History of Science Florilegium

In medieval Europe scholars gathered excerpts from the texts they read into carefully hand-written books called florilegia, from the Latin for gatherings of flowers. By the early modern period, such florilegia became a widespread and important way for learned individuals to collect and personalize the most important parts of the many old texts and commentaries they read and debated, and they increasingly also became places to collect new knowledge about the natural world. Over the following centuries, similar technologies of learning (ranging from copy-books, where students created personal books at their teachers' direction, to cabinets of curiosities, where collectors gathered rare objects from across the world) helped create the vast world of learning we associate with modern science.

Please use this section of the course site to:

• Gather and organize important ideas from class discussions
• Note key quotes and major claims from readings, practice paraphrasing and citation, and see what your classmates found significant from their own reading
• Share your questions and insights with your classmates and receive feedback

To create a new page, go to the Florilegium front page, click the Edit button on the upper right side of the front page, and add the name of the page you want to create within [[Double Brackets]]. Save the front page, click on the link to your new page, and start editing!

To edit an existing page, click the Edit button on the upper right side of the page you want to edit. See the wiki syntax page for how to do things that are more complicated than plain text.

It is up to you as a class how to use this space. However, please follow these basic rules:

• Be constructive and supportive.
  • Edit and improve each other's contributions in a way that shows respect for the work each classmate contributes to this collective project.
  • Spend time reading and editing, not just posting. Engaging with and improving existing text can be just as important a community contribution as adding the text in the first place.
  • Be considerate with major changes. Try to follow the intent and approach of other contributors to a page when making edits.
• Use proper academic conventions. Always cite your sources for both offline and online information and include a link to any online sources. Hint: you can add footnotes using ((double parentheses)).¹⁾
• Do not copy and paste material from other sources. You may include quotes from historical sources with proper citations, but all summaries, definitions, and analysis should be in your own words.