Natural Things | Ad Fontes Naturae is a global natural history project in the  digital humanities based out of Stanford’s Program in History & Philosophy  of Science. Our goal is to trace how natural objects from around the world  took on new meaning through the rise of modernity.

In the early modern era, Europeans sought to create a global natural  history that could accommodate the plants and animals they encountered  overseas into one unified system of knowledge characterized by a shared  classificatory system.

In Spring 2019, Hamilton College hosted the Inaugural Natural Things  Conference. Presenters charted the expansion of natural science in the age  of global empires.

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An edited volume titled, Natural Things: Ecologies of Knowledge in the Early  Modern World, is forthcoming.

Read more about the Natural Things Conference here