Dryden and the scientific image

1963 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-35
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
The Public ◽  
Scientific Image ◽  
Copernican System ◽  
Active Interest ◽  
Scientific Ideas

For one brief period, at all events, no one could speak of two cultures in England, and that period was the Restoration. The decades that surround the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 are full of the intellectual excitement that might ideally arise from the free interchange of ideas among scientists, poets, and philosophers. In no other age has it been so: no Elizabethan poet can be shown to have taken an active interest in scientific discovery, unless we call geography a science—though it is conceivable that Ben Jonson, lecturing in rhetoric at Gresham College in London in the very centre of the ferment that eventually produced the Royal Society, had access to new scientific ideas. Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) was merely a manifesto for the public encouragement of knowledge, and for years after his death it remained unfulfilled. Milton wrote Paradise Lost indifferent, apparently, to the question whether the Ptolemaic or Copernican system were true, and probably preferred the discredited Ptolemaic system for no better reason than that, in its picturesque detail, it suited his epic purposes better. And the record of English poets and philosophers after the appearance of Newton’s Principia in 1687 is hardly better. His Opticks of 1704, it is true, had a perceptible influence on eighteenth-century poets which has already been studied; but what is much more remarkable is the general avoidance of scientific discovery by the literary world of Augustan London.

Martin Folkes

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Anna Marie Roos
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
New Science ◽  
Definition Of

In 1750, Martin Folkes became the only individual who was President of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London, and he contributed to efforts to unite both organizations. Although he failed, illness forcing him to resign both offices, this chapter outlines the book’s analysis of the ensuing disciplinary boundaries between the two organizations in the early Georgian era in the context of Folkes’s life and letters. While it is normally assumed that natural philosophy and antiquarianism are disciplines that were fast becoming disconnected in this period, this work will reconsider these assumptions. The Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries were nearly reunited for good reason. Both societies incorporated techniques and affinities from antiquarianism—natural history and landscape—and the ‘new science’—engineering principles, measurement, and empiricism. Using Folkes’s life and letters, this biography will examine the disciplinary boundaries between the humanities and sciences in early Georgian Britain and reassess the extent to which the separation of these ‘two cultures’ developed in this era. It will also consider to what extent Folkes continued the Newtonian programme in mathematics, optics, and astronomy on the Continent. In this manner, the work will refine its definition of Newtonianism and its scope in the early eighteenth century, elucidating and reclaiming the vibrant research programme that Folkes promoted in the period of English science least well understood between the age of Francis Bacon and the present.

A problem picture

1949 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-42 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
The Public ◽  
George Iii

This engraving, which is reproduced by the kindness of Mr L. F. Gilbert, B.Sc., F.R.I.C., presents a problem which may or may not be worth solving. It was apparently issued to the public in the first half of the eighteenth century, but it is difficult to say why it was dedicated to the Royal Society. During this period there was an Arthur Stone living who married a daughter of Francis Fox (1675- 1738). The latter was known as 'Father Fox' when he was Chaplain to the Lord Mayor of London. Then there was George Stone (1708- 1764) who was known as 'Cardinal Lapidario' and his brother Andrew Stone (1703-1773) who conducted the negotiations which led to Henry Fox taking office under George III. Many other suggestions come to mind but it would be interesting to learn if any reader knows the engraving and can assist in solving the problem presented.

Manufacturing nature: science, technology and Victorian consumer culture

1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iwan Rhys Morus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Public Place ◽  
The Public ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Science Technology

The public place of science and technology in Britain underwent a dramatic change during the first half of the nineteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, natural philosophy was still on the whole the province of a relatively small group ofaficionados. London possessed only one institution devoted to the pursuit of natural knowledge: the Royal Society. The Royal Society also published what was virtually the only journal dealing exclusively with scientific affairs: thePhilosophical Transactions. By 1851, when the Great Exhibition opened its doors in Hyde Park to an audience of spectators that could be counted in the millions, the pursuit of science as a national need, its relationship to industrial progress were acceptable, if not uncontested facts for many commentators.

Homicide in Scotland, 1800–1849: Numbers and Theories (2)

2019 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-240
Author(s):  
W. W. J. Knox
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cause Of Death ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
Common Location ◽  
Spontaneous Action

This article challenges a series of orthodox propositions put forward by historians writing on the decline in homicide levels over the last three hundred years. Firstly, there was a decline in impulsive violence; secondly, there was a shift from stranger to intimate killing; and thirdly, there was a transition of the site of murder from the public to the private sphere. It will be argued that murder remained a mainly spontaneous action, a response to highly charged or impassioned insults and words, sometimes alcohol-fuelled and while the killing of spouses and other immediate family members increased over the course of 150 years (1700–1849), the pattern established in the second half of the eighteenth century was hardly disturbed since most victims were known to their assailants as family, friends or workmates. Stranger killing became more commonly associated with drunken brawls in taverns or in the streets; homicides that involved premeditative action, such as robbery, were rarely the cause of death. It is also clear that the street rather than the home was the most common location, again reflecting the spontaneous and opportunistic character of homicide.

Early Debates

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Llano
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Conduct Manuals ◽  
The Public ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The Social ◽  
Undeserving Poor

This chapter provides an account of how organilleros elicited public anger because their activity did not fit into any of the social aid categories that had been in place since the late eighteenth century. Social aid in Spain relied on a clear-cut distinction between deserving and undeserving poor in order to rationalize the distribution of limited resources and reduce mendicancy on the streets. Organilleros could not, strictly speaking, be considered idle, since they played music, but their activity required no specific skills and was regarded with suspicion as a surrogate form of begging. The in-betweenness of the organillero caused further anger as it challenged attempts to establish a neat distinction between public and private spaces. On one hand, organillo music penetrated the domestic space, which conduct manuals of the nineteenth century configured as female; on the other, it brought women into the public space, which those manuals configured as male.

The Practical and Symbolic Functions of Pre-Rameau Opera at the Paris Opéra before Gluck

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Michel Noiray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter explains how a uniquely long-lived canon evolved in revivals of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors—chiefly André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches—right up to the early 1770s. The Académie Royale de Musique was unique as the only theater to resist Italian repertory, except in two brief controversial periods. A dogmatic commitment to the old style and repertory survived after Lully’s death, quite separate from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opposition to this unique practice broke out occasionally among the public, but such opinion was not widely supported in the press. It is striking that the main critics of ancienne musique, as it was called—Rousseau, Paul Henri d’Holbach, and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm—all came from outside France. This chapter is paired with Franco Piperno’s “Italian opera and the concept of ‘canon’ in the late eighteenth century.”

Recording the Aloes at Chelsea - a singular solution to a difficult problem

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-57
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Singular Solution ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
General Series ◽  
History Of

In the Royal Society archives there is a collection of drawings of Aloes and other plants, made by two of the great botanical artists of the eighteenth century - Georg Dionysius Ehret and Jacob van Huysum. Although the Manuscripts General Series Catalogue records this manuscript only as a ‘Volume of 35 botanical paintings by Georg Dionysius Ehret’ of unknown provenance, the manuscript catalogue of the Arundel and other manuscripts, said to be the work of Jonas Dryander (1748-1810), provides the first clue linking these drawings to the two artists, and to the important collection of Aloes growing at that time in the Society of Apothecaries Physic Garden at Chelsea'. The history of the commissioning of the drawings is told briefly in the Journal Books of the Royal Society, and in the Minutes of Council, but the significance of these lovely and important drawings has been almost completely overlooked.

Sex in the City that Peter Built: The Demimonde and Sociability in Mid-Eighteenth Century St. Petersburg

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-930
Author(s):  
Igor Fedyukin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The City

This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provides a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I's era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”

Deconstructing female conventions

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 11-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria E. Rodríguez-Gil
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
At Home

Summary This paper examines Ann Fisher’s (1719–1778) most important and influential work, A New Grammar (1745?). In this grammar, the author did not follow the trend of making English grammar fit the Latin pattern, a common practice still in the eighteenth century. Instead, she wrote an English grammar based on the nature and observation of her mother tongue. Besides, she scattered throughout her grammar a wide set of teaching devices, the ‘examples of bad English’ being her most important contribution. Her innovations and her new approach to the description of English grammar were indeed welcomed by contemporary readers, since her grammar saw almost forty editions and reprints, it influenced other grammarians, for instance Thomas Spence (1750–1814), and it reached other markets, such as London. In order to understand more clearly the value of this grammar and of its author, this grammar has to be seen in the context of her life. For this reason, we will also discuss some details of her unconventional lifestyle: unconventional in the sense that she led her life in the public sphere, not happy with the prevailing idea that women should be educated for a life at home.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the TermAnthropocene

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Morton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Earth’S Crust ◽  
Steam Engine ◽  
Radioactive Materials ◽  
Earth Systems ◽  
Huge Data ◽  
Earth's Crust ◽  
Great Acceleration ◽  
Geological Period

Not a day goes by in the 2010s without some humanities scholars becoming quite exercised about the termAnthropocene. In case we need reminding,Anthropocenenames the geological period starting in the later eighteenth century when, after the invention of the steam engine, humans began to deposit layers of carbon in Earth’s crust. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s term has been current since 2000.1In 1945, there occurred “The Great Acceleration,” a huge data spike in the graph of human involvement in Earth systems. (The title’s Kubrick joke stems from the crustal deposition of radioactive materials since 1945.) Like Marx, Crutzen sees the steam engine as iconic. As this is written, geologists such as Jan Zalasiewicz are convincing the Royal Society of Geologists to make the term official.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document