Description
TitleScientific thinking and narrative discourse in early modern Italy
Date Created2021
Other Date2021-05 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (viii, 289 pages) : illustrations
Description“Scientific Thinking and Narrative Discourse in Early Modern Italy” explores scientific texts and artifacts as cultural productions in the context of the Scientific Revolution. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scientific writing was a new emerging genre drawing on the Book of Nature metaphor refashioned by Galileo Galilei as an interpretive key to read and to write about nature in the Italian vernacular. This study examines scientific and humanistic traditions as a means of discovery and discussions associated with mathematics and experimental findings across treatises, poems, archival materials, and artworks.
This research is centered on four topics of early modern science that form the basis of the chapters: 1) the Book of Nature metaphor, from books and letters by Galileo to the readers and writers he inspired; 2) new scientific language and terminology, in prose and poems; 3) scientific data, instruments, and communication regarding applied technologies, and 4) medical humanities perspectives and texts on syphilis and plague.
This study advances a literary and historical understanding of scientific and technical literature by analyzing a variety of authors through the lens of genre, exploring the ways these writers presented rhetorical tropes and scientific research data so that they could update humanistic modes of expression, communicate effectively, and establish scientific communities among professional and nonprofessional science enthusiasts. My research deals with issues of authorship, originality, and the question of an appropriate language, style, and communication for scientific contents, opening considerations on scientific thinking and narrative discourses as more than marginal, or an appropriation from non-literary domains, addressing global, technological, and social challenges faced by scientists and their readerships.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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