Collection, Laboratory, Theater: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th CenturyHelmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, Jan Lazardzig This volume launches a new, eight-volume series entitled Theatrum Scientiarum on the history of science and the media which has arisen from the work of the Berlin special research project on "Performative Cultures" under the aegis of the Theatre Studies Department of the Free University. The volume examines the role of space in the constitution of knowledge in the early modern age. "Kunstkammern" (art and curiosities cabinets), laboratories and stages arose in the 17th century as instruments of research and representation. There is, however, still a lack of precise descriptions of the epistemic contribution made by material and immaterial space in the performance of knowledge. Therefore, the authors present a novel view of the conditions surrounding the creation of these spatial forms. Account is taken both of the institutional framework of these spaces and their placement within the history of ideas, the architectural models and the modular differentiations, and the scientific consequences of particular design decisions. Manifold paths are followed between the location of the observer in the representational space of science and the organization in time and space of sight, speech and action in the canon of European theatrical forms. Not only is an account given of the mutual architectural and intellectual influence of the spaces of knowledge and the performance spaces of art; they are also analyzed to ascertain what was possible in them and through them. This volume is the English translation of Kunstkammer, Laboratorium, Bühne (de Gruyter, Berlin, 2003). |
Contents
The Final Frontier | 1 |
On the Transformation of Performative Space in the 17th Century | 9 |
Thought Experiments in SeventeenthCentury Mechanics | 35 |
The Smallest Venue of Knowledge in the 17th Century 15851665 | 57 |
Anatomical Theatre as Experimental Space | 75 |
The Florentine Uffizi as Kunstkammer Laboratory and Stage | 103 |
Immutable or Dynamic? The Case of the Library | 122 |
About the Concepts of Affections Asserted by Athanasius Kircher and Claudio Monteverdi | 146 |
Spaces of Certainty in the 17th Century | 316 |
Images Instruments and the Technology of Amplification | 338 |
Telescope and Microscope in the Works of Goethe Leeuwenhoek and Hooke | 355 |
The SixteenthCentury Mexican Missionary Convent as Theatre of Conversion | 394 |
The MilitaryEntertainment Complex | 427 |
Science in its Social Space | 456 |
Newtons Space Viewed by PresentDay Physics | 467 |
Material Culture Theoretical Culture and Delocalization | 490 |
Power Play and the Politics of Love in 17th Century France | 162 |
On the Architectonic of Academic Social Life Exemplified by the Brandenburg Universität der Völker Wissenschaften und Künste 166667 | 176 |
The Known and Unknown Kunstkammer of Rudolf II | 199 |
Pictorial Strategies in EarlyModern Wunderkammern | 228 |
Three Thought Loci by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz | 266 |
On the Representation of Knowledge in Athanasius Kircher | 283 |
Space Time and Numerical Speculation in the Ancient Metaphysical Fashion | 303 |
Wonder Vision Knowledge | 507 |
About the Authors | 527 |
Image Credits | 533 |
541 | |
571 | |
576 | |