Palmira Fontes da Costa

• Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

A interpretação dos cometas como sinais de adivinhação sofreu um declínio significativo durante o século XVII. No século posterior, e especialmente nos denominados centros europeus do conhecimento, esse tipo de interpretação foi banida da literatura científica e raramente aparecia em panfletos destinados a uma audiência de cariz popular. Em oposiçã...

This paper analyses the importance of Garcia de Orta's Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India (Goa, 1563) in the construction and circulation of Asian botanical and medical knowledge in the sixteenth century. It begins by examining the combined importance of experience and testimony in Orta's assessment of materia medica from India. It then c...

The Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India (1563) were conceived and published at a sensitive moment, both in terms of the history of print culture and of European geographical expansion. They represented the culmination of a life-time project for their author Garcia de Orta who had lived for almost thirty years in Portuguese Goa. Although th...

Durante todo o século XVIII, existiu um grande fascínio por seres humanos hermafroditas. Este interesse encontra-se patenteado nas suas inúmeras exibiçōes públicas e nas vánas dissertaçōes académicas sobre o tema. Neste período, e em contraste com o anterior, a existência de seres humanos hermafroditas passou a ser questionada por membros da comuni...

During the first decades of the sixteenth century, several animals described and viewed as exotic by the Europeans were regularly shipped from India to Lisbon. This paper addresses the relevance of these 'new' animals to knowledge and visual representations of the natural world. It discusses their cultural and scientific meaning in Portuguese trave...

This chapter presents a historiographical review of Portuguese Imperial science. It discusses science, technology, and maritime expansion. It also examines the development of Portuguese colonial medicine and natural history as well as the contributions of the Jesuits in the circulation of European and indigenous information, which are relevant to m...

This book provides a survey of the practices of science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires from 1500 to 1800. Authored by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from the United States, Latin America, and Europe, it consists of fifteen chapters, as well as an introduction and an afterword by scholars in the field. The topics discussed include n...

In his influential work, A social history of truth, Steven Shapin (1995) has argued for the central role of social status in the assessment of experimental knowledge. In his view, in seventeenth-century England, gentlemen were considered the right kind of persons to trust because of their freedom of action, codes of virtue and honour. These charact...

The fact that monstrous births were not represented in independent learned publications of the eighteenth century, except for the case of hermaphrodites, does not mean that the interest in them had disappeared or that they were no more considered proper objects of inquiry. This paper focuses on the medical understanding of monstrosity at the Royal...

Should human hermaphrodites be considered the ‘true’ embodiment of a mingled male and female nature or, instead, should their sexual duality be ascribed to misleading appearances? This chapter documents one critical moment in the history of sexual identity in mid-eighteenth-century England when this question became pertinent and controversial for t...

This paper is concerned with the particular problems raised by observations of phenomena outside the common course of nature for their validation as knowledge. It examines to what extent the content of the reports and, in particular, their lack of intrinsic plausibility affected the methods used in their authentication and the assessment of testimo...

This paper is concerned with the reporting and display of curiosities of nature at the meetings of The Royal Society during the first half of the eighteenth century. It is argued that these activities cannot, as some historians have maintained, be viewed as a mere opportunity for the entertainment of the Fellows. Instead, the reports and exhibition...

In tune with an Enlightenment sensibility that focused on the search for order and regularities, monsters were given a marginal position in eighteenth-century medical works. By contrast, they had an important place at the Royal Society during the second half of the century. This article first focuses on the general interest in monsters within the c...

Resumo: As imagens tiveram e, em larga medida ainda continuam a ter, um lugar subsidiário na historiografia da ciência. A sua utilização foi, e é, muitas vezes circuns-crita à evocação de figuras e de ambientes. Um dos problemas na utilização de repre-sentações visuais em trabalhos na área da História da Ciência é a tendência frequente de se pressu...