https://www.taranummedal.com/contact daily 0.75 2020-06-08 https://www.taranummedal.com/about daily 0.75 2020-06-08 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/t/5ecd6b5b02f4af1d18dc9099/1591622927739/IMG_1466small.jpg About - A native of Seal Beach, California, and educated at Pomona College, UC Davis, and Stanford University, I am Professor of History at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where I teach courses in early modern European history and the history of science. I am primarily interested in how all kinds of different people understood, transformed, sold, grappled with, and represented nature in 16th and 17th-century Europe. I situate my work at the intersection of the history of early modern central Europe and the history of science, examining connections between natural knowledge and gender, belief, the body, material culture, and the state in the Holy Roman Empire. I have long been interested in excavating the history of alchemy in the German speaking lands, and more recently have begun to explore the role of digital publication in the university. My work has been supported by the the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and, most recently, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. https://www.taranummedal.com/teaching daily 0.75 2020-05-26 https://www.taranummedal.com/home daily 0.75 2020-05-26 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/5ecd61bea81cd4417dde75f2/5ecd61d8b4f8de1f77bb269b/1590518238373/azcoveramazon.jpg Home https://www.taranummedal.com/home/anna-zieglerin monthly 0.5 2020-05-26 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d57504/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d5750d/1589986638319/20140301_Trade-151_0124-copy.jpg Home - Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d57504/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d5750f/1589986638323/20140301_Trade-151_0124-copy.jpg Home - Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d57504/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d57509/1589986638312/20140301_Trade-151_0124-copy.jpg Home - Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d57504/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d5750b/1589986638315/20140301_Trade-151_0124-copy.jpg Home - Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d57504/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d57507/1589986638309/20140301_Trade-151_0124-copy.jpg Home - Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d57504/5ecd4c6602f4af1d18d57505/1589986638303/20140301_Trade-151_0124-copy.jpg Home - Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood https://www.taranummedal.com/home/furnace-and-fugue monthly 0.5 2020-05-26 https://www.taranummedal.com/home/alchemy-and-authority-in-the-holy-roman-empire monthly 0.5 2020-05-26 https://www.taranummedal.com/home/john-abbot-william-swainson monthly 0.5 2020-05-26 https://www.taranummedal.com/books daily 1.0 2020-07-22 https://www.taranummedal.com/books/anna-zieglerin monthly 0.5 2020-11-05 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/t/5ecd511a29359c00045a408c/1604590039771/Nummedal%28WEB%29.jpg Books - Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood - In 1573, the alchemist Anna Zieglerin gave her patron, the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, the recipe for an extraordinary substance she called the lion's blood. Listen to Nummedal discuss Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood on Episode 119 of the Historically Thinking Podcast: The Curious Case of the Lion’s Blood, or, How Anna Zieglerin Came to be Burned at the Stake https://www.taranummedal.com/books/alchemy-and-authority monthly 0.5 2020-05-26 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/t/5ecd50205e861630ff2994dc/1590513791398/alchemyandauthortycover.jpg Books - Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire - What distinguished the true alchemist from the fraud? This question animated the lives and labors of the common men—and occasionally women—who made a living as alchemists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As purveyors of practical techniques, inventions, and cures, these entrepreneurs were prized by princely patrons, who relied upon alchemists to bolster their political fortunes. At the same time, satirists, artists, and other commentators used the figure of the alchemist as a symbol for Europe’s social and economic ills. Drawing on criminal trial records, contracts, laboratory inventories, satires, and vernacular alchemical treatises, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire situates the everyday alchemists, largely invisible to modern scholars until now, at the center of the development of early modern science and commerce. Reconstructing the workaday world of entrepreneurial alchemists, Tara Nummedal shows how allegations of fraud shaped their practices and prospects. These debates not only reveal enormously diverse understandings of what the “real” alchemy was and who could practice it; they also connect a set of little-known practitioners to the largest questions about commerce, trust, and intellectual authority in early modern Europe. https://www.taranummedal.com/books/john-abbot-william-swainson monthly 0.5 2020-05-26 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/t/5ecd5947ce92da4492204e73/1590516082112/abbot+cover+copy.jpg Books - John Abbot & William Swainson - An archive of never-before-published illustrations of insects and plants painted by a pioneering naturalist. During his lifetime (1751–ca. 1840), English-born naturalist and artist John Abbot rendered more than 4,000 natural history illustrations and profoundly influenced North American entomology, as he documented many species in the New World long before they were scientifically described. For sixty-five years, Abbot worked in Georgia to advance knowledge of the flora and fauna of the American South by sending superbly mounted specimens and exquisitely detailed illustrations of insects, birds, butterflies, and moths, on commission, to collectors and scientists all over the world. Between 1816 and 1818, Abbot completed 104 drawings of insects on their native plants for English naturalist and patron William Swainson (1789–1855). Both Abbot and Swainson were artists, naturalists, and collectors during a time when natural history and the sciences flourished. Separated by nearly forty years in age, Abbot and Swainson were members of the same international communities and correspondence networks upon which the study of nature was based during this period. The relationship between these two men—who never met in person—is explored in John Abbot and William Swainson: Art, Science, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Natural History Illustration. This volume also showcases, for the first time, the complete set of original, full-color illustrations discovered in 1977 in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand. Originally intended as a companion to an earlier survey of insects from Georgia, the newly rediscovered Turnbull manuscript presents beetles, grasshoppers, butterflies, moths, and a wasp. Most of the insects are pictured with the flowering plants upon which Abbot thought them to feed. Abbot’s journal annotations about the habits and biology of each species are also included, as are nomenclature updates for the insect taxa. Today, the Turnbull drawings illuminate the complex array of personal and professional concerns that informed the field of natural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These illustrations are also treasured artifacts from times past, their far-flung travels revealing a world being reshaped by the forces of global commerce and information exchange even then. The shared project of John Abbot and William Swainson is now brought to completion, signaling the beginning of a new phase of its significance for modern readers and scholars. https://www.taranummedal.com/books/furnace-and-fugue monthly 0.5 2020-11-05 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/t/5fa41b7fe09fb223060ed601/1604590480608/F%26Flanding.png Books - Furnace and Fugue https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ecd4aa456804733b031921e/t/5fa41be9b62fbf49568c80ae/1604590582523/FF+TOC.png Books - Furnace and Fugue