A recent correspondence-related public lecture by our Martin Lister Research Fellow Dr Anna Marie Roos has now been published as a podcast. The lecture, which took place at Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science on Tuesday 26 October, was entitled ‘The Oxford Philosophical Society and the Royal Society: A Meeting of Minds?’, and described the formation of the Oxford group, the work done under the direction of Robert Plot, and its relationship with the Royal Society: a tale of collaboration as well as rivalry. The podcast is available for listening and downloading on the MHS website.

Our poster and stand at DH2010.

Presenting at the Royal Society.

Cultures of Knowledge headed to London last weekend as the Project Director and Coordinator braved thirty-degree metropolitan temperatures to share the Project’s research at two events. At Digital Humanities 2010, the flagship annual meeting of the digital humanities community hosted this year by King’s College London, we presented a poster, which focused mainly on our union catalogue and its technical underpinnings. We received very useful feedback and discovered and made connections with some highly complementary projects, including the initiative discussed below. Meanwhile, at the kind invitation of our collaborator Mark Greengrass, Howard Hotson co-delivered a keynote address at Circulating Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Networks, Knowledge, and Forms, a conference at the Royal Society organised by Ruth Connolly (University of Newcastle), Felicity Henderson (Royal Society), and Carol Pal (Bennington College). Building on Mark’s overview of Hartlib’s significance as an intelligencer and the trials and tribulations of the Hartlib Papers Project, Howard used a description of the place of Hartlib and his letters within Cultures of Knowledge as the basis for a more general overview of the Project and its aspirations, especially within the digital sphere.

Download the poster presented at DH2010

Further to the CFP, registration is still open for the international conference Circulating Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Networks, Knowledge and Forms, which will take place at the Royal Society (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), and features plenary talks from Margaret Ezell, Richard Serjeantson, and Mark Greengrass and Howard Hotson (who will jointly present some of the aims and ambitions of Cultures of Knowledge). For the schedule, abstracts, and a registration form, please see the conference webpage.

Further to this post, Dr William Poole‘s correspondence-related lectures at the Museum of the History of Science and the Oxford Bibliographical Society last month have now been published online. ‘The Chinaman and the Librarian: The Meeting of Shen Fuzong and Thomas Hyde in 1687′ is available in full-text on ORA, while ‘Oxford and the Royal Society in the Seventeenth Century’ is available as a podcast on the MHS website.

Exploring Early Chinese Correspondences

Dr William Poole, a member of the English Faculty and New College and one of our John Aubrey researchers, is scheduled to give two lectures relevant to the Project in Oxford in the coming fortnight. The first, which will take place at the Taylor Institution under the auspices of the Oxford Bibliographical Society on Monday 1 March at 5.15pm, will explore the earliest surviving English-Chinese correspondence, which dates from 1687-88 (see the poster on the right). The second, which will take place at the Museum of the History of Science on Tuesday 9 March at 7pm, will explore the relationship between Oxford and the Royal Society in the seventeenth century, and forms part of the Museum’s year-long season of activities marking the 350th anniversary of the Society. For further details, see the MHS website. Update: these lectures are now online.

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.