Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge
The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8044743 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paula Findlen (0000-0001-5000-7794, University of California, Davis, corresponding author), Paula Findlen Paula Findlen |
| Year | 1990 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 292-331 |
| Publication date | 1990-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Renaissance Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-4338 • E-ISSN: 1935-0236 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2862366 |
| PMID | 11620275 |
| OpenAlex | W2334590183 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 41 |
| References cited | 30 |
During The Sixteenth And Seventeenth centuries natural history, and to a certain extent science in general, rediscovered its capacity for playfulness in the form of the scientific joke. By scientific joke, I mean the lusus naturae , or joke of nature, and the lusus scientiae, or joke of knowledge, that populated the museums and scientific texts of the period. The relation between the natural paradox of lusus and the scientific demonstrations and experiments that were also lusus points to the way in which the dynamic between art and nature and between collector and audience unfolded in the spectacle of science
Joke · Spectacle · Historical Philosophy and Science · History of Science and Medicine
The Laboratory as Stage
Hidden Secrets or the Mysteries of Daily Life. Hebrew Entries in the Journal Books of the Early Modern Astronomer Gottfried Kirch
Shadows of Instruction
Stones of Passion
Music and the moderni, 1300–1350
Kepler’s snow
Nature or Artifice? Grafting in Early Modern Surgery and Agronomy
Mechanisms of Wonder
The Vagina, the Ear, and the Eye
Conchas Legere ’
Magical (Re)unions
Club Medici
Between Carnival and Lent
Eighteenth-Century "Monsters" and Nineteenth-Century "Freaks"
Objects, worms, demons. The natural and magical miracle as material proof in the demonological literature of early modern Hungary
The Making of The Cabinet Part I
Mundos alternativos sin voces femeninas
The Fowls of Heaven and the Fate of the Earth
Finding Christ in roots and seeds
Laughing to love science
The Ingenuity of Fireflies
Renaissance Voyage Literature and Ethnographic Pleasure
Struggling with pictures in the early Académie royale des sciences
All about nothing
Ambergris and Early Modern Languages of Scent
Inside the Kunstkammer
Empty signs? Reading the book of nature in renaissance science
Descartes at School
Hunted to Extinction
From Emblems to Diagrams
Horses, Curiosities, and the Culture of Collection at Early Modern Germanic Courts
Pieter Bruegel's Magpie on the Gallows
Such Monsters Do Exist in Nature”
Casting Life, Recasting Experience
Covering Anthropology
Openness versus secrecy? Historical and historiographical remarks
Athanasius Kircher's magical instruments
Perception, Living Matter, Cognitive Systems, Immune Networks
Cultural History of Science
Scientific Symmetries
O ensino da medicina na Universidade de Coimbra no século XVI
Polarity and Analogy
Giordano Bruno and the hermetic tradition
Discorsi intorno a diverse cose natvrali /
A history of magic and experimental science
Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century
The Death of Nature
Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance
Science and Popular Culture in Sixteenth Century Italy
Rudolf II and His World
Touches of Sweet Harmony
La curiosité à la Renaissance
Humanists, Scientists, and Pliny
Humanists, Scientists, and Pliny
Dizionario etimologico italiano
Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century
Dizionario della lingua italiana
The Gods Made Flesh
The Gods Made Flesh
Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.2
The Museum
Unnatural Conceptions
Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources
Eros and Magic in the Renaissance
Persistance des géants
Feminine Icons
| Unique citing works | 41 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,14 |
| Citation span | 1990 - 2026 (37) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 37 |