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

Dr Anna Marie Roos, our industrious Martin Lister Research Fellow, has contributed her expertise to Chemistry: A Volatile History, a three-part series of hour-long documentaries to be broadcast on BBC Four from the end of this week. As well as describing Lister’s various contributions to the discipline, Anna Marie provides insights into Boyle and The Skeptical Chymist, and Newton and alchemy, and assisted producers in their preparation for the programme (including confirming that Boyle did not in fact invent the phosphorous match). The first episode will be broadcast on Thursday 21 January at 9pm.

Dr Anna Marie Roos, our Martin Lister Research Fellow, has just published an article on the seventeenth-century physician in Notes & Records of the Royal Society entitled ‘A Speculum of Chymical Practice: Isaac Newton, Martin Lister (1639–1712), and the Making of Telescopic Mirrors’. According to the abstract, ‘In 1674 … Martin Lister published a new method of making glass of antimony for telescopic mirrors, using Derbyshire cawk or barite as a flux. New manuscript evidence reveals that Sir Isaac Newton requested samples of the cawk and antimony from Lister through an intermediary named Nathaniel Johnston. An analysis of Lister’s paper and Johnston’s correspondence and its context reveals insights not only about Newton’s work with telescopic specula but also about his alchemical investigations. Analysing these sources also contributes to our understanding of the nature of correspondence networks in the early scientific revolution in England’. Subscribed users can access the full text of the article here.

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.

Contributions are sought for a workshop on ‘Intellectual Networks and Exchanges’, due to take place at Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge on 1-2 July 2010. Building on the methodological redefinition of ‘exchanges’ and of ‘networks’ which has occurred in the past three decades, the workshop will investigate cultural and intellectual networks and exchanges of ideas from the late medieval to the modern period. It will pay particular attention to the role of sources, historical factors, geography, images, and ideologies in creating, fostering, and preserving communicative practices, especially within colonial settings. For further information, please see the workshop webpage or contact the organizer, Dr Isabel DiVanna.

Papers are invited for a conference on ‘Circulating Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Networks, Knowledge and Forms’, due to be held at the Royal Society in London on 8-10 July 2010. The conference will explore the dynamic intellectual economies brought into being by wars, revolution, and international exploration, with particular reference to the forms in which ideas circulated; the networks of intelligencers, scribes, printers, publishers, and booksellers through which they moved; and the structures of knowledge which linked particular categories of content to particular material forms. The deadline for the receipt of 300-word abstracts is 7 January 2010; for further details and submission instructions, see the conference website.