scholarly journals Lisa Jardine CBE. 12 April 1944 — 25 October 2015

2017 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. 363-375
Author(s):  
Michael Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
History Of ◽  
University College London ◽  
Christopher Wren

After completing a PhD on Francis Bacon, which was published as a book in 1974, Lisa Jardine became a leading expert on Renaissance humanism and particularly on Desiderius Erasmus, her monograph on whom was published in 1993. Meanwhile, she had become the first woman Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, later holding chairs at Queen Mary and at University College London. In the early 1990s she became a notable broadcaster and public intellectual, while her Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (1996) made her a best-selling author. In the following decade, she published various significant books, including biographies of Francis Bacon, Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, and Going Dutch , a perceptive study of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century. She was also instrumental in founding the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters in 2002, while associated initiatives included the publication of the ‘Hooke Folio’ after its return to the Royal Society in 2006. In her later years, she took on a number of important public responsibilities, perhaps most notably her chairmanship of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority from 2008 to 2014. Lisa Jardine will be remembered as a lively and charismatic figure, who championed the causes that she adopted with vigour and who brought enthusiasm and panache to all the activities in which she engaged.

The Testimony of Nature: Boyle, Hooke and Experimental Philosophy

1971 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Kargon
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Organization ◽  
The Body ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Full Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

“The Office of the sense shall be the only judge of the experiment, and … the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.”Francis Bacon, The Great InstaurationThe first history of the Royal Society of London, published in 1667, and the most recent full study of that scientific organization published three centuries later, agree on one important point: that Sir Francis Bacon was the intellectual progenitor of the body, that in the denigrating words of a contemporary critic the Society was “Bacon-faced.” The author of the former, Thomas Sprat, termed Bacon the “one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the whole extent of this Enterprise,” and in “whose Books there are every where scattered the best arguments that can be produced for the defence of Experimental Philosophy.” The author of the latter, Margery Purver, agrees that “Bacon was the great formative influence on the Society's concept of science.”Yet it must be conceded at once that Bacon's legacy was ambiguous. While the early Royal Society indeed was Bacon-faced, “it saw many faces of Bacon.” The period after the founding of the Society, the 1660's and 1670's, was one of contending philosophies and of a continuing effort to fashion clearer notions of what an experimental philosophy was to be like and what role experience was to play in scientific argument. Two of the more important and influential members of the Society who were actively engaged in this pursuit were Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; these men were, and saw themselves, as disciples of the Lord Chancellor. It is my intention here to illustrate the differing approaches to the Baconian legacy of Boyle and of Hooke by focusing attention upon an interesting analogy, used by both, which may aid us in interpreting the conception of experiment in the works of these two founders of the experimental philosophy.

scholarly journals Seventeenth-Century ‘double writing’ schemes, and a 1676 letter in the phonetic script and real character of John Wilkins

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Poole
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Artificial Language ◽  
Real Character ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
History Of ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
First Time

Royal Society Classified Papers XVI contains a letter written in not one but two seemingly mysterious scripts. As a result, this letter has remained until now effectively illegible, and has been miscatalogued. These scripts are rare examples of the written forms devised by John Wilkins to accompany his proposals for an artificial language, published under the auspices of the Royal Society in 1668. This article therefore first correctly identifies and decodes this letter, which is shown to be from the Somersetshire clergyman Andrew Paschall to Robert Hooke in London in 1676, and then surveys other surviving texts written in Wilkins's scripts or language. Finally the article addresses the contents of the letter, namely its author's attempt to build a workable double writing device, in effect an early ‘pantograph’. Designs for such instruments had been much touted in the 1650s, and the complex history of such proposals is unravelled properly for the first time.

The Royal Society of London’s history of trades programme: An early episode in applied science

1985 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-158 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Applied Science ◽  
Consumer Products ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Industrial Chemicals ◽  
New Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
Master Craftsman

In the seventeenth century, craftsmen made most consumer products—dyed clothing, industrial chemicals, leather goods and all other household and industrial products. By the nineteenth century, the master craftsman with his apprentices had disappeared and the factory provided industrial and consumer products. The Royal Society of London’s history of trades programme was an integral part of the process which took knowledge from the craftsman and put it into the factory owners’ control. The Royal Society’s history of trades programme began in 1660 when members, excited with the new science of Galileo and the programme and promise of Francis Bacon, began the project they thought would revolutionize industry. Bacon had suggested that scholars write descriptions of trades called ‘histories of trades’ which he thought would benefit industry and provide information for the new science of the seventeenth century. Society members hoped that following Bacon’s recommendations, they could change industry as radically as Copernicus and Kepler had changed astronomy. Unfortunately, their revolution failed in the seventeenth century. Although Newton was able to bring the sciences of astronomy and mechanics to their modern forms, the makers of the applied science revolution eventually found Bacon’s programme inadequate. In 1660, however, when the Royal Society was formed, members had every reason to believe their programme would succeed, and for about two and a half decades they tried to implement Bacon’s plan. Bacon’s programme called for complete descriptions of trades, called ‘histories’, and while the Society’s scholars wrote few complete histories, they collected and published many partial accounts.

Material doubts: Hooke, artisan culture and the exchange of information in 1670s London

1995 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Iliffe
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Construction Work ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Philosophers

In this paper I analyse some resources for the history of manipulative skill and the acquisition of knowledge. I focus on a decade in the life of the ‘ingenious’ Robert Hooke, whose social identity epitomized the mechanically minded individual existing on the interface between gentleman natural philosophers, instrument makers and skilled craftsmen in late seventeenth-century London. The argument here is not concerned with the notion that Hooke had a unique talent for working with material objects, and indeed my purpose is to rethink the ways in which we account for such virtuosity. In this vein, I do not adopt solely a realist or constructivist attitude to skill but seek to show how, in a purposeful way, Hooke drew from the resources of techniques and information made available to him by his social interaction with labourers, servants, craftsmen, gentlemen and noblemen. In Hooke's local culture, intelligence flowed between the sites where these individuals worked and socialized. I examine the practical, social and situational links between the worlds of the coffee house, the workshop and the rooms of the Royal Society at Arundel House (between 1667 and 1674) and Gresham College. From this perspective, there were no rigid boundaries between the domains of natural philosophy, banausic culture and construction work on which Hooke was engaged, and I argue that we should examine his world in term of a series of networks of capital exchange comprised of finance, social power and mechanical expertise.

The Curious Eye

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Webster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Johannes Kepler ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Moment

The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? Today, in our everyday lives we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, The Curious Eye explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but rather an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.

Hooke recommemorated

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-140
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
History Of

Richard Nichols, The Diaries of Robert Hooke, The Leonardo of London, 1635-1703 . Lewes, Sussex: The Book Guild, 1994, Pp. 185, £15.00. ISBN 0- 86332-930-6. Richard Nichols is a science master turned historian of science who celebrates in this book Robert Hooke’s contributions to the arts and sciences. The appreciation brings together comments from Hooke’s Diaries , and other works, on each of his main enterprises, and on his personal interaction with each of his principal friends and foes. Further references to Hooke and his activities are drawn from Birch’s History of the Royal Society, Aubrey’s Brief Lives , and the Diaries of Evelyn and of Pepys. The first section of the book, ‘Hooke the Man’, covers his early years of education at home in Freshwater, at Westminster school and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he soon joined the group of experimental philosophers who set him up as Curator of the Royal Society and Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, Bishopsgate. Hooke’s domestic life at Gresham College is described - his intimate relationships with a series of housekeepers, including his niece, Grace Hooke, and his social life at the College and in the London coffee houses.

scholarly journals Robert Hooke, F. R. S. (1635-1703)

1960 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-145 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Hooke’S Law ◽  
Hooke's Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Instruments

The period which saw the foundation of the Royal Society is rich in names remarkable for original achievement in the field of science, but, if we except Newton—and his first paper appeared eleven years after the foundation of the Society which is now being celebrated—none is more noteworthy than Robert Hooke. Without any advantages of birth or influence, poor in health and poor, as a young man, in worldly goods, he carried out work of the first importance in most branches of science then known, and of one branch, meteorology, he may claim to be the founder. Not only was he outstanding as an experimenter and as the inventor of new instruments, but he had an informed imagination which led him to astonishingly correct anticipations of many advances subsequently to be made. Although to many his name is known only through Hooke’s Law, outstanding figures in the history of science have been loud in his praises. Thomas Young wrote of the ‘inexhaustible but neglected mines of nascent inventions, the works of the great Robert Hooke’, a most apt phrase, since Hooke’s work contains so much that is suggestive and original, which his restless spirit lacked time to develop.

Louis Harold Gray, 1905-1965

1966 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 195-217 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Mutual Benefit ◽  
Natural Experiments ◽  
Renaissance Period ◽  
At Home

Louis Harold (Hal) Gray was not a product of his times; that is to say he was no opportunist who cleverly adapted his talents to the current circumstances. Rather he was a maker of scientific history and his genius would have been as apparent in any other age. Particularly would he have been at home in London three centuries earlier. It has been recorded (1) * that the beginnings of the Royal Society stemmed from the urge in ´a small group of learned men who were interested in the Experimental, or New Philosophy as it was then called . . . to meet occasionally in London for talk and discussions at the lodgings of one of their number’. The urge to meet with his fellow men for their mutual benefit by discussion of matters of science was characteristic also of Hal Gray. The New Philosophy which some would now equate with the scientific method owed much in England to Francis Bacon (one time of Trinity College, Cambridge) and would have delighted a seventeenth-century Gray. It was the natural revolution of the Renaissance period against medieval dogma and the confinement of formalistic scholasticism. Further the New Philosophy was not subject-limited, and its exponents considered and discussed Physick, Anatomy, Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, Statistics, Magnetics, Chymicks and Natural Experiments (2).

Political Science

2018 ◽  
pp. 104-133
Author(s):  
Tita Chico
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Core ◽  
Gulliver's Travels ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
History Of ◽  
Natural Philosophers

Late seventeenth-century natural philosophers inherited the conjunction of politics and science at the core of Francis Bacon’s experimental project. Thomas Sprat’s The History of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels use the conventions of literary knowledge to express their scientific-political visions, insisting that natural philosophy cannot be understood apart from the political institutions enabling and enabled by its practice and promulgation. These writers use the experimental imagination to envisage, in turn, civil government, absolutist monarchy, and imperialism. Sprat advances scientific triumphalism and a model for schooling gentlemen into civil society.

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