Undergraduate Course: The Order of Nature: Politics of Knowledge from Medieval to Enlightenment Europe (HIST10443)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 40 |
ECTS Credits | 20 |
| Summary | The way we order the natural world has always shaped our culture, beliefs, politics, and indeed economic choices. Between c. 1200 and 1750, Europe fostered many of the institutions and practices that still shape our assumptions about the order of nature: universities, with their communities of scholarship and debate; regimes of mass media; telescopes for stars and microscopes for microbes; scientific academies; and archives for collecting global data. This course will allow students to gain a critical understanding of these developments through a range of primary sources, including some housed in Edinburgh¿s own libraries and museums. |
| Course description |
This course will consider major shifts in understanding the order of nature c. 1200-1700. Medieval schools and universities found an order in nature, envisioning an elaborate hierarchy reaching from minerals and worms to the heights of heaven. Throughout the period, scholars and doubters debated this world picture, adding to it and undermining its foundations, until it grew into an entirely different order of nature in the 'New Sciences' of the seventeenth century. Intellectuals of various kinds competed for validity, authority, and prestige; and their thinking had far-reaching social, cultural, and economic effects. This course will explore how understandings of natural order shifted over the period, such as: problems of reconciling human reason and divine revelation; attitudes towards ancient texts and modern material experience; and Europe's relation to knowledge systems elsewhere in the world. Seminars alternate between broad themes and detailed cases, and the assigned essays help students to develop a deeper mastery of both.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | A pass or passes in 40 credits of first level historical courses or equivalent and a pass or passes in 40 credits of second level historical courses or equivalent.
Before enrolling students on this course, Personal Tutors are asked to contact the History Honours Admission Administrator to ensure that a place is available (Tel: 50 4030). |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate, through an essay on a wider general theme and a summative examination, the ability to consider large-scale historical narratives in the history of knowledge;
- Demonstrate, through a deeper case study, a detailed and critical command of a body of scholarship on the history of knowledge in this period;
- Demonstrate, through seminar participation and a research programme developed around a case study of textual, visual, or material primary sources, the ability to define and research original historical problems and to work independently;
- Demonstrate, through seminar participation and peer-to-peer critique, the ability to collaborate, mutually evaluate, and share critical perspectives.
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Reading List
A. Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (2018).
L. Daston and K. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (1998); eadem, eds., The Cambridge History of Science: Early Modern Science (2006).
P. Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700, 2nd ed. (2009).
W. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (1994).
P. Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994).
P. Hazard, The European Mind 1680-1715, trans. J. L. May (1964).
W. Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (2012).
D. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 BC to AD 1450, 2nd ed. (2008).
P. O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (2011).
W. Poole, The World Makers: Scientists of the Restoration and the Search for the Origins of the Earth (2010).
L. M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (2012).
E. R. Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (2015).
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Richard Oosterhoff
Tel: (0131 6)50 9110
Email: richard.oosterhoff@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Katherine Perry
Tel:
Email: kperry2@ed.ac.uk |
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