scholarly journals Thomas Birch's ‘Weekly Letter’ (1741–66): correspondence and history in the mid-eighteenth-century Royal Society

2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markman Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Discrete Group ◽  
British Library ◽  
Private Knowledge

Thomas Birch (1705–66), Secretary of the Royal Society from 1752 to 1765, and Philip Yorke, second Earl of Hardwicke (1720–90), wrote a ‘Weekly Letter’ from 1741 to 1766, an unpublished correspondence of 680 letters now housed in the British Library (Additional Mss 35396–400). The article examines the dimensions and purposes of this correspondence, an important conduit of information for the influential coterie of the ‘Hardwicke circle’ gathered around Yorke in the Royal Society. It explores the writers' self-conception of the correspondence, which was expressed in deliberately archaic categories of seventeenth-century news exchange, such as the newsletter, aviso and a-la-main. It shows how the letter writers negotiated their difference in status through the discourse of friendship, and concludes that the ‘Weekly Letter’ constituted for the correspondents a form of private knowledge, restricted in circulation to their discrete group, and as such unlike the open and networked model of Enlightenment science.

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.

John Birchensha and the Early Royal Society: Grand Scales and Scientific Composition

1990 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leta E. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
String Vibrations ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

The concept of music as science, still a vital part of the natural philosophy of the seventeenth century, found a strong advocate in the early Royal Society, whose agenda frequently embraced musical topics. From the organization's inception in 1660 to the early eighteenth century the Society's minutes recount acoustical experiments performed at meetings and describe papers on topics ranging from string vibrations to music's medicinal powers.

The Institute of Science of Bologna and The Royal Society in the eighteenth century

2002 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Cavazza
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society

English astronomers had known of the astronomical studies of G.D. Cassini, F.R.S., in Bologna even before the foundation of The Royal Society, and throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth, Fellows of the Society were kept informed of Bolognese science, whereas that in turn was often strongly influenced by ideas and discoveries in England. Fellows of the Society were from time to time elected from Bologna, and the Society had members of the Bolognese academy among its Italian Fellows.

Founders of marine science in Britain: the work of the early Fellows of the Royal Society

1965 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-50 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Coastal Waters ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
Open Sea ◽  
High Degree ◽  
John Evelyn ◽  
British People

On 25 March 1663 John Evelyn recorded in his diary: ‘to our Society, where was an account of severall Experiments made lately at Sea by our President & other members a fortnight before’ (1). Why were the early Fellows of the Royal Society interested in the sea and what did they hope to discover? It was during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the importance of the sea to the British people was made clear. They became dependent on shipping both for defence and for economic development. W hen they established trading posts and colonies in distant lands all communications had to be made by sea and soon merchant ships were sailing regularly over oceans where only an occasional bold sailor had previously ventured to challenge the monopoly of other nations. At the same time British explorers were searching for new routes and fresh opportunities for trade. These developments stimulated interest in subjects connected with shipping. At the beginning of the seventeenth century navigation was being studied by many British mathematicians though satisfactory ways of determining longitude were not perfected until the eighteenth century (2). The continued difficulty of fixing a ship’s position in the open sea made precise observations difficult but sailors learned to take advantage of the prevailing winds and currents. They had reached a high degree of proficiency in navigating coastal waters and this knowledge was gradually extended to new lands. In 1612 Henry, Prince of Wales, commanded Sir Thomas Button to record during his exploration

Book reviews

1998 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-379
Author(s):  
Colin A. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Mathematical Practice ◽  
X Rays ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Von Liebig ◽  
Principles Of Geology

Eleven book reviews in the July 1998 edition of Notes and Records : Robert Boyle. A free enquiry into the vulgarly received notion of nature , Edward B. Davis and Michael Hunter (eds.). P. Mancosu, Philosophy of mathematics and mathematical practice in the seventeenth century . Patricia Fara, Sympathetic attractions: magnetic practices, beliefs, and symbolism in eighteenth–century England . Alan Cook, Edmond Halley: charting the heavens and the seas . Jan Bondeson, A cabinet of medical curiosities . J.M.H. Moll, Presidents of The Royal Society of Medicine . W.H. Brock, Justus von Liebig: the chemical gatekeeper . Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–33) , J. Secord (ed.). X–rays––the first hundred years , Alan Michette and Slawka Pfauntsch (eds.). Jack Morrell, Science at Oxford 1914–1939 . John Polkinghorne, Beyond science. The wider human context .

Anglo–Vietnamese diplomatic relationship in the seventeenth century: the case of the English East India Company

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Ngoc Dung Tran
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British Library ◽  
Military Alliances ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Primary Materials ◽  
Diplomatic Relationship

Abstract Drawing on primary materials from the English East India Company (EIC) archives in the British Library (London, UK), this article investigates the early diplomatic encounters between England and Vietnam (Tonkin and Cochinchina) in the seventeenth century. Previous studies have mostly focused on the English trade in Vietnam in that period and their diplomatic missions from the late eighteenth century to 1858 but partly neglected their diplomacy in their first connections with Vietnam (1614–1705). This article thus investigates how the EIC adapted its gift-giving diplomacy to the diverse and shifting political landscape of the Tonkin and Cochinchina kingdoms. While the Trịnh Lords in Tonkin severely limited diplomatic and trade exchanges with EIC agents and other European traders, the Nguyễn Lords in Cochinchina welcomed relations with EIC representatives as it served their ambition to facilitate trade and establish military alliances with other powerful actors in the region.

The Royal Society and Italy 1667-1795

1982 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-81 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Past ◽  
Psychology Today ◽  
Italian Science ◽  
High Esteem ◽  
John Wallis

Italy has often held a special place in the view of cultivated Englishmen, and this is especially the case for Italian sciences in the seventeenth century (1). At the first beginnings of the Royal Society in 1645 the young men who met for discussions in London held Italian science in high esteem. So much was this the case that among their topics of discussion, as John Wallis, by then Savilian Professor at Oxford, recalled in 1678, were the valves in the veins (whose description by Fabricius of Aquapendente had so impressed William Harvey), Galileo s telescopic discoveries and Torricelli s barometric experiment, all part of that ‘New Philosophy’ which he took to have been founded by Galileo and Bacon. This last was certainly the view to which most of the early Fellows of the Royal Society subscribed, paying constant tribute to Galileo’s role in the foundation of the new experimental science as well as in the advancement of the Copernican theory, as can be seen from the works of Robert Boyle and, later, Newton. The chronological point, self-evident but not always remembered, that living men are not constrained by dates, although historians may wish to be, is exemplified in the case of Newton’s respect for Galileo enunciated in 1687 in the first edition of the Principia , maintained through all the vicissitudes of revision in 1713 and 1723, and as long as the Principia was read, as it was throughout the seventy-five years after Newton’s death (1727), his 1687 tribute to Galileo remained fresh. Similarly, the works of post-Galilean Italian scientists by no means lost their influence because time had worn on into the eighteenth century and they had published in the seventeenth; even today a fifty-year-old book in a new edition may excite new readers, and this of course was even more true in the past when scientific advances approximated in their rate of development to those of, say, economics or psychology today.

Acoustics in the early Royal Society 1660-1680

1982 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-175 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Music Theory ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Discipline ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Collective Interest ◽  
The Subject

The early Royal Society has been the focus of much attention by historians of science over many years, (1) but strangely enough there is no really detailed account to be found of the activities and discussions which took place in the weekly meetings, although there is ample information available on the subject. This study of the Royal Society’s collective interest in acoustics aims to provide a detailed analysis of an important subject that has not been dealt with elsewhere, at the same time as providing a case study of the way in which experiments were suggested and sometimes undertaken in meetings during the first twenty years of the Society’s existence. Apart from the article published forty years ago in this journal by Lloyd, in which the author is concerned only with articles in the Philosophical Transactions relating to music theory and acoustics in the years 1677—1698 (2), the contribution of members of the Royal Society to the topic of acoustics has been treated as subsidiary to that of more famous individuals in the seventeenth century; namely Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, Isaac Newton and Joseph Sauveur. The comparative neglect of the activities of the Royal Society has arisen because writers have been concerned with tracing the ‘progress’ of acoustics as a scientific discipline, in which events in the seventeenth century merely set the scene for the triumphs of John and Daniel Bernoulli and Euler in the eighteenth century.

Thomas Henshaw and Sir Robert Paston's pursuit of the red elixir: An early collaboration between fellows of The Royal Society

1997 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald R. Dickson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
British Library ◽  
Closed World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Culture Of Science ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
The Right ◽  
Shed Light

The problems involved in using Baconian categories to understand the great instauration Bacon hoped to foster are now well known. Natural philosophers were, for Bacon, empiricists, who tested their observations of nature openly, and their foes were superstitious dogmatists, who speculated by conjuring hypotheses in secret. As Joseph Agassi has wryly remarked, ‘once a person, historian or not, accepts a division of mankind into open-minded and closed-minded, he almost invariably finds himself on the right side’.1We now appreciate how broad even the Royal Society's conception of natural philosophy was, given the hermetic interests of many of its early members.2 By examining an early collaborative effort of Thomas Henshaw and Sir Robert Paston, who were both respected Fellows of the Royal Society as well as ‘chemical alchemists’ or ‘chemical philosophers’ following a rigorous, quantitative programme of experimentation, this essay will confirm that the actual practice of natural philosophy was broad indeed, and hardly revolutionary.3 Our view of these shadowy figures is usually obscured by the backdrop against which they are set, a backdrop that was created as the category of ‘natural magic’ disappeared, with part becoming science and the rest being discarded as superstition. The evidence to be examined includes an alchemical treatise in the British Library (Sloane 2222) and Henshaw's correspondence discussing it. Although the status of alchemy certainly changed during the course of the seventeenth century, it did so because more rigorous experimentation proved the alchemist's claims to be unverifiable, not because any underlying theories had been altered. The letters, especially, illustrate this process and also shed light on the differences between the closed world of alchemy and the more open culture of science then emerging.

scholarly journals Lemurs before lemur : depictions of captive lemurs prior to Linnaeus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan S. Rogers ◽  
Stephanie L. Canington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Luxury Goods ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Carl Von Linné ◽  
Early Human

In 1758, Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) published the tenth edition of Systema Naturae , in which he formally described the most unique group of primates: lemurs. The story of the early human-mediated dispersal of lemurs from Madagascar, prior to their formalized descriptions, is a complex one. It touches on the birth of the standardization of modern zoology, empire building, and the growth of international trade and commerce, with many Fellows of the Royal Society contributing to the earliest observations of these animals in captive settings. Through the use of historical documents and artwork, we present this history in four parts: ‘Part I: The lemurs that became ‘lemurs’ (1746–1756)’, discusses the specific lemurs that Linnaeus used to describe the genera in the tenth and twelfth editions of Systema Naturae ; ‘Part II: Establishing the trade routes (1500–1662)’, examines seventeenth century captive lemurs and the role of the trade routes of the East India Companies in the transportation of lemurs from Madagascar; ‘Part III: Tracing the Bugée (1693–1732)’, reviews the lemurs identified by late seventeenth and early eighteenth century pre-Linnaean naturalists; and ‘Part IV: The chained lemur (1732–1761)’, concludes with eighteenth century lemurs in menageries and as luxury goods.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document