Wonderful Secrets of Nature
Natural Knowledge and Religious Piety in Reformation Germany
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3211666 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kathleen Crowther‐heyck (University of Oklahoma, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 94 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 253-273 |
| Publication date | 2003-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Isis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/379386 |
| PMID | 12879557 |
| OpenAlex | W2280451981 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 8 |
Sixteenth-century Germany witnessed a tremendous flourishing of vernacular literature. An unprecedented number and variety of texts were produced for new groups of readers. This essay analyzes one underexplored genre of this vernacular literature: texts on the natural world. Numerous books on animals, plants, minerals, and natural marvels rolled off the German presses in this period, indicating a widespread curiosity about the natural world. These texts give valuable insight into the views of nature available to a broad lay audience, literate in German but not necessarily in Latin. They reveal a pervasive sense of nature as divinely created and a deep conviction that contemplation of the natural world would lead to greater piety. The divine and the mundane were thoroughly intertwined in vernacular natural histories. While other historians of science have seen the sixteenth century as a period of increasingly secular ways of thinking about nature, I argue for the persistence, and even the intensification, of profoundly religious attitudes toward the natural world
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Contemplation · Curiosity · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Flourishing · German · Globe · Literature · Natural (archaeology · Natural Philosophy · Period (music · Praise · Vernacular · Historical and Literary Studies · History · History of Science and Natural History · Philosophy · Psychology · Socioeconomics of Resources and Conservation
Medicine, Natural Philosophy, and the Influence of Melanchthon in Reformation Denmark and Norway
The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science
How the relation between religion, politics, and science (R-P-S) gave rise to school biology
Between Scientific Ideas and Christian Religious Beliefs
Rethinking Sixteenth-Century ‘Lutheran Astronomy’
Experimenting in the Material World and on Paper in sixteenth-century France
Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2003
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,3 |
| Citation span | 2003 - 2022 (20) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |