Communicating observations in early modern letters (1500-1675) : epistolography and epistemology in the age of the scientific revolution / edited by Dirk van Miert.

London : Warburg Institute ; Turin : Nino Aragno, 2013.

ix, 268 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Introduction / Dirk van Miert. -- The first anthropologist of America: Petrus Martyr de Angleria (1457-1526) and his epistolary reports De orbe novo decades octo / Gerhard Holk. -- 'The spices of our art'. Medical observation in Conrad Gessner's letters / Candice Delisle. -- Observing nature. The correspondence network of Carolus Clusius (1526-1609) / Florike Egmond. -- Monumental letters in the late Renaissance / William Stenhouse. -- Philology and empiricism: observation and description in the correspondence of Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) / Dirk van Miert. -- Reading in the Heavens: observation and interpretation of astronomical phenomena in learned letters circa 1600 / Adam Mosley. -- Mapping Peiresc's Mediterranean: geography and astronomy, 1610-36 / Peter N. Miller. -- Conceiving the invisible. The role of observation and experiment in Descartes's correspondence, 1630-50 / Erik-Jan Bos and Theo Verbeek. -- 'A cloud of witnesses': scientific observation in the correspondence of James Ussher (1581-1656) / Elizabethanne Boran. -- Men of science as objects of observation in the correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, 1641-77 / Iordan Avramov. -- Concluding observations on communicating observations / Dirk van Miert.

Includes bibliographical references and index.