Thomas Morel tells the story of subterranean geometry, a forgotten discipline that developed in the silver mines of early modern Europe. Mining and metallurgy were of great significance to the rulers of early modern Europe, required for the silver bullion that fuelled warfare and numerous other uses. Through seven lively case studies, he illustrates how geometry was used in metallic mines by practitioners using esoteric manuscripts. He describes how an original culture of accuracy and meas...

Of all the thinkers of the century of genius that inaugurated modern philosophy, none lived an intellectual life more rich and varied than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Maria Rosa Antognazza's pioneering biography provides a unified portrait of this unique thinker and the world from which he came. At the centre of the huge range of Leibniz's apparently miscellaneous endeavours, Antognazza reveals a single master project lending unity to his extraordinarily multifaceted life's work...

A biography of an important but largely forgotten nineteenth-century scientist whose work helped lay the foundation of modern neuroscience.Emil du Bois-Reymond is the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century. In his own time (1818–1896) du Bois-Reymond grew famous in his native Germany and beyond for his groundbreaking research in neuroscience and his provocative addresses on politics and culture. This biography by Gabriel Finkelstein draws o...

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw an extraordinary flowering of arts and culture in Germany which produced many of the world's finest writers, artists, philosophers and composers. This volume, first published in 2004, offers students and specialists an authoritative introduction to that dazzling cultural phenomenon, now known collectively as German Romanticism. Individual chapters not only introduce the reader to individual writers such as Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, ...

The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built between 1735 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands. Designed to perform sophisticated activities such as writing, drawing, or music making, these “Enlightenment automata” have attracted continuous critical attention from the time they were made to the present, often as harbingers of t...

Many early novels were cosmopolitan books, read from London to Leipzig and beyond, available in nearly simultaneous translations into French, English, German, and other European languages. In Novel Translations, Bethany Wiggin charts just one of the paths by which newness—in its avatars as fashion, novelties, and the novel—entered the European world in the decades around 1700. As readers across Europe snapped up novels, they domesticated the genre. Across borders, the nove...

This open access book presents a comparative analysis of the use of fatherland terminology in a political and legal context in Jülich, Hesse-Cassel and Brittany from 1642 to 1655. Fatherland terminology includes words such as patria, patriot and nation. In historiography, the use of these words by the nobility is often interpreted as an early sign of nationalism that conflicted with the prince’s initiation of state-building. The book argues that neither ‘states’ nor ‘nationalism’ truly exi...

The Cambridge Companion to Goethe provides a challenging yet accessible survey of this versatile figure, not only one of the world's greatest writers but also a theatre director and art critic, a natural scientist and state administrator. The volume places Goethe in the context of the Germany and Europe of his lifetime. His literary work is covered in individual chapters on poetry, drama (with a separate chapter on Faust), prose fiction and autobiography. Other chapters deal with his work ...

Medieval German Literature provides a comprehensive survey of this Germanic body of work from the eighth century through the early fifteenth century. The authors treat the large body of late-medieval lyric poetry in detail for the first time.

Why the card catalog—a “paper machine” with rearrangeable elements—can be regarded as a precursor of the computer.Today on almost every desk in every office sits a computer. Eighty years ago, desktops were equipped with a nonelectronic data processing machine: a card file. In Paper Machines, Markus Krajewski traces the evolution of this proto-computer of rearrangeable parts (file cards) that became ubiquitous in offices between the world wars.The s...

This book is all about events, discoveries and ideas which may have seemed small and insignificant at the time but later changed the world. DDT and LSD, Frick & Frack, the Basel Mission and the Zionist World Congress, Tadeus Reichstein and Friedrich Nietzsche, the first printed edition of the Koran and much else provide the stuff of which exciting stories are made in Basel, the hub of the universe.

Is it allowed to argue that the legendary “freedom of teaching and research” seems to be purely theoretical and in fact one should better speak of “the dictatorship of the professorate”? Or is this a problem of intellectual nature? Is the ignorance of our elite in (journalism and) academia owed to their (innocent, God-given) mental immaturity?It took me only a few visites to the State Archive (Staatsarchiv) in Hamburg to realize that there had taken place an impressive revolutionar...