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.

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.

Essay reviews: The early years of the Royal Society

1990 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-268
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
New Work ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Institutional Aspects

Michael Hunter, Establishing the new science: the experience of the early Royal Society . Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1989. Pp. xiv+382. £45. ISBN 0-85115-506-5. Francis Bacon as a young man claimed, 'I have taken all learning to be my province’. Michael H unter might justly claim to have taken the 17th century Royal Society as his. Over the past 20 years he has produced a profusion of articles, monographs and books dealing in detail with the institutional aspects of the Society between 1660 and 1700, based upon an unmatched survey of its activities as embodied in its manuscripts and related printed works, and now he has given us a compendium of all that he has learned in Establishing the new science . At a time when ‘social history’ is occupying so much of modern historians’ interest, this new work will be essential reading. Not that the institutional history of the Royal Society has been totally neglected over the years. Fifty years ago Sir Henry Lyons, then Treasurer of the Society, began the well-known work published four years later as The Royal Society 1660-1940. A history of its administration under its Charters , devoted primarily to the day-to-day running of the Society, an invaluable account of its formal existence, its personnel and its organization, with something about its promotion of science. At the same time, interest was turning to the problem of the pre-history of the Society, that is, what lay behind the famous organizational meeting of November 1660. A spate of articles appeared interpreting the known facts in different ways, the arguments put forward being definitively and cogently examined by R.H. Syfret in this journal under the title ‘Origins of the Royal Society’.

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.

Hymnody and Liturgy

2019 ◽  
pp. 491-506
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Metrical Psalmody ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.

scholarly journals Making the States’ Translation (1637): Orthodox Calvinist Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Republic

2017 ◽  
Vol 110 (3) ◽  
pp. 440-463
Author(s):  
Dirk van Miert
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Past ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

In the study of the history of biblical scholarship, there has been a tendency among historians to emphasize biblical philology as a force which, together with the new philosophy and the new science of the seventeenth century, caused the erosion of universal scriptural authority from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. A case in point is Jonathan Israel's impressive account of how biblical criticism in the hands of Spinoza paved the way for the Enlightenment. Others who have argued for a post-Spinozist rise of biblical criticism include Frank Manuel, Adam Sutcliffe, and Travis Frampton. These scholars have built upon longer standing interpretations such as those of Hugh Trevor-Roper and Paul Hazard. However, scholars in the past two decades such as Anthony Grafton, Scott Mandelbrote and Jean-Louis Quantin have altered the picture of an exegetical revolution inaugurated by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Spinoza (1632–1677), and Richard Simon (1638–1712). These heterodox philosophers in fact relied on philological research that had been largely developed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Moreover, such research was carried out by scholars who had no subversive agenda. This is to say that the importance attached to a historical and philological approach to the biblical text had a cross-confessional appeal, not just a radical-political one.

The Bashmurite Revolts in the Delta and the ‘Bashmuric Dialect’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Feder
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Population

This chapter examines the history of the famous Bashmuric revolts and introduces the so-called Bashmuric dialect of Coptic. The Bashmuric revolts were recorded by Coptic and Arabic medieval historians and became known to European scholars as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the population of the Delta revolted very successfully for a longer period against the Arab rule and administration. Historians and the History of the Patriarchs attributed the revolts to the insupportable fiscal demands and unjust treatment of the Christian population by the Muslim governors (walis). The appearance of the Bashmuric dialect is first noted in the description of Athanasius of Qus (fourteenth century) in his Coptic grammar written in Arabic. Early scholars (beginning in the seventeenth century) studying Coptic manuscripts then tried to apply Athanasius' division of the Coptic language to the Coptic texts.

Martin Folkes

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
New Science ◽  
Definition Of

In 1750, Martin Folkes became the only individual who was President of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London, and he contributed to efforts to unite both organizations. Although he failed, illness forcing him to resign both offices, this chapter outlines the book’s analysis of the ensuing disciplinary boundaries between the two organizations in the early Georgian era in the context of Folkes’s life and letters. While it is normally assumed that natural philosophy and antiquarianism are disciplines that were fast becoming disconnected in this period, this work will reconsider these assumptions. The Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries were nearly reunited for good reason. Both societies incorporated techniques and affinities from antiquarianism—natural history and landscape—and the ‘new science’—engineering principles, measurement, and empiricism. Using Folkes’s life and letters, this biography will examine the disciplinary boundaries between the humanities and sciences in early Georgian Britain and reassess the extent to which the separation of these ‘two cultures’ developed in this era. It will also consider to what extent Folkes continued the Newtonian programme in mathematics, optics, and astronomy on the Continent. In this manner, the work will refine its definition of Newtonianism and its scope in the early eighteenth century, elucidating and reclaiming the vibrant research programme that Folkes promoted in the period of English science least well understood between the age of Francis Bacon and the present.

Ireland: Realm of the Four Masters

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Rowley-Conwy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Irish History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Manuscripts ◽  
To Come ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Or History

On 9 January 1843, Richard Griffith addressed the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) about some antiquities found in the River Shannon. The river was being dredged to render it navigable, and the artefacts were discovered during the deepening of the old ford at Keelogue. Griffith was the chairman of the Commissioners carrying out the work, and his expertise was in engineering rather than ancient history. He stated that the finds came from a layer of gravel; in its upper part were many bronze swords and spears, while a foot lower were numerous stone axes. Due to the rapidity of the river’s flow there was very little aggradation, so despite the small gap the bronze objects were substantially later than the stone ones. The river formed the border between the ancient kingdoms of Connaught and Leinster. The objects had apparently been lost in two battles for the ford that had taken place at widely differing dates; stressing that he was no expert himself, Mr Griffith wondered whether ancient Irish history might contain records of battles at this spot (Griffith 1844). This was probably the earliest non-funerary stratigraphic support for the Three Age System ever published, but it did not signal the acceptance of the Three Age System. Just as telling as Griffith’s stratigraphic observation was his immediate recourse to ancient history for an explanation; for, as we shall see, ancient history provided the dominant framework for the ancient Irish past until the end of the nineteenth century. The Irish had far more early manuscript sources than the Scots or the English, although wars and invasions had reduced them; the Welsh scholar Edward Lhwyd wrote from Sligo on 12 March 1700 to his colleague Henry Rowlands that ‘the Irish have many more ancient manuscripts than we in Wales; but since the late revolutions they are much lessened. I now and then pick up some very old parchment manuscripts; but they are hard to come by, and they that do anything understand them, value them as their lives’ (in Rowlands 1766: 315). In the seventeenth century various Irish scholars brought together the historical accounts available to them. Geoffrey Keating (Seathrú n Céitinn, in Irish) wrote the influential Foras Feasa ar Éirinn or ‘History of Ireland’ in c.1634, and an English translation was printed in 1723 (Waddell 2005).

A Bedouin Principle of Freedom for the Risorgimento d’Italia: Michele Amari Integrates Ibn Khaldūn with Vico’s filologia

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-96
Author(s):  
Markus Messling
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Classical Model ◽  
The State ◽  
Model Case ◽  
Ibn Khaldun ◽  
Giambattista Vico ◽  
New Science ◽  
Human Choice ◽  
History Of

Abstract In the New Science (1744), Giambattista Vico defined filologia as “the doctrine of all the institutions that depend on human choice” of the mondo civile. When nineteenth-century European nationalism was on the rise, supported by narratives of cultural homogeneity and specificity, philological comparatism was the state-of-the-art and it, often, legitimated the obsessions with the purity of origins and genealogies. Italy, characterized by internal plurality and its Mediterranean entanglements, is a model case. Whereas many discourses of the Risorgimento aspired to shape a new Italian nation after the classical model, Michele Amari’s History of the Muslims of Sicily (1854–1872) marked an astonishing exception. For him, going back to Islamic-Sicilian history, its literary, rhetorical and linguistic culture, meant to resume, on a higher level of incivilmento (Vico), what had been obscured by cultural decline: the spirit of freedom and equality, which Ibn Khaldūn had attributed to the Bedouins and their dynamics in history.

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).

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