The Royal Society and Italy 1667-1795

1982 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-81 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Past ◽  
Psychology Today ◽  
Italian Science ◽  
High Esteem ◽  
John Wallis

Italy has often held a special place in the view of cultivated Englishmen, and this is especially the case for Italian sciences in the seventeenth century (1). At the first beginnings of the Royal Society in 1645 the young men who met for discussions in London held Italian science in high esteem. So much was this the case that among their topics of discussion, as John Wallis, by then Savilian Professor at Oxford, recalled in 1678, were the valves in the veins (whose description by Fabricius of Aquapendente had so impressed William Harvey), Galileo s telescopic discoveries and Torricelli s barometric experiment, all part of that ‘New Philosophy’ which he took to have been founded by Galileo and Bacon. This last was certainly the view to which most of the early Fellows of the Royal Society subscribed, paying constant tribute to Galileo’s role in the foundation of the new experimental science as well as in the advancement of the Copernican theory, as can be seen from the works of Robert Boyle and, later, Newton. The chronological point, self-evident but not always remembered, that living men are not constrained by dates, although historians may wish to be, is exemplified in the case of Newton’s respect for Galileo enunciated in 1687 in the first edition of the Principia , maintained through all the vicissitudes of revision in 1713 and 1723, and as long as the Principia was read, as it was throughout the seventy-five years after Newton’s death (1727), his 1687 tribute to Galileo remained fresh. Similarly, the works of post-Galilean Italian scientists by no means lost their influence because time had worn on into the eighteenth century and they had published in the seventeenth; even today a fifty-year-old book in a new edition may excite new readers, and this of course was even more true in the past when scientific advances approximated in their rate of development to those of, say, economics or psychology today.

Book reviews

1998 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-379
Author(s):  
Colin A. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Mathematical Practice ◽  
X Rays ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Von Liebig ◽  
Principles Of Geology

Eleven book reviews in the July 1998 edition of Notes and Records : Robert Boyle. A free enquiry into the vulgarly received notion of nature , Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter (eds.). P. Mancosu, Philosophy of mathematics and mathematical practice in the seventeenth century . Patricia Fara, Sympathetic attractions: magnetic practices, beliefs, and symbolism in eighteenth–century England . Alan Cook, Edmond Halley: charting the heavens and the seas . Jan Bondeson, A cabinet of medical curiosities . J.M.H. Moll, Presidents of The Royal Society of Medicine . W.H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: the chemical gatekeeper . Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–33) , J. Secord (ed.). X–rays––the first hundred years , Alan Michette and Slawka Pfauntsch (eds.). Jack Morrell, Science at Oxford 1914–1939 . John Polkinghorne, Beyond science. The wider human context .

The Convent of Santa Clara, the Elite and Social Change in Eighteenth Century Querétaro

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELLEN GUNNARSDÓTTIR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article focuses on the changes that occurred within Querétaro's elite from the late Habsburg to the high Bourbon period in colonial Mexico from the perspective of its relationship to the convent of Santa Clara. It explores how creole elite families of landed background with firm roots in the early seventeenth century, tied together through marriage, entrepreneurship and membership in Santa Clara were slowly pushed out of the city's economic and administrative circles by a new Bourbon elite which broke with the social strategies of the past by not sheltering its daughters in the city's most opulent convent.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

XXI: Mortality in Magherafelt, County Derry, in the early eighteenth century reappraised

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (89) ◽  
pp. 50-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Macafee ◽  
Valerie Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Historical Demography ◽  
The Past ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Tax Returns ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Population Patterns

The study of Irish historical demography has long been an area of complexity and controversy; and the further back into the past the search for patterns and trends is pushed, the more the problems multiply. Much of the difficulty stems from the inadequacy and/or variability of the available sources. Hearth-tax returns, enumeration lists of various types, estate records and registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, all pose problems of interpretation and in addition, for any single area, they are likely to provide only fragmentary and discontinuous evidence. $$Largely because of these difficulties, only a limited number of detailed analyses of population patterns in specific areas as far back as the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century have been attempted. Yet at the same time the work which has been done has made it apparent both that this is a crucial period in terms of demographic history and that only detailed case studies can provide the evidence necessary to enlarge upon our current very general understanding.

Mortality on Convict Voyages to Australia, 1788–1868

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-313
Author(s):  
John McDonald ◽  
Ralph Shlomowitz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Indentured Labor ◽  
East Indies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

During the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of research on the seaboard mortality associated with intercontinental migration during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The focus of historical interest in this linkage between mortality and migration has been the Atlantic slave trade. We now have mortality rates on voyages from various regions in Africa to various destinations in the Americas, from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (see Curtin, 1968, 1969: 275-286; Klein and Engerman, 1976, 1979; Klein, 1978; Postma, 1979; Miller, 1981; Cohn and Jensen, 1982a, 1982b; Cohn, 1985; Eltis, 1984, 1987; Steckel and Jensen, 1986; Galenson, 1986). These slave studies have spawned renewed interest in the mortality associated with other seaborne populations, and mortality rates have been calculated on Dutch immigrant voyages to the East Indies during the eighteenth century, European convict and immigrant voyages to North America and European immigrant voyages to Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Indian and Pacific Islander indentured labor voyages to Fiji and Queensland, Australia, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Riley, 1981; Eltis, 1983; Cohn, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988; Grubb, 1987; Ekirch, 1987; Morgan, 1985; Shlomowitz, 1986, 1987, 1989; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1988, forthcoming).

The Libraries of Newton, Hooke and Boyle

1966 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-55 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The demand and search for the scientific literature of the past has grown enormously in the last twenty years. In an age as conscious as ours of the significance of science to mankind, some scientists naturally turned their thoughts to the origins of science as we know it, how scientific theories grew and how discoveries were made. Both institutions and individual scientists partake in these interests and form collections of books necessary for their study. How did their predecessors fare in this respect? They, of course, formed their libraries at a time when books were easy to find—and cheap. But what did they select for their particular reading? For example, what did the libraries of the three greatest scientists of the seventeenth century, Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, look like? Fortunately in the case of Newton, the history of his books is now fairly clear, thanks to the devoted labours of Colonel R . de Villamil (i), but it is a sad reflection on our attitude to our great intellectual leaders that this library o f the greatest English scientist, whose work changed the world for hundreds of years, was not taken care of, was, in fact, forgotten and at times entirely neglected.

William, Viscount Brouncker, P. R. S. (1620-1684)

1960 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-157 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Life ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Charles I ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
John Wallis ◽  
At Home

The lack of a definitive study of the life of Lord Brouncker, a spiteful remark of Pepys so often quoted against him (1), and possible confusion with his less reputable brother Henry (2), all combine to prompt an intriguing question. Why was he chosen as the first President of the Royal Society rather than John Wilkins, John Wallis, Robert Boyle or Sir Robert Moray? The wisdom of the choice was proved by the devoted and able service he gave to that high office during the infant years of the Society. William, second Viscount Brouncker of Castle Lyons, in the Irish peerage, was the elder son of Sir William Brouncker, gentleman of the privy chamber to Charles I, and vice-chamberlain to his son, Charles, Prince of Wales. ‘This loyal knight’ Wood records in his Athena Oxonienses ‘who was the son of Sir Henry Bruncker, President of Mounster in Ireland , by Anne, his wife, sister of Henry, Lord Morley, was created Viscount of Castle Lyon in the said kingdom 12 September 1645, and dying in Wadham College, in the middle of November following, was buried on the 20th of the said month.’ We know little of Brouncker’s early life, even the date of his birth, 1620, is conjectural. He was sent to Oxford at the age of sixteen, where he quickly made himself proficient in several languages. He was probably intended to follow the profession of medicine, as in 1647 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Physick at Oxford, but his inclination led him to the study of mathematics, for which he evidently had a flair. He soon began to correspond with distinguished mathematicians, notably John Wallis, and it was not long before his reputation as a mathematician was recognized both at home and abroad.

Architecture, Anatomy, and the New Science in Early Modern London

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Modern London

Focuses on an important but overlooked building in late seventeenth-century London: the College of Physicians on Warwick Lane designed by the scientist and architect Robert Hooke in the 1670s. The building, which was commissioned in response to the previous college’s destruction in the Great Fire of London in 1666, was itself demolished in the nineteenth century. In this article, Matthew Walker argues that the conception and design of Hooke’s college had close links with the early Royal Society and its broader experimental philosophical program. This came about through the agency of Hooke—the society’s curator—as well as the prominence of the college’s physicians in the experimental philosophical group in its early years. By analyzing Hooke’s design for the college, and its prominent anatomy theater in particular, this article thus raises broader questions about architecture’s relationship with medicine and experimental science in early modern London.

The Arse Poetica of Thomas Hobbes: On the Composition and Reception of De Mirabilibus Pecci

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-357
Author(s):  
Jessica Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Compelling Evidence ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Geological Processes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Mock Epic

This article provides a two-part study of Thomas Hobbes’ De Mirabilibus Pecci, a Latin poem composed very early in his career. Part one examines the poem as a product of Hobbes’ participation in the recreational literary culture of Caroline England, in particular analysing the influence of mock-epic and burlesque traditions that would continue to shape Hobbes’ writings but also studying how the poem offers compelling evidence for his early preoccupation with the laws of motion, with geological processes such as the creation and erosion of stone formations, and with the philosophy of Lucretius. Part two recounts the extraordinary history of the poem’s reception in the last decades of the seventeenth century. The poem’s familiarity among Hobbes’ allies and adversaries alike helped to cement his reputation as a master of scoffing and drollery, as an opponent of the experimental science practiced by the Royal Society, and as a freethinker or atheist.

AN OPEN ELITE: THE PECULIARITIES OF CONNOISSEURSHIP IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN COWAN
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Modern Approach ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage of antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it.

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