I am currently engaged in three related areas of research. Two address the relationship between material culture and scholarship, in their focus on the way that Renaissance and early modern intellectuals developed an understanding of things--natural objects and the material remains of classical antiquity. The third will examine the relationship between natural history (in its broad sense) and religion in the Western tradition by focusing on the history of natural theology and the argument from design.
Books
The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (2006)
Out of the diverse traditions of medical humanism, classical philology, and natural philosophy, Renaissance naturalists...
Unpublished Papers
Collection, conviction, and contemplation: or, Picturing coins in early modern books, ca. 1550-1700 (2003)
This paper explores the uses of published illustrations of coins in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquarian...
Exemplarity and the use of antiquity in Erasmus (2001)
This paper explores Erasmus’s creative response to the tension between his idealization of antiquity and...