Merchants and Marvels

The beginning of global commerce in the early modern period had an enormous impact on European culture, changing the very way people perceived the world around them. Merchants and Marvels assembles essays by leading scholars of cultural history, art history, and the history of science and technology to show how ideas about the representation of nature, in both art and science, underwent a profound transformation between the age of the Renaissance and the early 1700s. The essays address intriguing topics like the Dutch tulip-mania of 1637, the relationship between alchemy and commercial exchange in the Holy Roman Empire, the traffic in "curiosities" in Italy, and how Spanish sea charts reflected territorial claims in the 1500s. Antonio Barrera, James A. Bennett, Klaas van Berkel, Harold, J. Cook, Paula Findlen, Anne Goldgar, Deborah Harkness, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Pamela Long, Mark Meadow, Chandra Mukerji, Tara Nummedal,

"This beautifully-illustrated book explores the relations between the accumulations of profitable commodities and the production of enlightening knowledge in Europeans' relations with their external worlds, opening a new way of expressing the historical relation between the arts of depicting the world and the techniques for knowing it." -- Simon Schaffer, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
"Merchants and Marvels traces the paths by which many wonderful commodities were traded and collected in early-modern Europe. The editors and their contributors have produced a marvelous collection-a true Wunderkammer-to delight the mind." -- Jan Golinski, Department of History, University of New Hampshire
"A terrific collection, which gives the reader both wonderful new stories, and a vivid sense of how historians are beginning to study the material side of cultural history. These well-presented original essays deserve a wide public." -- Tony Grafton, Department of History, Princeton University
"Merchants and Marvels is wide-ranging and thought-provoking." -- Canadian Journal of History

Pamela H. Smith is Associate Professor of History at Pomona College and the Claremont Graduate University. She is the author of The Business of Alchemy: Science andCulture in the Holy Roman Empire, winner of the 1995 Pfizer Prize in the History of Science. Paula Findlen is Professor of History and Director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford University. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Museums,Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, winner of the 1995 Marroro Prize in Italian History and 1996 Pfizer Prize in the History of Science.

The beginning of global commerce in the early modern period had an enormous impact on European culture, changing the very way people perceived the world around them. Merchants and Marvels assembles essays by leading scholars of cultural history, art history, and the history of science and technology to show how ideas about the representation of nature, in both art and science, underwent a profound transformation between the age of the Renaissance and the early 1700s.

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