Article ID: CBB001221394

Mining Tacitus: Secrets of Empire, Nature and Art in the Reason of State (2012)

unapi

Keller, Vera A. (Author)


British Journal for the History of Science
Volume: 45
Pages: 189--212


Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Part of a special issue: “States of Secrecy”
Language: English

A new political practice, the `reason of state', informed the ends and practices of natural study in the late sixteenth century. Informed by the study of the Roman historian Tacitus, political writers gathered `secrets of empire' from both history and travel. Following the economic reorientation of `reason of state' by Giovanni Botero (1544--1617), such secrets came to include bodies of useful particulars concerning nature and art collected by an expanding personnel of intelligencers. A comparison between various writers describing wide-scale collections, such as Botero, Francis Bacon (1561--1626), Jakob Bornitz (1560--1625) and Matthias Bernegger (1582--1640), reveals that seventeenth-century natural intelligencers across Europe not only were analogous to political intelligencers, but also were sometimes one and the same. Those seeking political prudence cast themselves as miners, prying precious particulars from the recesses of history, experience and disparate disciplines, including mathematics, alchemy and natural philosophy. The seventeenth-century practice of combining searches for secrets of empire, nature and art contests a frequent historiographical divide between empirical science and Tacitism or reason of state. It also points to the ways political cunning shaped the management of information for both politics and the study of nature and art.

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Description On the late 16th- and 17th-century practice of natural history within the context of state activities.


Included in

Article Vermeir, Koen; Margócsy, Dániel (2012) States of Secrecy: An Introduction. British Journal for the History of Science (p. 153). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001221394/

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Authors & Contributors
Kurtulmus, A Faik
Irzik, Gürol
Vermeir, Koen
Ash, Eric H.
Joyce C. Havstad
Alison Lynn McManus
Concepts
Science and politics
Science and government
Government sponsored science
Science and society
Authority of science
Public policy
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century, early
20th century
17th century
16th century
Places
United States
Italy
England
Florence (Italy)
Russia
Greece
Institutions
American Physical Society
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