scholarly journals Mineral waters across the Channel: matter theory and natural history from Samuel Duclos's minerallogenesis to Martin Lister's chymical magnetism, ca . 1666–86

2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 373-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos ◽  
Victor D. Boantza
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Mineral Waters ◽  
Corporate Body ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
Matter Theory ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
Changing Attitudes

Our essay analyses a little-known book, Observations sur les eaux minerales des plusieurs provinces de France (1675), which is a study of French mineral waters, commissioned by and conducted at the French Royal Academy of Science (est. 1666). Its author, Samuel Cottereau Duclos (1598–1685), was a senior founding figure of the Academy, its chief chymist and one of its most influential members. We examine Observations with a focus on the changing attitudes towards chymical knowledge and practice in the French Academy and the Royal Society of London in the period 1666–84. Chymistry was a fundamental analytical tool for seventeenth-century natural historians, and, as the work of Lawrence Principe and William Newman has shown, it is central to understanding the ‘long’ Scientific Revolution. Much study has also been done on the developing norms of openness in the dissemination and presentation of scientific, and particularly chymical knowledge in the late seventeenth century, norms that were at odds with traditions of secrecy among individual chymists. Between these two standards a tension arose, evidenced by early modern ‘vociferous criticisms’ of chymical obscurity, with different strategies developed by individual philosophers for negotiating the emergent boundaries between secrecy and openness. Less well studied, however, are the strategies by which not just individuals but also scientific institutions negotiated these boundaries, particularly in the formative years of their public and political reputation in the late seventeenth century. Michael Hunter's recent and welcome study of the ‘decline of magic’ at the Royal Society has to some extent remedied these omissions. Hunter argues that the Society—as a corporate body—disregarded and avoided studies of magical and alchemical subjects in the late seventeenth century. Our examination problematizes these distinctions and presents a more complex picture.

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.

Inventing Leonardo

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-166
Author(s):  
Margaret Dalivalle ◽  
Martin Kemp ◽  
Robert B. Simon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Cultural Entity

From the evidence of contemporary literary sources, manuscript inventories, correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, Chapter 8 considers the penetration of literary concepts of Leonardo as an artist and thinker (pictor doctus), how the early reception relates to the wider ‘invention’ of Leonardo as a cultural entity, and whether a distinctly ‘British version’ of Leonardo can be detected. It focuses on the introduction into England of sixteenth-century Italian receptions of Leonardo via Richard Haydocke’s 1598 translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura, and from contact with Giorgio Vasari’s Lives. It proposes that, due to the scarcity of Vasari’s text in early modern England, it was Lomazzo’s account of Leonardo that influenced the earliest understanding of the artist in Britain. The chapter tracks the absorption of Vasari’s text in seventeenth-century England through the interventions of key individuals at the Stuart courts, before and after the Interregnum. A particular focus is the prominent role of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, who collected Leonardo’s writings and drawings from the Jacobean period until the mid 1640s. The dispersal of his collection throughout the seventeenth century, and the acquisition in the 1670s of the Windsor Volume by Charles II, and the Codex Arundel by the Royal Society, signal key staging posts in the reception of Leonardo in Restoration England.

scholarly journals The rediscovery of Palmyra and its dissemination in Philosophical Transactions

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-230
Author(s):  
Gregorio Astengo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Archaeological Site ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Ancient City ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

This paper examines the first publicly documented western encounter with the ancient city of Palmyra as an archaeological site. This encounter was achieved in the late seventeenth century by a group of British merchants, who reached Palmyra and made drawings and reports of its ruins. The reports were then published in Philosophical Transactions in the mid 1690s. This paper points to the ways in which such accounts came into being, as well as how the city was described and publicly communicated for the first time in Philosophical Transactions . These articles had a great impact throughout the following centuries as a reference for the study of Palmyra. This paper therefore also stresses the pivotal role of Philosophical Transactions for the production and dissemination of Palmyra's archaeological legacy, as well as for the development of early modern archaeology within the early Royal Society.

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.

Présence d’esprit in Action in Seventeenth-Century France

2021 ◽  
pp. 176-190
Author(s):  
Emma Gilby
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern France ◽  
Changing Attitudes

This chapter contributes to the story of how and where criticism functions in early modern France by analysing descriptions of présence d’esprit or ‘presence of mind’, which emerge in the mid-1650s as a way of signalling quick thinking. Présence d’esprit is clearly associated with the salons, where it is required for participation in literary and linguistic games, and emerges simultaneously at a crucial juncture in Blaise Pascal’s Lettres provinciales (1656–7), where it is used to shine a satirical light on the casuistry of the Jesuits. In both contexts, the attribution of présence d’esprit can be both negatively and positively accented. It crystallizes anxiety about the privileging of spontaneity and instinct over careful curation and the work of scholarship. These ambivalent views, mirroring changing attitudes to ‘la critique’, also demonstrate the complex interweave of poetics, rhetoric, and theology in the early modern period, and the places they share.

Science, Instruments, and Guilds in Early-Modern Britain

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 392-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Instrument Making ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
International Demand ◽  
Early Modern Britain

AbstractThe emergence of instrument-making trades in early-modern England tested the power of established guilds. From the seventeenth century, instrument makers were able to exploit growing markets for scientific apparatus and attempted to exploit connections with the Royal Society. Given the growth in both local and international demand, and in new methods of manufacture, instrument makers were frequently able to evade the diminishing power of guilds to police the efforts of the makers.

Art Lovers and Scientific Virtuosi?

Nuncius ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-548
Author(s):  
Vera Keller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Large Role ◽  
Inclusive Concept

Since Walter Houghton’s influential 1942 article, the English virtuoso has played a large role in the early modern histories of art, of science, and of relationships between them. This emphasis has obscured alternatives, such as the “lover.” This essay challenges the historiographical predominance of the Royal Society virtuoso through a brief survey of the relative uses of virtuoso and “lover” (also liefhebber, Liebhaber and amator) in England in the first half of the seventeenth century. It then offers the counterpoint of the socially and disciplinarily inclusive concept of philomathia developed by Jena Professor Erhard Weigel (1625–1699) in his school of “Art and Virtue” and his proposed College of Art Advisors, a model which raises challenging questions for the Restoration virtuoso.

At the source of Western science: The organization of experimentalism at the Accademia del Cimento (1657–1667)

2000 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Beretta
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
Queen Christina Of Sweden ◽  
Accademia Del Cimento

The Accademia del Cimento, founded by the Medici princes, Ferdinando II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his brother, Leopoldo, later Cardinal, had members and programmes of research very different from earlier academies in Italy. The Cimento foreshadowed later European academies and institutions specifically devoted to research and improvement of natural knowledge. It issued only one publication, the Saggi di naturali esperienze , and most of the observations and experimental results from its brief life remain unpublished. The Roman Accademia fisica-matematica, associated with Queen Christina of Sweden, continued to some extent its emphasis on experiment, while The Royal Society, with which it maintained links, placed even greater reliance on experiment and its validation through unvarnished publication. Comparisons between the Cimento and its contemporaries, The Royal Society and the Frenchacademy, illuminate the origin of scientific institutions in the early modern period.

scholarly journals Richard Baxter and the Mechanical Philosophers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Sytsma
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
The People ◽  
Early English ◽  
Henry More

Richard Baxter, one of the most famous Puritans of the seventeenth century, is generally known as a writer of practical and devotional literature. But he also excelled in knowledge of medieval and early modern scholastic theology, and was conversant with a wide variety of seventeenth-century philosophies. Baxter was among the early English polemicists to write against the mechanical philosophy of René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi in the years immediately following the establishment of the Royal Society. At the same time, he was friends with Robert Boyle and Matthew Hale, corresponded with Joseph Glanvill, and engaged in philosophical controversy with Henry More. This book is a chronological and thematic account of Baxter’s relation to the people and concepts involved in the rise of mechanical philosophy in late seventeenth-century England. Drawing on largely unexamined works, including Baxter’s Methodus theologiae christianae (1681) and manuscript treatises and correspondence, this book discusses Baxter’s response to mechanical philosophers on the nature of substance, laws of motion, the soul, and ethics. Analysis of these topics is framed by a consideration of the growth of Christian Epicureanism in England, Baxter’s overall approach to reason and philosophy, and his attempt to understand creation as an analogical reflection of God’s power, wisdom, and goodness, understood as vestigia Trinitatis. Baxter’s views on reason, analogical knowledge of God, and vestigia Trinitatis draw on medieval precedents and directly inform a largely hostile, though partially accommodating, response to mechanical philosophy.

Early Modern Socinianism and Unitarianism

2014 ◽  
pp. 360-372
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
The Trinity

This essay describes the version of Christianity set out by Faustus Socinus, including his critique of the Trinity and the atonement, and his understanding of Christian ethics. It shows how his theology was taken up and developed by later Socinians, and describes how the role of reason in Socinian theology changed. The challenges which Socinianism posed to mainstream theology, especially in a period when new philosophies were being explored, are outlined. From the middle of the seventeenth century, Arian and then Unitarian ideas were heard, but these then receded into the background in the eighteenth century. It is suggested that the anti-Trinitarians benefited from changing attitudes toward philosophy and human nature during the Enlightenment, but that the French Revolution ushered in a new era of conservatism and hostility toward Socinianism and Unitarianism, at least in Europe.

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