Rome and the Royal Society, 1660-1740

2004 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Classical Education ◽  
John Ray ◽  
Federico Cesi ◽  
New Churches ◽  
Accademia Dei Lincei ◽  
Queen Christina Of Sweden ◽  
John Evelyn

Most Fellows of The Royal Society in the late seventeenth century knew Rome through their classical education and would have been attracted to visit it for the remains of antiquity and for the new churches and palaces of the papal city. John Evelyn, in Rome 16 years before the foundation of the Society, John Ray, Edmond Halley and Robert Nelson, and Bishop Burnet and G.W. Leibniz, also met people who had links to the Accademia dei Lincei of Prince Federico Cesi, and to the later Accademia Fisica-mathematica associated with Queen Christina of Sweden. Besides astronomy, they were especially interested in cabinets of curiosities and in Vesuvius and other volcanic sites. They met English residents in Rome, especially those around the Venerable English College.

scholarly journals ‘Vividness’ in english natural history and anatomy, 1650–1700

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Wragge-Morley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
John Ray ◽  
The Mind ◽  
It Knowledge ◽  
The Brain

This article concerns the use of rhetorical strategies in the natural historical and anatomical works of the seventeenth-century Royal Society. Choosing representative works, it argues that naturalists such as Nehemiah Grew, John Ray and the neuroanatomist Thomas Willis used the rhetorical device known as ‘comparison’ to make their descriptions of natural things vivid. By turning to contemporary works of neurology such as Willis's Cerebri Anatome and contemporary rhetorical works inspired by other such descriptions of the brain and nerves, it is argued that the effects of these strategies were taken to be wide-ranging. Contemporaries understood the effects of rhetoric in terms inflected by anatomical and medical discourse—the brain was physically altered by powerful sense impressions such as those of rhetoric. I suggest that the rhetoric of natural history could have been understood in the same way and that natural history and anatomy might therefore have been understood to cultivate the mind, improving its capacity for moral judgements as well as giving it knowledge of nature.

Founders of marine science in Britain: the work of the early Fellows of the Royal Society

1965 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-50 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Coastal Waters ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
Open Sea ◽  
High Degree ◽  
John Evelyn ◽  
British People

On 25 March 1663 John Evelyn recorded in his diary: ‘to our Society, where was an account of severall Experiments made lately at Sea by our President & other members a fortnight before’ (1). Why were the early Fellows of the Royal Society interested in the sea and what did they hope to discover? It was during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the importance of the sea to the British people was made clear. They became dependent on shipping both for defence and for economic development. W hen they established trading posts and colonies in distant lands all communications had to be made by sea and soon merchant ships were sailing regularly over oceans where only an occasional bold sailor had previously ventured to challenge the monopoly of other nations. At the same time British explorers were searching for new routes and fresh opportunities for trade. These developments stimulated interest in subjects connected with shipping. At the beginning of the seventeenth century navigation was being studied by many British mathematicians though satisfactory ways of determining longitude were not perfected until the eighteenth century (2). The continued difficulty of fixing a ship’s position in the open sea made precise observations difficult but sailors learned to take advantage of the prevailing winds and currents. They had reached a high degree of proficiency in navigating coastal waters and this knowledge was gradually extended to new lands. In 1612 Henry, Prince of Wales, commanded Sir Thomas Button to record during his exploration

A Roman correspondence: George Ent and Cassiano dal Pozzo, 1637–55

2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Fossil Wood ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Federico Cesi ◽  
Accademia Dei Lincei

George Ent (FRS 1663), a distinguished physician, was in Rome in 1636, visited the notable collector Cassiano dal Pozzo and saw his Paper Museum. After he returned to London he carried on a correspondence with Cassiano in letters of more than ordinary interest. Cassiano had sent Ent specimens of fossil wood and a table made from fossil wood. They had come from the estates at Acquasparta belonging to Prince Federico Cesi, the founder of the Accademia dei Lincei. The specimens and the table were shown to early meetings of The Royal Society and had a significant part in the developing debate on the origin of fossils. The letters also record exchanges of books between London and Rome. Among medical matters there is news of William Harvey and his works.

scholarly journals The opposite poles of a debate - lapides figurati and the Accademia dei Lincei

Substantia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 19-28
Author(s):  
Alessandro Ottaviani
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Plant Fossils ◽  
Federico Cesi ◽  
Accademia Dei Lincei ◽  
The One

The essay analyses the research carried out by some members of the Accademia dei Lincei on lapides figurati, namely by Fabio Colonna on animal fossils, and by Federico Cesi and Francesco Stelluti on plant fossils; the aim is to show the role played by the Accademia dei Lincei in establishing during the second half of the seventeenth century the opposite poles of the debate on the lapides figurati, on the one hand as chronological indices of a past world and, on the other, as sudden outcome of the vis vegetativa.

scholarly journals The English Connection: Jacob and Johann Philipp Breyne, James Petiver and Plants: The Correspondence between the Breynes and Petiver from the 1690s

2022 ◽  
Vol 128 (5) ◽  
pp. 167-198
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Pękacka-Falkowska
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central

The article discusses the hitherto unknown correspondence between the Danzig (present-day Gdańsk) botanist Jacob Breyne, his son Johann Philipp Breyne, and James Petiver in the last decade of the seventeenth century. Their correspondence documents contacts between one of the most important naturalists of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the seventeenth century and members of the Royal Society. The content of the letters reveals how books, naturalia and various artefacts circulated between Western and East-Central Europe. It also reveals the principles of reciprocity and friendship followed by those who conducted inquiries into natural history.

Queen Christina of Sweden as a Patron of Music in Rome in the Mid-Seventeenth Century

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
TESSA MURDOCH
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Chamber Music ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Keen Interest ◽  
Commissioned Works ◽  
Queen Christina Of Sweden

Following her abdication, Queen Christina of Sweden took up residence in the Palazzo Farnese, Rome from 1655. She had already developed a keen interest in music, gained from tuition from a French dancing master, and playing the star role in the ballet The Captured Cupid in honour of her mother's birthday in 1649. Christina's arrival in Rome was marked by performances in her honour in the Palazzo Barberini and Palazzo Pamphili of specially commissioned works by contemporary composers Marco Marazzoli and A.F. Tenaglia, and by her favourite Giacomo Carissimi. Inspired by the chamber music proportions of the cappella of the Collegio Germanico, many of Carissimi's secular arias were composed for his royal Swedish patron. After two years in France, Christina returned to Rome, where she took up residence in the Palazzo Riario on the Janiculum. Inventories record her musical instruments and describe the contents of the Great Hall in which concerts were held.

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.

Shining through the centuries: John Ray's life and legacy

2000 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
B. J. Ford
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
John Ray

A major conference on John Ray and other clerical naturalists, entitled ‘John Ray and his successors; the clergyman as biologist’, was held at Braintree, Essex, from 18 to 21 March 1999. Speakers considered Ray's work and beliefs in the context of the theology of his day, and the interplay between religion and biology up to the present time. Some of the outstanding protagonists were, like Ray, ordained Fellows of the Royal Society.

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