Fabian Kraemer, A Centaur in London: Reading and Observation in Early Modern Science Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. Pp. 344. ISBN 978-1-4214-4631-8. $60.00 (hardcover).
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: A Centaur in London provides a rich analysis of early modern epistemology through the lens of the discourse on monsters in that era.The study is an abridged and revised iteration of his earlier work, Ein Zentaur in London: Lektüre und Beobachtung in der frühneuzeitlichen Naturforschung (2014).The English version has been published in Johns Hopkins University Press's Information Cultures series, edited by Ann Blair, Anthony Grafton and Earle Havens.The study spans from the mid-sixteenth century to the mideighteenth, narrating the discourse on monsters and curiosities in light of early modern scholarly practices in the Republic of Letters.Kraemer argues that new observational methods linked to the Scientific Revolution were not solely grounded in experimentation but were also deeply rooted in reading practices.He examines how 'epistemic genres' such as observatio, mémoire, historia, autopsia and copia facilitated the dissemination of scientific knowledge and contributed to an epistemic shift from prodigious or divine to naturalized explanations of monstrous phenomena.Kraemer builds on the earlier scholarship and guidance of Katharine Park, Lorraine Daston, Gianna Pomata and Ann Blair in his investigation of the monstrous and the reading practices of the early modern period.This places his study among current and relevant discussions of early modern intellectual history and the history of science.The book is structured in an orderly manner and draws valuable parallels using geographical distinctions.It also explores intellectual practicesboth of learned societies and of individual scholarsbounded, in the author's own words, by the figures of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605), an Italian naturalist, and Albrecht von Haller (1708-77), a Swiss anatomist.The book is divided into four chapters.The first analyses the 'explosion of the discourse of monsters' (p.15) in late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century naturalhistory literature.Kraemer employs Blair's definitions of 'factoids' (tidbits or morsels of knowledge) to illustrate how earlier publications influenced subsequent studies through replication of texts and images, for example in Johann Georg Schenck's Monstrorum Historia (1609), Conrad Lycosthenes's Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon (1557), or Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia (1544).Chapter 2 focuses on Aldrovandi's handwritten encyclopedia of his natural-history collection (Pandechion epistemonicon).Kraemer examines his reading practices, visual representations of monsters (especially centaurs), the question of authority and the nature of observations.Particularly compelling is Kraemer's attention to the physical aspects
Author: Barbara Bienias
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404020944