Liquid, easy to transport and store as well as a very intense form of energy, black gold has become the invisible engine of growth, particularly since the 1950s and 1960s. The other, traditional sources of energy such as biomass, wind and water power have been marginalised in the energy mix of the industrialised countries (Chevalier, 2004).ĢCrude oil, with its exceptional qualities, has become the primary source of industrial and military power, replacing coal as reference energy. It benefits from relatively abundant and low-cost energy obtained from fossil fuels, namely oil, natural gas and coal, and, to a much lesser degree, fissile fuels such as uranium. IntroductionġModern economic development as we know it today, which is the product of the industrialisation process of the last two centuries, is fuelled primarily by non-renewable mineral resources extracted from the lithosphere (the outermost shell of Earth). It entailed a reorientation away from Aristotelian and empiricist approaches and toward the elaboration of a radically new biblist metaphysics.The authors would like to thank Marie Thorndahl for her support in the writing of this chapter. Once this discourse by the librarian of the Escorial is read independently of meanings that might have been inscribed in the library's iconography and is complemented with insights gleaned from other works by its author and his mentor, Benito Arias Montano, the librarian's description reveals itself to be a manifesto of how the friar thought the study of nature should be undertaken at the Escorial. To identify this agenda, this study shuns iconographic interpretation to focus instead on Friar José de Sigüenza's description of the library's frescoes. This study advances the thesis that once the Royal Library was established in its permanent premises attempts were made to define its intellectual agenda, and in particular to redirect the study of nature undertaken there in a rather distinct and novel direction. Interpretations of the iconography of the Royal Library of the Escorial have fostered many assessments of the intellectual panorama of late sixteenth-century Spain.
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