scholarly journals Richard Waller and the Fusion of Visual and Scientific Practice in the Early Royal Society

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine M. Reinhart
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Multiple Functions

Richard Waller, Fellow and Secretary of the Royal Society, is probably best remembered for editing Robert Hooke’s posthumously published works. Yet, Waller also created numerous drawings, paintings, and engravings for his own work and the Society’s publications. From precisely observed grasses to allegorical frontispieces, Waller’s images not only contained a diverse range of content, they are some of the most beautiful, colorful, and striking from the Society’s early years. This article argues that Waller played a distinctly important role in shaping the visual program of the Royal Society by virtue of his multiple functions as reliable administrator and translator, competent natural philosopher, and skilled image-maker. It analyzes Waller’s visual works in the context of his graphic training—in part influenced by his mother Mary More—and situates them within the context of English image-making traditions and Waller’s own natural philosophical interests. Examined as a functional whole, Waller’s career as a Fellow of the Royal Society emerges as an important case study in the fusion of visual and scientific practices in early-modern England.

scholarly journals The hidden side of animal cognition research: Scientists’ attitudes toward bias, replicability and scientific practice

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. e0256607
Author(s):  
Benjamin G. Farrar ◽  
Ljerka Ostojić ◽  
Nicola S. Clayton
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Animal Cognition ◽  
Reliability And Validity ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Free Text ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Animal Minds ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Questionable Research Practices ◽  
Replication Studies

Animal cognition research aims to understand animal minds by using a diverse range of methods across an equally diverse range of species. Throughout its history, the field has sought to mitigate various biases that occur when studying animal minds, from experimenter effects to anthropomorphism. Recently, there has also been a focus on how common scientific practices might affect the reliability and validity of published research. Usually, these issues are discussed in the literature by a small group of scholars with a specific interest in the topics. This study aimed to survey a wider range of animal cognition researchers to ask about their attitudes towards classic and contemporary issues facing the field. Two-hundred and ten active animal cognition researchers completed our survey, and provided answers on questions relating to bias, replicability, statistics, publication, and belief in animal cognition. Collectively, researchers were wary of bias in the research field, but less so in their own work. Over 70% of researchers endorsed Morgan’s canon as a useful principle but many caveated this in their free-text responses. Researchers self-reported that most of their studies had been published, however they often reported that studies went unpublished because they had negative or inconclusive results, or results that questioned “preferred” theories. Researchers rarely reported having performed questionable research practices themselves—however they thought that other researchers sometimes (52.7% of responses) or often (27.9% of responses) perform them. Researchers near unanimously agreed that replication studies are important but too infrequently performed in animal cognition research, 73.0% of respondents suggested areas of animal cognition research could experience a ‘replication crisis’ if replication studies were performed. Consistently, participants’ free-text responses provided a nuanced picture of the challenges animal cognition research faces, which are available as part of an open dataset. However, many researchers appeared concerned with how to interpret negative results, publication bias, theoretical bias and reliability in areas of animal cognition research. Collectively, these data provide a candid overview of barriers to progress in animal cognition and can inform debates on how individual researchers, as well as organizations and journals, can facilitate robust scientific research in animal cognition.

scholarly journals The decline of guilds and their monopoly in English provincial towns, with particular reference to Exeter

Urban History ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
MASARU YONEYAMA
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
City Government ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Craft Guilds ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTThis article examines the decline of the craft guilds in early modern England by way of a case-study of the Tuckers’ Company in Exeter. From the 1980s, this case figured prominently in the historiographical debate concerning guild decline; however, it has not been examined recently. The current study reveals the Tuckers’ Company is not a case of decline in guild membership so much as a case of the loss of guild monopoly and a concomitant transition to charitable functions. On the basis of empirical sources, this study also reveals the mechanisms and context of this transformation in the post-Civil War politics of the city of Exeter. Specific attention is given to first, the decline of royal authority bolstering the guild against the city government and secondly, the shift of power in the guild with the ascendance of the merchant fullers. Finally, the historiographical implications of the article's findings are discussed.

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.

scholarly journals “Nature’s Bastards”: Grafted Generation in Early Modern England

2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-148
Author(s):  
Claire Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Reproduction Humaine

This paper examines the shared rhetoric between human and horticultural generation in early modern England, particularly focusing on grafting. Early modern English gardening manuals imagine grafting as a method of controlling generation in the natural world, and early modern English obstetrical treatises imagine the female generative body in horticultural language. Alongside these scientific texts, this article uses Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as a literary case study of grafting rhetoric. Ultimately, while grafting treatises imagine man’s power over generation in the natural world and obstetrical treatises imagine controlling human generation using horticultural metaphor, The Winter’s Tale complicates this fantasy by depicting Leontes’s efforts at genealogical control as unnecessary and fruitless: not only do Perdita and Hermione survive and flourish after his attempts to kill them, but Perdita is the legitimate and non-grafted offspring of Hermione and Leontes. Cet article examine la rhétorique que partagent la reproduction humaine et l’horticulture en Angleterre au début de l’époque moderne. Les ouvrages portant sur les jardins, à l’époque, représentent la greffe comme une méthode pour contrôler la reproduction dans le monde naturel, tandis que les ouvrages d’obstétrique de la même époque représentent la capacité reproductrice du corps féminin en termes d’horticulture. A côté de ces textes scientifiques, on se sert dans cet article de la pièce de Shakespeare The Winter’s Tale comme exemple de la rhétorique de la greffe. En dernière analyse, tandis que les ouvrages décrivant la greffe représentent la puissance humaine sur la reproduction dans le monde naturel et que les ouvrages d’obstétrique représentent la reproduction humaine avec des métaphores tirées de l’horticulture, The Winter’s Tale vient compliquer cet imaginaire en présentant comme futiles les tentatives de contrôle généalogique de Leontes : non seulement Perdita et Hermione survivent et fleurissent après les tentatives de meurtre, mais encore Perdita est le fruit légitime non-greffé des amours d’Hermione et Leontes.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kit Heyam
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
Sexual Transgression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

This introduction discusses the reputation of King Edward II (1307–1327) in medieval and early modern England, and the implications of this reputation beyond its immediate relevance to scholars of Edward II’s reign and afterlife: as a case study for the history of sex and the changing vocabulary of sexual transgression; as a source of positive depictions of love between men; as a paradigmatic exemplum for discussions of favouritism and deposition, and thereby a case study providing insight into the early modern use of medieval history; as a means of developing our understanding of literary texts such as Marlowe’s Edward II; and as a process that illuminates the literary nature of medieval and early modern historical narratives.

‘The needle may convert more than the pen’: women and the work of conversion in early modern England

Conversions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Canavan ◽  
Helen Smith
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Personal Transformation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
Queer Phenomenology

This chapter opens by establishing women's centrality to the religious life of the household and community, and, in particular, their work as model converts and proselytisers. It argues that women’s devotion was neither inherently private nor inherently concerned with questions of selfhood or personal transformation. Drawing on the Queer Phenomenology of Sara Ahmed, the chapter suggests the extent to which conversion functions as a re-orientation and change in direction. The second half of the chapter takes women’s biblical needlework as a case study in material culture as an instrument of orientation. Considering a group of manuscript poems alongside the evidence of inventories and surviving stitchcraft, the authors argue for the evangelical and devotional effects of women’s decorative arts, and suggest that scriptural and religious themes were not simply emblematic but intended to work upon and transform the viewer. For early modern readers and viewers, the needle was a doubly efficacious tool, able to prick not only fabric but the consciences of those who wielded it or meditated upon its products.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Translation and Genettean Hypertextuality: Catherine Magdalen Evelyn, Catherine of Bologna, and English Franciscan Textual Production, 1618–40

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-261
Author(s):  
Jaime Goodrich
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Franciscan Order ◽  
Gerard Genette ◽  
The Voice

Drawing on the ideas of Gérard Genette, this article argues for the value of reading translations as “hypertexts,” or as works grafted onto earlier texts (“hypotexts”), on the basis of the intriguing case study of The Admirable Life of the Holy Virgin S. Catharine of Bologna (1621), translated by Catherine Magdalen Evelyn of the Gravelines Poor Clares. Little-known today despite Evelyn’s importance as the most prolific female translator of the early Stuart period, this publication sublimates the voice of the translator through its laconic paratextual materials and its misattribution of Evelyn’s work to another nun. In spite of this carefully engineered authorial opacity, the stakes of Evelyn’s translation become clearer when it is read as part of a hypertextual system of Franciscan writings published in English, French, Italian, and Portuguese over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An analysis of how her text is grafted onto this series of hypotexts through bibliography, intertextuality, and translation results in a detailed, albeit speculative, account of Evelyn’s motivations for reading, translating, and publishing The Admirable Life. This seemingly modest publication is thus revealed as a rich hypertext that participated in a wider European project to chronicle the history of the Franciscan order. A concluding discussion of hypertextuality in early modern England briefly gestures more broadly toward the relevance of this method for studies of Renaissance literature.

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