik deals with early modern names of the sloth, an animal that was perceived as particularly strange in the early modern period. He tries to reconstruct how the given names and their etymologies were connected to the perceived behaviour and the physiognomy, and what this might tell us about the conceptions behind these.
“Naming an unknow animal the case of the sloth (Folivora)”, pp. 325–343
20/10/2020: Virtual Guest Talk by Johanna Luggin at STVDIO seminar Warwick
On October, 20th, our colleague Johanna Luggin gave a virtual guest talk at the STVDIO seminar of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at Warwick. She presented the peculiar reception of doctrines by philosopher René Descartes in two Neo-Latin didactic poems from the 18th century – the Mundus Cartesii (“The World of Descartes”) written by Pierre le Coëdic SJ and the Cerebrum (“The Brain”) written by Claude Griffet SJ. These two works play with Cartesian theories as well as with the Virgilian and Lucretian subtexts, bending genre traditions and representing an intriguing mix of genuine fascination and subtle critique of the ideas of the 17th century natural philosopher.
The talk was attended by the Renaissance Centre’s academic staff as well as PhD- and MA-students and inspired a discussion on i.a. the didactic function of these peculiar Neo-Latin texts.
The interdisciplinary lecture series “ATRIUM-Ringvorlesung” takes place even in the time of corona, albeit online. The lecture series presents new research results from various disciplines of ancient cultures and Neo-Latin studies based in the Atrium in Innsbruck. Our colleague Dominik Berrens gave the first lecture on the October 14, 2020 with the title “Flinke Peterchen und fette Gänse – Die amerikanische Fauna in der neulateinischen Literatur”. Dominik discussed some of his findings on the naming of the American fauna.
22/09/2020: Antike und Abendland 65/66
Our researcher Dominik Berrens contributed to the recent issue of Antike und Abendland 65/66 (2019/2020) an article on terminology in Georg Agricola’s Bermannus:
In summer 2018 all our project members attended the big IANLS (International Association for Neo-Latin Studiens) congress in Albacete (Spain). Now the Acta Conventus Neolatini Albasitensis have been published by Brill, which, in addition to the five plenary papers, contains a further 49 essays on all areas of Neo-Latin Studies.
Our team member Irina Tautschnig contributed to the new Acta with a paper on Carlo Noceti’s Iris: “The Weaver of Light: Divine Origin of Nature and Natural Science in Carlo Noceti’s Iris”. In her paper, Tautschnig examined the role of one specific strategy to promote science within the text, namely to present scientific discoveries as divinely ordained.
13/05/2020: Noscemus Transkribus Model released – UPDATE: Revised and extended version now available
A revised and extended version of our Transkribus model is now available. For the 2nd version a substantial amount of new pages was added, including prints from the 15th century, texts set in Fraktur and texts with a considerable amount of Greek passages.
The model is available for every registered user in Transkribus and called: Noscemus GM 2.2.Noscemus GM 2.2 is able to read texts set in Antiqua-based typefaces from the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th century with a high level of accuracy and consistently outperforms most of the standard OCR engines. Although it is tailored towards transcribing (Neo-)Latin texts, Noscemus GM 2.2 also provides convincing results for other languages such as French, Italian and English. The Noscemus model is therefore able to offer help not only to Neo-Latinists, but to all kind of researchers dealing with larger text corpora from the Early Modern Period.
The model is based on training data from the project’s Digital Sourcebook and comprises at present (May 2020) around 1,600 fully corrected pages. In order to give the user a maximum of freedom, standardizations in the transcription process have been kept to a minimum. Normalizations have been implemented only in the following cases: ligatures (e.g. æ, œ, ct, ff) and abbreviations (e.g. -que, -us, -tur, …mm…, …nn…) have been expanded, long s (ſ) transcribed as a normal s, and small caps transcribed as majuscules.
In the model’s current state there remain a handful of known issues: There are occasional inconsistencies in the transcription of quotation marks and diacritics; the error rate for the transcription of Greek words or passages is still high.
29/02/2020: Talk by Irina Tautschnig at “Schönheit vor Weisheit”
Created in celebration of the 350th anniversary of the University of Innsbruck, the exhibition “Schönheit vor Weisheit. Das Wissen der Kunst und die Kunst der Wissenschaft” in the Tyrolean State Museum “Ferdinandeum” explored the relationship between art and science. On the last weekend of its run, a series of talks showcased the range of young research at the university. Our colleague Irina Tautschnig was invited to present her work on Neo-Latin scientific poetry to a wider audience.
06–07/02/2020: Noscemus at the Transkribus User Conference 2020
From 6 to 7 February 2020 the Transkribus User Conference 2020 took place in Innsbruck. The TUC is an annual gathering of the Transkribus community, where the latest developements in Automated Text Recognition are discussed. Our colleague Stefan Zathammer was invited to present our Transkribus model “Noscemus GM v1”.
18–20/12/2019: Talk by Dominik Berrens in Würzburg
Just before the Christmas break (18 to 20 December 2019), the Camerarius project of the University of Würzburg held its final conference with the title “Camerarius im Kontext. Konstellationen und Diskurslandschaften des 16. Jahrhunderts”. Our colleague Dominik Berrens was invited to give a talk on Camerarius’s role in establishing a medical terminology in the sixteenth century
The first Transkribus model of NOSCEMUS trained by Stefan Zathammer is now officialy out. It is available for every registered user in Transkribus and called: Noscemus GM v1. The model is able to read texts set in Antiqua-based typefaces from the 16th, 17th and 18th century with a high level of accuracy and consistently outperforms most of the standard OCR engines. Although it is tailored towards transcribing (Neo-)Latin texts, Noscemus GM v1 also provides convincing results for other languages such as French, Italian and English. The Noscemus model is therefore able to offer help not only to Neo-Latinists, but to all kind of researchers dealing with larger text corpora from the Early Modern Period.
The model is based on training data from the project’s Digital Sourcebook and comprises at present (December 2019) around 1,000 fully corrected pages. In order to give the user a maximum of freedom, standardizations in the transcription process have been kept to a minimum. Normalizations have been implemented only in the following cases: ligatures (e.g. æ, œ, ct, ff) and abbreviations (e.g. -que, -us, -tur, …mm…, …nn…) have been expanded, long s (ſ) transcribed as a normal s, and small caps transcribed as majuscules.
In the model’s current state there remain a handful of known issues: There are occasional inconsistencies in the transcription of quotation marks; the error rate for the transcription of Greek words or passages is still high; to a lesser degree the same applies to words set in (German) Fraktur.
For more information see also the post on the Transkribus HP
Make sure you use the model “Noscemus GM v1” when you run the Text Recognition on your document!
04/12/2019: Talk by Irina Tautschnig in Wuppertal
In the guest talk series organised by the DFG project “Ikonographie auf wissenschaftlichen Instrumenten der Frühen Neuzeit” (IZWT, University of Wuppertal), Irina Tautschnig gave the paper “Die Gesichter der Wissenschaft. Neulateinische Porträtepigramme als Medium der Wissenschaftsbewerbung”. In her talk, she examined portrait epigrams as a means to shape the image of scientists and to promote scientific achievements.
In the recent issue of Intellectual History Review 29.4 (2019) two articles of our researcher Ovanes Akopyan were published:
“Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–1597): new perspectives on a Renaissance philosopher”, pp. 541–543 | Link to the article
and
“In search of a spiritus: Francesco Patrizi on tides”, pp. 655–668 | Link to the article
This article analyzes two chapters of Francesco Patrizi’s Nova de universis philosophia that deal with a topic widely debated in European intellectual circles at the time: the origin of tides. By deconstructing Patrizi’s views on the phenomenon of ebb and flow, this paper places these chapters of Patrizi’s opus magnum into a larger context and shows how, with the use of novel philosophical arguments, he sought to replace what he considered an outdated theory of tides.
05/11/2019: Guest Talk by Sietske Fransen
On Tuesday, 5th November 2019, Sietske Fransen (Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte – Bibliotheca Hertziana) will give the talk: “On Jan Baptista van Helmont. Understanding Language and the Mind”.
Date: Tue, 05/11/2019 – 18:00 Location: Innsbruck, Langer Weg 11 (Zentrum für Alte Kulturen), SR1
On Tuesday, 25th June 2019, Monica Azzolini (Università di Bologna) will give the talk: “Aetna: Production and circulation of knowledge about Sicily's volcano in early modern sources”.
Date: Tue, 25/06/2019 – 18:00 Location: Innsbruck, Langer Weg 11 (Zentrum für Alte Kulturen), SR5
On Tuesday, 18th June 2019, Volker Remmert (Bergische Universität Wuppertal) will give the talk: “Wettstreit der Paratexte. Johannes Keplers Tabulae Rudolphinae (Ulm 1627) und Philipp Lansbergens Tabulae motuum coelestium perpetuae (Middelburg 1632)”.
Date: Tue, 18/06/2019 – 18:00 Location: Innsbruck, Langer Weg 11 (Zentrum für Alte Kulturen), SR5
At the 7thVolturnia Conference of Bavarian and Austrian classicists in Erlangen (Germany), Dominik Berrens gave the paper: "Guter Stil in neulateinischen Wissenschaftstexten". In his talk, Dominik presented an overview of how scientists faced the difficulty of disseminating their findings and ideas in texts that aimed at being, on the one hand, scientifically accurate and, on the other hand, written in a style inspired by classical models.
On the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the University of Innsbruck, the Botanical Garden has organized an exhibition entitled: “Mensch und Natur – Eine botanische Reise durch die Wissenschaften" (Humans and Nature – A botanical journey through the sciences). Dominik Berrens contributed to the project "Wie kommen Pflanzen zu ihren botanischen Namen?” (How plants got their botanical names).
07/06/2019: Workshop (De)Constructing authority in early modern cosmology
Organisation: Ovanes Akopyan Date: Fr, 07/06/2019 – 10:00–18:15 Venue: Innsbruck, Langer Weg 11 (Zentrum für Alte Kulturen), SR1
About the workshop:
It is often claimed that instead of relying on authoritative texts, the method which is usually associated with the pre-modern period, early modern science has its roots in experimental knowledge. Cosmology that due to the Copernican revolution went through significant changes is usually seen as the most illustrative example of such a shift. However, the picture seems to be much more complex. This workshop will focus on the notion of “authority” in early modern astronomy and astrology and the strategies with which scholars constructed or, on the contrary, rejected authoritative texts and concepts. This workshop will, hopefully, demonstrate how by applying a set of argumentative strategies not exclusively limited to experimental knowledge per se, early modern scholars established a new pantheon of reliable authorities in their field or sought to restore the position of those whose ideas had been shaken by new scientific discoveries.
A number of fundamental questions will be addressed, including:
“Scientific heroes” in early modern cosmology and promotion of science
Astrology and its controversial status in the early modern period
“Previous” authorities, such as Aristotle, Ptolemy or Abu Ma'shar, and the use and abuse of their legacy
The authority of the Bible and the authority of science
Confessionalisation and institutionalisation of early modern cosmologies
Our researches will give the following talks:
Johanna Luggin: In tam vasto librorum oceano, quibus studiosorum ingenia perturbantur: William Gilbert's Use of Experiment and Rejection of Authority, Reconsidered
Irina Tautschnig: Constructing Authority in the Paratext: The Panegyric Poems to Johannes Hevelius' Selenographia
Johanna Luggin attended the interdisciplinary conference Zeugenschaft/testimony in der Frühen Neuzeit, organized by the research platform The Exercise of Judgement in Graz. She presented a paper on early modern debates about magnetism and its connection to testimony, witnesses, and authority in early modern science to an international group of historians of law, historians of science, as well as philosophers.
05–17/05/2019: Johanna Luggin at the Warburg Institute
Johanna Luggin visited the Warburg Institute in London for a Library Travel Grant for two weeks in May, to work with the broad and exceptional collection of books in the history of science at the Warburg library. She was especially interested in its many books on early modern anatomy, as well as on astronomy and cosmography.
07/05/2019: Guest Talk by Dario Tessicini
On Tuesday, 7th May 2019, Dario Tessicini (University of Durham) will give the talk: “The Renaissance Invention of Cosmology”.
Date: Tue, 07/05/2019 – 18:00 Location: Innsbruck, Langer Weg 11 (Zentrum für Alte Kulturen), SR5
At the 2019 Postgraduate Conference of the British Society for the History of Science in Cambridge, Irina Tautschnig presented the paper “The Beehive of Science. Newton in Carlo Noceti’s Iris”. In her talk, she analysed how in this 18th century Jesuit didactic poem on the rainbow, scientific progress is depicted not as the work of scientific heroes, but as the result of a collective search for truth, echoing the famous image of the busy bees in Vergil’s Georgics(4.158–69).
28/03/2019: Guest Talk by Kurt Girstmair
On Thursday, 28th March 2019, Kurt Girstmair (Universität Innsbruck) will give the talk: “Lauter Falsches: drei Handschriften der ULB Tirol”.
Date: Thu, 28/03/2019 – 18:00 Location: Innsbruck, Langer Weg 11 (Zentrum für Alte Kulturen), SR1
In the recent issue of Humanistica Lovaniensia – Journal of Neo-Latin StudiesVol. 68, No. 1 (2019) two articles of our researchers were published:
Martin Korenjak: “Explaining Natural Science in Hexameters. Scientific Didactic Epic in the Early Modern Era” (pp. 135–175) | Link to the article
Didactic epic is one of the most intensely studied genres of Neo-Latin poetry. However, the numerous didactic poems that consider scientific topics as diverse as polar lights and balneology have to date received little attention. Insofar as these poems are considered at all, they are primarily understood as exercises in literary imitatio and demonstrations of poetic virtuosity, largely disregarding their professed objectives of explaining science to their readers. Focusing on a case study of the Iris (1730) by the Jesuit poet Carlo Noceti, the present article suggests that the formal aspects of these texts should not be evaluated in isolation from their contents. Rather, it seems preferable to treat them as serious attempts to familiarise readers with new notions, facts and insights in the age of the Scientific Revolution. The article is complemented by an Appendix listing all pertinent poems known to the author.
The term Flora usually refers to the natural vegetation of a particular geographic region or a scientific work that catalogues such vegetation. These meanings have evolved from a metonymy of the Roman goddess Flora. It was previously assumed that this metonymic use began in the seventeenth century and was initially limited to book titles. However, the present article challenges these assumptions and demonstrates that the metonymic use of Flora was employed much earlier, and not in book titles, but in poetry and letters.
17–19/03/2019: RSA 2019 Toronto
At the 65th Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) in Toronto our researches will give the following talks (Monday, 18/03/2019):
14/03/2019: Talk by Irina Tautschnig at the Max-Planck-Institute (Berlin)
On Thursday, 14th March 2019, Irina Tautschnigwill present her dissertation project under the title “Pulchri correpta cupidine veri saecla. Promoting Science in Neo-Latin Literature” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin.
On Tuesday, 12th March 2019, Guido Giglioni (Università degli Studi di Macerata) will give the talk: “The Beginnings of Life: William Harvey and the Latin Lexicon of Plantanimal Growth”.
Date: Tue, 12/03/2019 – 18:00 Location: Innsbruck, Langer Weg 11 (Zentrum für Alte Kulturen), SR5
On Wednesday, 20th February 2019, Maude Vanhaelen (Warwick) will give the talk: “Plato in the place of Aristotle: Platonic lectures and commentaries in Renaissance universities”.
02/02/2019: Süddeutsche Zeitung, “Die Biene – ein durch und durch politisches Tier”
On 2 February 2019, the features section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on ancient ideas about the bee state, to which our colleague Dominik Berrens was interviewed as an expert.
01–02/02/2019: Talk by Irina Tautschnig at the AKME Colloquium
At the AKME Colloquium in Innsbruck (February 1stand 2nd), Irina Tautschnig presented her research on the interplay of didactics and satire in Libert Froidmont'sSomnium sive peregrinatio caelestis, an early 17thcentury dream narrative about a voyage through the universe. As a literary reaction to recent astronomical discoveries, theSomniumpresents an interesting case study for her project on promoting science.
On Wednesday, December 12th 2018, Ian Maclean(Oxford) will give the talk “Andreas Frisisu of Amsterdam and the Search for a Niche in the Market for Latin Books (1664–1675)”.
On Thursday, December 6th 2018, Petra Schierl (Universität Basel) will give the talk “Gestalt und Ähnlichkeit: Conrad Gessners Neuordnung der fossilia”.
On Wednesday, November 28th 2018, Mordechai Feingold (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena) will give the talk “An Enigmatic Elizabethan Puritan Intellectual: John Reinolds (1549–1607)”.
01/11/2018: Talk by Dominik Berrens at the Department for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge
Dominik Berrens spends the Michaelmas (October–November) as visiting scholar at the Department for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. On Thursday, 1 November 2018, he was invited to talk about his ongoing research with theEarly Science and Medicine working group at the Department. Dominik presented his case study on the naming of the sloth and discussed his results with the audience.
23/10/2018: Guest Talk by Hiro Hirai
On Tuesday, October 23rd 2018, Hiro Hirai (Radboud University) will give the talk “Galen in the Medical Context of the Scientific Revolution”.
The first workshop of the NOSCEMUS project “Digitising the Classical Tradition”, organised in cooperation with the University of Zagreb and the Književni krug Split took place on the 12th and 13th of October 2018 in Split. It was dedicated to the new possibilities which the digital media offer for Latin studies and the history of science.
Organisation: Neven Jovanović (University of Zagreb), Martin Korenjak (University of Innsbruck), Braco Lučin (Književni krug Split)
Venue: Institute of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Split, Brothers Radić Square, 7, Split
14/08/2018: Talk by Dominik Berrens at the Rotary Club “Saarlouis-Untere Saar” (Germany)
On Tuesday, August 14th 2018, Dominik Berrens was invited to give a talk to members and guests of the Rotary Club “Saarlouis-Untere Saar” (Germany). Dominik gave insights into the ongoing research of the ERC project.
The talk was followed by a vivid discussion with the interested audience. We would like to thank the Rotary Club “Saarlouis-Untere Saar” for the warm welcome and the possibility to present our work.
29/07–03/08/2018: 17th International Congress of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies (IANLS) in Albacete
Within the special session “Scientia Latina I: Neo-Latin as a Means of Promoting and Disseminating Early Modern Science” some members of our research team presented their current work.
Martin Korenjak gave a paper on “Heroes of Scientific Revoluiton”. In early modern times, the rapidly developing natural sciences propounded a mass of radically new, seemingly absurd ideas about the physical world. In order to overcome resistance and to win over their contemporaries, proponents of the new science not only tried to argue convincingly for the factual truth of the scientific results, but also did their best to present scientists as respectable individuals and their work as worthwhile and fruitful. One way of doing so was to depict the protagonists of the new science as intellectual heroes and science itself as a heroic endeavour, following the lead of ancient models such as Cicero and especially Lucretius. In his talk Korenjak demonstrated how this approach was realised in a broad variety of literary genres, but especially in poems of praise for famous authors like Thomas Burnet and Isaac Newton, which were often used as introductory paratexts to their works.
Johanna Luggin presented a paper on the 18th century didactic poem Cerebrum (“The Brain”), written by the Jesuit Claude Griffet, focusing especially on its various strategies to advertise this medical subject to the reader, suggesting the anatomy and function of the brain and soul as an interesting, relevant, complex, but – through the author’s efforts – nonetheless understandable topic.
As the third speaker of the session, Irina Tautschnig gave a paper on Carlo Noceti’s Iris, another 18th century Jesuit didactic poem on the physics of the rainbow. In her talk, she examined the role of one specific strategy to promote science within the text, namely to present scientific discoveries as divinely ordained.
On Thursday, March 8th 2018, Ramunė Markevičiūtė (Berlin) will give the talk “Die drei Hybriditäten des Lehrgedichts. Methodologische Ansätze zur Analyse der Gattungen im philosophisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Kontext der Frühen Neuzeit”.
12–13/01/2018: 39th Metageitnia – Talk by Dominik Berrens
Dominik Berrens gave a talk at the 39th Metageitnia Conference in Strasbourg (12th and 13th of January). In his paper “Chymia mit allen Sinnen. Alchemistische Wissensvermittlung in Michael Maiers Atalanta Fugiens” he gave an overview over this fascinating work that uses different artistic and intellectual approaches to alchemical knowledge. Furthermore, he dealt with two chapters (XIDealbate Latonam & rumpite libros and XXI Fac ex mare et foemina circulum) in more detail. Both chapters are especially interesting for Dominik's project on naming.
12/2017: Joachim Camerarius Περὶ τῆς ἡλιακῆς ἐκλειψεως edited by Dominik Berrens
On the occasion of the solar eclipse of 1539, the German polyhistor Joachim Camerarius (1500–1574) issued a small volume (De solis defectu anni M.D.XXXIX. interlunii mensis Maii) containing three poems about this astronomic event: two of them in Latin (by Heinrich Wolf and by Camerarius himself) and one in Greek (also by Camerarius). The latter poem is titled Περὶ τῆς ἡλιακῆς ἐκλείψεως and consists of 71 hexameters dealing mostly with the eclipse as a bad portent for humankind. This poem, that was printed another time in 1540 as an appendix to Lorenzo Bonincontri's De rebus naturalibus et divinis, has been edited, translated and commentated by Dominik Berrens for the first time. The similia clearly demonstrate that Camerarius heavily draws on the Homeric poems, of which he also issued an edition with commentary during this time.
Berrens, Dominik: Camerarius' griechische Dichtung zur Sonnenfinsternis von 1539. Edition, Übersetzung, sprachlicher Kommentar, in: Camerarius Polyhistor. Wissensvermittlung im deutschen Humanismus, ed. Thomas Baier, Tübingen 2017 (= NeoLatina 27), pp. 221–231.
On Tuesday, November 21st 2017, Marion Gindhart (Mainz/Würzburg) will give the talk “De cometis – Von geschwentzten sternen. Wissensformationen in lateinischen und deutschen Kometendrucken der frühen Neuzeit”.
