Early Modern Universities and the Sciences

Early Modern Universities and the Sciences sheds new light onto little studied higher institutions of learning in Central and Western Europe. Lands such as Finland and Portugal, or universities like Vienna and Trnava, have attracted less attention so far than they deserve. The book demonstrates that the history of better known institutions, like Padua or Paris, benefits from a much broader background in which to consider the impact of alumni networks or far-reaching echoes of reforms across the Atlantic. This collection of essays aims to foster a deeper understanding of some of the ways in which the intertwined relation of philology and experiments gave rise to institutionalised forms of knowledge. Essays deal with both academic practices as well as university reforms stemming from the increasingly widespread methodology of linking the study of texts to observations of natural phenomena. Both were means to amend and improve knowledge from the classics. The study of this phenomenon in its instutionalised setting requires a multidisciplinary approach that mirrors exactly those very knowledge practices it purports to come to grips with. As such, Early Modern Universities and the Sciences is a typical scholarly product of the ever growing contemporary Scientiae academic community, scientiae.co.uk.

Vittoria Feola is an early modern historian at the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and the Ancient World, University of Padova. She is the editor of prize-winning Antiquarianism and Science in Early Modern Urban Networks, Paris, 2014, and the author of Elias Ashmole. The Quartercentenary Biography, Rome, 2017. She has published widely on seventeenth-century British and European intellectual history. Vittoria Feola has served as President of Scientiae from 2017 to 2020, and directs the Bartolomeo Gamba Project. She is the editor of the book series Scientiae, Amsterdam University Press, History of British and Irish Philosophy, 1500-1800. Texts and Studies, Mantua University Press, History of Medicine, L'Erma di Bretschneider.