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Collectio mineralium : the catalog of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold's II mineralogical collection

2022 - Firenze University Press

x, 270 p. : ill.

  • Includes bibliographical references and index.
  • This work is the critical edition of the catalog of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold's II mineralogical collection. The volume, unpublished and preserved at the Historical Archives of the University of Firenze Museum System, dates to 1765 and describes 242 mineralogical specimens coming primarily from the current Slovak-Hungarian mining district. This edition gives the transcription of the German manuscript and its translation into English together with an organized system of notation to illustrate the complex history of the text, the characterization of the mineralogical species, and the geographical location of the mineral extraction sites. This work represents to date the only published catalog of a mineralogical collection belonging to a member of the Habsburg-Lorraine family.
  • Annarita Franza is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Firenze. Her research is focused on the history of European naturalistic collecting, scientific museology, and museum cataloging. Johannes Mattes is a PhD and an historian based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has conducted research and/or taught at universities in Paris, Stanford, Toronto, Vienna, and the Leopoldina (Halle) where he specialized in eighteenth to twentieth history of natural sciences in Central and Eastern Europe. Giovanni Pratesi is a PhD and Professor of scientific and naturalistic museology and planetary geology at the University of Firenze. He is also the Italian representative at the Museum Commission of the International Mineralogical Association. He has published numerous scholarly books and research articles, and has been recognized for excellence in research, teaching, and outreach. [Publisher's text]
  • Collected essays.