Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

To celebrate its 350th anniversary, a selection of papers published by Royal Society since its foundation has been made freely available online. The Trailblazing site, launched on 30 November 2009, showcases sixty articles from the Society’s archive of more than 60,000 published since 1660. Publications are presented along an interactive timeline, which places them in the context of social, political, and economic events. While no works by John Aubrey, John Wallis, or Martin Lister are featured, seventeenth-century papers include Newton’s work on light and colour from 1672 and Antonie van Leewenhoeck’s 1676 treatise on ‘little animals in water’. Halley’s account of the 1715 solar eclipse is also included, in which he reports his own detailed observations, as well as the unfortunate circumstances that led the Professors of Astronomy at both Oxford and Cambridge to miss the celestial event. The former, Dr John Keill, was thwarted by excessive cloud cover; the latter, Rev. Mr Roger Cotes, ‘had the misfortune of being oppressed by too much Company, so that, though the Heavens were very favourable, yet he miss’d both the time of the Beginning of the Eclipse and that of total Darkness’. The concept of ‘Company’ was most frequently used by early modern Britons as a euphemism for social drinking.

Papers are sought for an interdisciplinary graduate conference on ‘Intellectual Exchange and Networks in Europe, 1500-1660: Approaches from the Humanities and Social Sciences’, due to take place at the University of Chicago on 7-8 May 2010. Featuring keynote contributions from Denis Crouzet and Peter N. Miller, the conference will explore how ideas moved through Europe between 1500 and 1660, with a particular emphasis on social networks, trade routes, epistolary webs, and multiple forms of literary transmission. The conference will also consider the movement of ideas in the present. The deadline for the receipt of 250-word abstracts is 30 November 2009; for further details and submission instructions, see H-Net.