Fabian Krämer

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

A paper archive of everything written: Ulisse Aldrovandi's Pandechion Epistemonicon (Fall 2011 and Spring 2012)

2011-2012

Fabian Krämer is a historian interested primarily in the History of Science in early modern Europe. He has been trained as both a historian and literary scholar. Both of these disciplinary backgrounds are present in his current research, which pays special attention to the scholarly practices of reading and writing that were in use across the porous disciplinary boundaries of the "Republic of Letters", the early modern world of learning. Other recent research interests include the history of the case history and the history of the book.
Fabian Krämer recently finished his PhD dissertation (How Did a Centaur Get to Early Modern London? Observation and Reading in the Study of Nature, ca. 1550-1650), which he wrote under the supervision of Professor Helmut Zedelmaier at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and Professor Lorraine Daston at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin. At the latter institution, his dissertation project was part of a research project on The History of Scientific Observation. He also received grants for doctoral research at Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel and at Forschungsbibliothek Gotha. Furthermore, the Fazit and the Gerda Henkel Foundations supported his dissertation project.
His research contributions to date correspond to the fields of specialization mentioned above. Fabian Krämer's publications primarily deal with matters of early modern history of science and especially the "how" and "why" of description and depiction of "natural particulars" in early modern medicine and natural history. His most recently published article examines the rich biography of one of the woodcuts commissioned by the eminent Bolognese natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) for his huge encyclopedia of natural history, the depiction of a curious, two-legged centaur.