A Centaur in London

"A Centaur in London presents a series of careful and rich case studies of the scholarly treatment of 'monsters' from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, in locales ranging from Switzerland and Italy to Germany and England, and with examples ranging from headless people and dragons to the London centaur of the title. With its impeccable scholarship and breadth of vision, enhanced by Kraemer's command of the numerous languages from which he has drawn his material, this book will make its mark, introducing important new developments in both European and Anglo-American scholarship."

"Fabian Kraemer's sharp-eyed study offers a new answer to an old problem in the history of science: why did European naturalists in the space of less than fifty years go from collecting reports of monsters to denying the possibility of centaurs, dragons, and other monstrous species? His careful attention to how text factoids circulated in the first media of print is rich in potential lessons for our digital age."

"Deftly weaves through two centuries of pan-European scholarship, tracking monsters as they circulated in textual and visual formats. Kraemer's real quarry is the changing relation between observation and reading and what it tells us about large-scale periodizations of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment."

"An illuminating account of changing intellectual practices in early modern natural history. From Aldrovandi to Haller, this book shows how new ways of observing combined with new ways of reading to create a powerful form of learned empiricism. Challenging conventional stereotypes on the divide between scholarship and empirical observation, the human and the natural sciences, Kraemer offers an important contribution to the history of epistemic cultures."

"What happens when you follow the centaur and the textual itineraries of other monstrous and fabulous creatures? This book takes seriously the intellectual goals of the Renaissance naturalists, seventeenth-century academicians, and enlightened physicians and philosophers. Kraemer explores the dialectic between reading and observation, news and rumor, factoids and facts in early modern Europe, showing us why monsters represented an Archimedean inflexion point for defining knowledge in the age of the Scientific Revolution."

"In this sweeping, erudite, and deeply absorbing book, Kraemer offers the definitive account of how early modern scholars integrated encounters with rare monstrous creatures into their philosophical systems, radically revising our understanding of the role of bookish learning in the emergence of modern science."