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.

‘Philosophical’ grammar in John Wilkins’s ‘Essay’

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Salmon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Real Character ◽  
Philosophical Language ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
Insight Into

Recent studies of John Wilkins, author ofAn essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language(1668) have examined aspects of his life and work which illustrate the modernity of his attitudes, both as a theologian, sympathetic to the ecumenical ideals of seventeenth-century reformers like John Amos Comenius (DeMott 1955, 1958), and as an amateur scientist enthusiastically engaged in forwarding the interests of natural philosophy in his involvement with the Royal Society. His linguistic work has, accordingly, been examined for its relevance to seventeenth-century thought and for evidence of its modernity; described by a twentieth-century scientist as “impressive” and as “a prodigious piece of work” (Andrade 1936:6, 7), theEssayhas been highly praised for its classification of reality (Vickery 1953:326, 342) and for its insight into phonetics and semantics (Linsky 1966:60). It has also, incidentally, been examined for the evidence it offers on seventeenth-century pronunciation (Dobson 1968).

Comenius and the Real Character in England

PMLA ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 70 (5) ◽  
pp. 1068-1081 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Demott
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Real Character ◽  
The Real ◽  
Philosophical Language ◽  
John Wilkins

Since Bacon was the first Englishman to mention “real characters” and among the first to insist on the need for a truly precise means of expression, scholarship has come to regard the outcropping of linguistic schemes in the seventeenth century as a direct result of his writings. The influence of his “semantic sense” on later thinkers has been traced with some care; Richard F. Jones and others have shown us how to connect the language projects with specific passages in his works; evidence of his influence has been seen in the support given in scientific circles to projects like John Wilkins' Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, which the Royal Society published in 1668.

The intellectual origins of the Royal Society-London or Oxford?

1968 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-156 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Invisible College ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
History Of ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Oxford Group ◽  
The Invisible

The Royal Society was founded in 1660 at Gresham College. Even in the seventeenth century divergent views arose among its founders as to its intellectual origins and the events which led up to its foundation. So it is not surprising that echoes of these divergences were heard when the Society was celebrating its Tercentenary in 1960. The main points in debate were the extent of Francis Bacon’s influence on its foundation, and the respective contributions of the related groups in London and Oxford. Miss Syfret had already successfully challenged Thomas Birch’s view that the ‘Invisible College’ mentioned by Boyle and centring round Hartlib was in any direct way linked with the foundation of the Royal Society. Professor Douglas McKie in Origins and Founders brought both the London and Oxford groups into his account, and his and Miss Syfret’s interpretations seemed to fit one another (1). However, a booklet from Oxford written by Miss (now Dr) Margery Purver and Dr E. J. Bowen claimed that John Wilkins and the Oxford group were the only begetters of the Royal Society, and rejected John Wallis’s claims for the earlier London group around Gresham College. Dr Purver has elaborated the arguments in favour of this view in a recently published book (2). The Editor of Notes and Records has now asked me to put on record my own views, since I had already discussed this aspect of the intellectual history of the period in my Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Introductory remarks

1973 ◽  
Vol 267 (882) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Agricultural Practice ◽  
Special Committee ◽  
Keen Interest ◽  
National Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Royal Charter ◽  
First Time

On behalf of the organizers I should like to add our welcome to that of the President, and to say how gratified we are that this meeting has attracted such a large and distinguished gathering, representative of so many agricultural interests. I think it is not generally known that the Royal Society has a long history of direct interest in agricultural matters, for in 1662, when the Society received its Royal Charter, it appointed a special committee - the Committee for Agriculture, or the Georgicall Committee - which met for the first time in that year on 20 March. This is 311 years ago almost to the day. It is particularly interesting and significant to us meeting here today that the Society and its Committee showed a proper concern for agricultural practice and its national importance, as well, of course, as a keen interest in scientific matters. Furthermore, special measures were initiated to implement the Committee’s ideas and decisions through the members of the Society, and these measures embraced horticultural and forestry topics as well as those of agricultural pertinence.

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