Event time:
Thursday, September 19, 2019 - 5:30pm
Location:
Yale Peabody Museum
170 Whitney Avenue
New Haven, CT
06511
Event description:
Nature’s Narrators
The 2019-2020 John H. Ostrom Lecture Series
What is Natural History
the History of?
Paola Bertucci
Associate Professor of History and History of Medicine;
Curator of the History of Science and Technology Division,
Yale Peabody Museum
Thursday, September 19, 2019
at 5:30 pm
Yale Peabody Museum
Free admission
Why is natural history history, and what kind of history is it? In
order to answer these questions, the lecture focuses on natural
history as it was practiced from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
century, well before Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. We will
start with the rediscovery of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in
the Renaissance and will explore the various meanings that natural
history came to acquire at the time of the Scientific Revolution. By
examining early collections, museums, catalogues, herbaria, and
encyclopedias, we will ask how these works shaped definitions
of nature and the place of humans within in.
The John H. Ostrom 2019-2020 Lecture Series is sponsored by the Trumbull Lectureship and the Office of the Secretary and Vice President for Student Life, Yale University