Art and Nature in Early Modern Europe

Catalog description

This seminar examines ideas of art, nature, and the relationship between them from the era of the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. The boundaries between the natural and the artificial were central to early modern understandings of the world, of knowledge, and of the possibilities of human agency; these boundaries were hotly debated and dramatically redrawn between the sixteenth century and the eighteenth, giving rise to new kinds of knowledge and new attempts to control or reshape environments, populations, societies, and economies, in Europe and across the world. Readings from recent scholarship will complement sustained engagement with primary sources, and the course will culminate in a substantive research project. Topics likely to be covered include but are not limited to agricultural projects, alchemy, artisanal knowledge, experimental philosophy, natural history, political economy, travel literature, and utopianism.