scholarly journals Truth and Wonder in Richard Head’s Geographical Fictions

Sederi ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 117-137
Author(s):  
Sonia Villegas López
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Floating Island ◽  
The Status ◽  
Geographical Discourse

In line with the method prescribed by members of the Royal Society for natural history and travel writing, Richard Head explored the limits of verisimilitude associated with geographical discourse in his three fictions The Floating Island (1673), The Western Wonder (1674) and O-Brazile (1675). In them he argues in favor of the existence of the mysterious Brazile island and uses the factual discourse of the travel diarist to present a semi-mythical place whose very notion stretches the limits of believability. In line with recent critical interpretations of late seventeenth-century fiction as deceptive, and setting the reading of Head’s narrations in connection with other types of travel writing, I argue that Head’s fictions are a means of testing the readers’ gullibility at a time when the status of prose, both fictional and non-fictional, is subject to debate.

scholarly journals The English Connection: Jacob and Johann Philipp Breyne, James Petiver and Plants: The Correspondence between the Breynes and Petiver from the 1690s

2022 ◽  
Vol 128 (5) ◽  
pp. 167-198
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Pękacka-Falkowska
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central

The article discusses the hitherto unknown correspondence between the Danzig (present-day Gdańsk) botanist Jacob Breyne, his son Johann Philipp Breyne, and James Petiver in the last decade of the seventeenth century. Their correspondence documents contacts between one of the most important naturalists of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the seventeenth century and members of the Royal Society. The content of the letters reveals how books, naturalia and various artefacts circulated between Western and East-Central Europe. It also reveals the principles of reciprocity and friendship followed by those who conducted inquiries into natural history.

scholarly journals ‘Vividness’ in english natural history and anatomy, 1650–1700

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Wragge-Morley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Rhetorical Device ◽  
John Ray ◽  
The Mind ◽  
It Knowledge ◽  
The Brain

This article concerns the use of rhetorical strategies in the natural historical and anatomical works of the seventeenth-century Royal Society. Choosing representative works, it argues that naturalists such as Nehemiah Grew, John Ray and the neuroanatomist Thomas Willis used the rhetorical device known as ‘comparison’ to make their descriptions of natural things vivid. By turning to contemporary works of neurology such as Willis's Cerebri Anatome and contemporary rhetorical works inspired by other such descriptions of the brain and nerves, it is argued that the effects of these strategies were taken to be wide-ranging. Contemporaries understood the effects of rhetoric in terms inflected by anatomical and medical discourse—the brain was physically altered by powerful sense impressions such as those of rhetoric. I suggest that the rhetoric of natural history could have been understood in the same way and that natural history and anatomy might therefore have been understood to cultivate the mind, improving its capacity for moral judgements as well as giving it knowledge of nature.

Essay review. Robert Hooke under the microscope

2004 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-302
Author(s):  
J. Friesen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Essay Review ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Robert Hooke ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
The Status ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Century Thought

Three centuries after Hooke's death his contributions to late seventeenth–century thought are only beginning to be examined in their totality. Hooke's reputation as a leading experimentalist and founding father of The Royal Society has been obscured by the success of his rival Isaac Newton and pro–Newtonian historiography that has portrayed him as the man who thought of the grand idea second, an innovative figure who vindictively accused Newton and others of plagiarism despite his own failures to publicize his discoveries or to carry his many projects to completion. These four books attempt to rescue Hooke from historical neglect. As Jardine in her biography explains, the goal is ‘to retrieve Hooke and his genius, and give him back the status he undoubtedly deserves today, as a groundbreaking thinker and brilliant experimentalist, a founding figure in the European scientific revolution’.

The Animal Chemistry Club; assistant society to the Royal Society

1967 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-185 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
Parent Body ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Linnean Society ◽  
The Status ◽  
Common Interests ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Monolithic Structure

Towards the end of the eighteenth century it was becoming increasingly clear that the Royal Society alone was inadequate to provide the facilities needed for the detailed discussion of all the specialized branches of science. Groups of Fellows with common interests began to meet privately in order to discuss their problems and consider ways in which their particular branch might be studied and improved. In days when numerous coffee and dinner clubs were springing up, it was an easy matter to persuade a circle of friends and colleagues to join in following the fashionable trend. Thus a common interest might be furthered in a congenial atmosphere (i). Already in 1788, the Linnean Society had been formed with the aim of improving the study of Natural History (2). Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, intent upon measures which would raise the status of the Fellowship, looked with disfavour on anything which appeared likely to undermine the standing of the Royal Society. Nevertheless, he lent strong support to the Linnean Society in its early days (3), allowing its members full use of his extensive personal collection of specimens, so that by 1790 the new Society was well established (4). But by developing independently of the Royal Society, the Linnean Society became its rival in the field of Natural History. This was a blow to the monolithic structure of the parent body and Banks became more wary of the possible effects which might follow the formation of other such specialized groups, though he gave his qualified support to the Horticultural Society, established in 1804 and later to the Geological Society, set up in 1807 (5).

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.

Edward Heron-Allen FRS (1861–1943): a review of his scientific career, with an annotated bibliography of his foraminiferal publications

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Hodgkinson ◽  
John E. Whittaker
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Annotated Bibliography ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
Scientific Career ◽  
History Museum ◽  
First Time

ABSTRACT: In spite of his many other interests, Edward Heron-Allen also worked for nearly 50 years as a scientist on minute shelled protists, called foraminifera, much of it in an unpaid, unofficial capacity at The Natural History Museum, London, and notably in collaboration with Arthur Earland. During this career he published more than 70 papers and obtained several fellowships, culminating in 1919 in his election to the Royal Society. Subsequently, he bequeathed his foraminiferal collections and fine library to the Museum, and both are housed today in a room named in his honour. In this paper, for the first time, an assessment of his scientific accomplishments is given, together with a full annotated bibliography of his publications held in the Heron-Allen Library. This is part of a project to produce a bibliography of his complete publications, recently initiated by the Heron-Allen Society.

Transmission of Renaissance herbal images to China: the Beitang copy of Mattioli’s commentaries on Dioscorides and its annotations

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
National Library ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Northern Chinese ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Animal Names ◽  
National Library Of China ◽  
Made In

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.

Rewriting Renaissance ornithology: Jean Baptiste Faultrier's “Traitté general des oyseaux” (1660)

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. CHARMANTIER ◽  
M. GREENGRASS ◽  
T. R. BIRKHEAD
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Travel Literature

“Traitté general des oyseaux” was written in 1660 by Jean Baptiste Faultrier, a taxman working in Louis XIV's royal hunting lodge. The 787-page, un-illustrated manuscript was dedicated to the all-powerful Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's superintendent of the finances. Faultrier used an impressive variety of sources, from the natural history treatises of Aldrovandi and Belon, to falconry treatises, Italian bird-keeping manuals, Thevet's travel literature, and husbandry books. Faultrier's work brought together many facets of ornithology, and placed natural history, hunting and bird-keeping on the same level. Although on a par with Jonston's De avibus (1650), Faultrier's “Traitté” was never printed and remained unknown until 2004. Analysis of the content reveals how Faultrier worked and his aim in writing such a manuscript, which is one of the only ornithology works of seventeenth-century France.

The Royal Society Specimens from the Chelsea Physic Garden, 1722-1799

1993 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-224 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Important Link ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Herbarium Collections ◽  
Important Evidence

The deed of conveyance of 1722, by which Sir Hans Sloane gave the Society of Apothecaries control of their ‘Physick Garden at Chelsey’ in perpetuity, forged an important link between the Apothecaries and the Royal Society, one that has lasted to the present day. For the next 75 years the Apothecaries paid an annual tribute of dried plant specimens to the Royal Society as proof that they were continuing to use the garden for its proper purpose. These specimens, which have survived the centuries with remarkably little damage, now provide important evidence of what was being grown in the garden at the time and may also be nomenclaturally important as representing plants given botanical names by Philip Miller in 1768. A careful search in the herbarium collections of the Department of Botany in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, where the Royal Society specimens are now held, has resulted in the location of all but a small number of the 3750 specimens that were sent. Tracing them has not been easy for a number of reasons, not least because they are now dispersed among the several million specimens in the Museum’s collections. The names of the plants used by the Apothecaries in the lists that were the starting point for the search were those current at the time, hence of pre-Linnaean character, and had first to be linked to present-day names before the work could begin. Some lists of names were found to be inaccurate and some were entirely misleading.

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