Medical competence, anatomy and the polity in seventeenth-century Rome.
At the centre of this article are two physicians active in Rome between 1600 and 1630 who combined medical practice with broader involvement in the dynamic cultural, economic and political scene of the centre of the Catholic world. The city's distinctive and very influential social landscape magnified issues of career-building and allows us to recapture physicians’ different strategies of self-fashioning at a time of major social and religious reorganization. At one level, reconstructing Johannes Faber and Giulio Mancini's medical education, arrival in Rome and overlapping but different career trajectories contributes to research on physicians’ identity in early modern Italian states. Most remarkable are their access to different segments of Roman society, including a dynamic art market, and their diplomatic and political role, claimed as well as real. But following these physicians from hospitals to courts, including that of the Pope, and from tribunals to the university and analysing the wide range of their writing – from medico-legal consilia to political essays and reports of anatomical investigations – also enriches our view of medical practice, which included, but went beyond, the bedside. Furthermore, their activities demand that we reassess the complex place of anatomical investigations in a courtly society, and start recovering the fundamental role played by hospitals – those quintessential Catholic institutions – as sites of routine dissections for both medical teaching and research. (pp. 551–567)
Accademia dei Lincei
The Accademia dei Lincei was the first European academy devoted to the natural sciences. It was founded in Rome in 1603 by four young men: Federico Cesi, Johannes Heckius, Francesco Stelluti and Anastasio de Filiis. The Lincei adopted the emblem of the Lynx, an animal remarkable for the quickness of its sight. The Academy met at Cesi family Palazzo, opposed traditional learning and promoted a new way of investigating nature, by means of observation and experiments. The Lynceans pursued research in chemistry, natural history and physics. They were attracted by antiquarian studies too. The Academy established a network of correspondence with naturalists and savants from all Europe. Galilei joined the Academy in 1611 and was supported by Cesi and his colleagues in his endeavour to promote the heliocentric cosmology. Cesi was mainly interested in natural philosophy, gave noticeable contributions to botany and paid special attention to the investigation of fungi. Entomology played a relevant part in the research carried out by the Lincei who published two broadsheets devoted to the bees. They were also meant to revere the Barberini family, whose emblem was a trigon of bees. Academicians sought the Barberini's support, and, after Maffeo Barberini became Urban VIII, Cesi and his colleagues became part of the Barberini system of patronage. Galilei unsuccessfully tried to gain the Pope's support for his effort to have Copernicanism accepted by the Church. The Academy actually closed in 1630 when Federico Cesi died. In 1874 the Accademia dei Lincei was restored as Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. In 1939 the Fascist regime ordered the fusion of the Accademia dei Lincei with the Accademia d'Italia, which was under Benito Mussolini's control. In 1944 the Accademia d'Italia was suppressed and the Accademia dei Lincei was reestablished and was housed in the Renaissance Villa Farnesina in Rome. 
 
 
 
Key Concepts 
 
The Accademia dei Lincei contributed to the reorientation of science from individual work to a collaborative enterprise. 
Scientific illustration and visual communication were two cornerstones of the Lynceans projects. 
The Lynceans adopted Paracelsian medicine and paved the way to the diffusion of chemical medicine in Italy. 
Cesi and Galilei embodied two different views of nature, i.e. vitalism and mechanism. 
 
 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
academies; 
Galilei; 
natural history; 
entomology; 
fossils; 
iatrochemistry; 
mycology; 
microscope; 
astronomy; 
cosmology
Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History
This book explores the history of the Dominican Republic as it evolved from the first European colony in the Americas into a modern nation under the rule of Rafael Trujillo. It investigates the social foundations of Trujillo's exceptionally enduring and brutal dictatorship (1930-1961) and, more broadly, the way power is sustained in such non-democratic regimes. The author reveals how the seemingly unilateral imposition of power by Trujillo in fact depended on the regime's mediation of profound social and economic transformations, especially through agrarian policies that assisted the nation's large independent peasantry. By promoting an alternative modernity that sustained peasants' free access to land during a period of economic growth, the regime secured peasant support as well as backing from certain elite sectors. This book thus elucidates for the first time the hidden foundations of the Trujillo regime.