CIRCULATING KNOWLEDGE OR SUPERSTITION? ; CIRCULATING KNOWLEDGE OR SUPERSTITION?: THE DUTCH DEBATE ON DIVINATION

This article describes the Dutch reception of an international controversy about the divining rod. gives us a beautiful picture of the ways in which natural philosophy was practiced and disseminated in the Low Countries at the turn of the seventeenth century. It offers us an idea of the scientific demonstrations going on in Dutch bourgeois domestic settings, the personal contacts by which scientific claims were transferred, as well as the ways in which controversies were initiated and perpetuated. This sometimes intense and venomous controversy between advocates and opponents of the divining r... Mehr ...