Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions

Set in the context of Counter-Reformation Rome, this book focuses on the twenty-year long relationship (1611-1630) between Galileo Galilei and Federico Cesi, the founder of the Academy of the Lynx-eyed. Contrary to the historiographical tradition, it demonstrates that the visions of Galileo and Cesi were not at all convergent. In the course of the events that led to the adoption of the anti-Copernican decree of 1616, Galileo realized that the Lynceans were not prepared to support his battle for freedom of thought. In addition to identifying the author of the anonymous denunciation of Galileo’s Assayer, Paolo Galluzzi offers an original reconstruction of the dynamics which culminated in the Church’s condemnation of the famous Tuscan scientist in 1633.

This book was originally published in Italian as Libertà di filosofare in naturalibus: I mondi paralleli di Cesi e Galileo (Storia dell’Accademia dei Lincei, Studi 4). Rome: Scienze e Lettere, Editore Commerciale, 2014.

John Wilkins (1614-72): New Essays presents ten fresh essays on the life and work of the influential English natural philosopher and theologian, John Wilkins. Wilkins, one of the most prominent figures in the scientific revolution in England, and a founder of the Royal Society of London, published widely on astronomy, mechanics, language, and theology, and was also an important churchman and politician. These ten essays review Wilkins’s writings and influence, while also addressing the wider contexts of his activities, including his service as head of house at two successive colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, and his political work. This new collection thus covers all aspects of Wilkins’s career, and functions as a complete reappraisal of this seminal early modern figure.

Contributors are: C. S. L. Davies, Mordechai Feingold, Felicity Henderson, Natalie Kaoukji, Rhodri Lewis, Scott Mandelbrote, Jon Parkin, William Poole, Anna Marie Roos, and Richard Serjeantson.

Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe investigates how Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia was read, interpreted and remodelled for a variety of readerships in eighteenth-century Europe. The editors, Mordechai Feingold and Elizabethanne Boran, have brought together papers which explore how, when, where and why the Principia was appropriated by readers in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, England and Ireland. Particular focus is laid on the methods of transmission of Newtonian ideas via university textbooks and popular works written for educated laymen and women. At the same time, challenges to the Newtonian consensus are explored by writers such as Marius Stan and Catherine Abou-Nemeh who examine Cartesian and Leibnizian responses to the Principia. Eighteenth-century attempts to remodel Newton as a heretic are explored by Feingold, while William R. Newman draws attention to vital new sources highlighting the importance of alchemy to Newton.

Contributors are: Catherine Abou-Nemeh, Claudia Addabbo, Elizabethanne Boran, Steffen Ducheyne, Moredechai Feingold, Sarah Hutton, Juan Navarro-Loidi, William R. Newman, Luc Peterschmitt, Anna Marie Roos, Marius Stan, and Gerhard Wiesenfeldt.

In this tribute to Anthony Grafton, a preeminent historian of early modern European intellectual and textual culture and of classical scholarship, fifty-eight contributors present new research across the many areas in which Grafton has been active. The articles span topics from late antiquity to the 20th century, from Europe to North American, and a full spectrum of fields of learning, including art history, the history of science, classics, Jewish and oriental studies, church history and theology, English and German literature, political, social, and book history. Major themes include the communities and dynamics of the Republic of Letters, the reception of classical texts, libraries and book culture, the tools, genres and methods of learning.

Contributors are: James S. Amelang, Ann Blair, Christopher S. Celenza, Stuart Clark, Thomas Dandelet, Lorraine Daston, Mordechai Feingold, Paula Findlen, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Robert Goulding, Alastair Hamilton, James Hankins, Nicholas Hardy, Kristine Louise Haugen, Bruce Janacek, Lisa Jardine, Henk Jan de Jonge, Diane Greco Josefowicz, Roland Kany, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Arthur Kiron, Jill Kraye, Urs B. Leu, Scott Mandelbrote, Suzanne Marchand, Margaret Meserve, Paul Michel, Peter N. Miller, Glenn W. Most, Martin Mulsow, Paul Nelles, William R. Newman, C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Laurie Nussdorfer, Jürgen Oelkers, Brian W. Ogilvie, Nicholas Popper, Virginia Reinburg, Daniel Rosenberg, Sarah Gwyneth Ross, Ingrid D. Rowland, David Ruderman, Hester Schadee, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Richard Serjeantson, Salvatore Settis, Jonathan Sheehan, William H. Sherman, Nancy Siraisi, Jacob Soll, Peter Stallybrass, Daniel Stolzenberg, N.M. Swerdlow, Dirk van Miert, Kasper van Ommen, Arnoud Visser, Joanna Weinberg and Helmut Zedelmaier.

This collective volume in the history of early-modern science and medicine investigates the transfer of knowledge between Germany and Scotland focusing on the Scottish mathematician and physician Duncan Liddel of Aberdeen. It offers a contextualized study of his life and work in the cultural and institutional frame of the northern European Renaissance, as well as a reconstruction of his scholarly networks and of the scientific debates in the time of post-Copernican astronomy, Melanchthonian humanism and Paracelsian controversies.

Contributors are: Sabine Bertram, Duncan Cockburn, Laura Di Giammatteo, Mordechai Feingold, Karin Friedrich, Elizabeth Harding, John Henry, Richard Kirwan, Jane Pirie, Jonathan Regier.

Richard ‘Dutch’ Thomson (d. 1613), best known today as a Bible translator and one of the earliest English Arminians, was admired in his own day for his learning. This book provides the first biography of Thomson. It maps his connections with his contemporaries, reconstructs his reading, and edits his surviving correspondence, some seventy-eight letters. Thomson moved among the greatest scholars of his day, and was good friends with Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon. He travelled in Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, became a member of five universities, and worked with manuscripts in the libraries in England, Florence, Geneva, Heidelberg and Leiden. Modern scholarship, working within national boundaries, has tended to see only a part of the whole picture.

In Making the New World Their Own, Qiong Zhang offers a systematic study of how Chinese scholars in the late Ming and early Qing came to understand that the earth is shaped as a globe. This notion arose from their encounters with Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni and other Jesuits. These encounters formed a fascinating chapter in the early modern global integration of space. It unfolded as a series of mutually constitutive and competing scholarly discourses that reverberated in fields from cosmology, cartography and world geography to classical studies. Zhang demonstrates how scholars such as Xiong Mingyu, Fang Yizhi, Jie Xuan, Gu Yanwu, and Hu Wei appropriated Jesuit ideas to rediscover China’s place in the world and reconstitute their classical tradition.

Winner of the Chinese Historians in the United States (CHUS) "2015 Academic Excellence Award"

In A Sincere and Teachable Heart: Self-Denying Virtue in British Intellectual Life, 1736-1859, Richard Bellon demonstrates that respectability and authority in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain were not grounded foremost in ideas or specialist skills but in the self-denying virtues of patience and humility. Three case studies clarify this relationship between intellectual standards and practical moral duty. The first shows that the Victorians adapted a universal conception of sainthood to the responsibilities specific to class, gender, social rank, and vocation. The second illustrates how these ideals of self-discipline achieved their form and cultural vigor by analyzing the eighteenth-century moral philosophy of Joseph Butler, John Wesley, Samuel Johnson, and William Paley. The final reinterprets conflict between the liberal Anglican Noetics and the conservative Oxford Movement as a clash over the means of developing habits of self-denial.

Researching and writing its history has always been one of the tasks of the university, particularly on the occasion of anniversary celebrations. Through case studies of Prague (1848, 1948), Oslo (1911), Cluj (from 1919), Leipzig (2009) and Trondheim (2010), this book shows the continuity of the close relationship between jubilees and university historiography and the impact of this interaction on the jubilee publications and academic heritage. Up to today, historians are faced with the challenge of finding a balance between an engaged, celebratory approach and a more distant, academically critical one. In its third part, the book aims to go beyond the jubilee and presents three other ways of writing university history, by focusing on the university as an educational institution.
Contributors are: Thomas Brandt, Pieter Dhondt, Marek Ďurčanský, Jonas Flöter, Jorunn Sem Fure, Trude Maurer, Emmanuelle Picard, Ana-Maria Stan and Johan Östling.

In Science in the Vanished Miguel de Asúa provides the first modern comprehensive account of Jesuit science in the missions of Paraguay and the River Plate region during the 17th and 18th centuries. Focusing on individual Jesuits and underlining the relationships of their work to the religious goals of the Society of Jesus, the book covers the disciplines of natural history, cartography, medical botany, astronomy and the topics pursued by the former missionaries in their Italian exile. Based on many so far unexplored manuscripts and a vast corpus of primary sources, the book argues the existence of a tradition of research on nature consistent with universal Jesuit science and at the same time original in its articulation of Western learning and aboriginal lore on nature.

In The Humboldtian Tradition, eleven scholars consider Wilhelm von Humboldt as a historical phenomenon and a contemporary symbol. Inspired by the growing body of literature that in recent years has problematized the modern research university, they put Humboldt’s basic academic principles into context and discuss their significance for the current debate about higher education.
The authors draw on the latest research in order to bring the educational and research policies of our day into perspective. At a time when the university is undergoing deep-seated transformations worldwide, they address the question how we should relate to the ideas associated with Humboldt’s name. What is his relevance to the twenty-first century?
Contributors are: Mitchell Ash, Pieter Dhondt, Ylva Hasselberg, Marja Jalava, Peter Josephson, Thomas Karlsohn, Claudia Lindén, Johan Östling, Sharon Rider, Hans Ruin, Susan Wright.

In Failure of American and Soviet Cultural Imperialism in German Universities, 1945-1990 Natalia Tsvetkova describes the American and Soviet policies in German universities during the Cold War. In both parts of divided Germany the conservative professorate resisted both the American and Soviet policies of reforms in universities. Whether these policies can be considered cases of cultural imperialism will be discussed in this book. As well as how and why both American and Soviet policies of the transformation of German universities eventually failed.

Scholars in Action addresses the complexities of the culture of knowledge, focusing on the scholar, or savant, as its main actor. The book explores how, and to what end, savants in the 18th Century collated, produced, critiqued, propagated, diffused, and applied knowledge.
Investigating scholars’ diverse practices of knowledge, the volume’s six sections are organised around central scholarly activities: rising and advancing, reading and judging, perceiving and reacting, printing and communicating, observing and experimenting, as well as advising and serving.
Based on a wide range of sources and looking at a great variety of savants, an international group of 40 authors open up new perspectives on eighteenth-century scholars and scholarship.

Contributors include Kirill Abrosimov, Gunhild Berg, Thomas Biskup, Holger Böning, Simona Boscani-Leoni, Barbara Braun-Bucher, Laurence Brockliss, Florence Catherine, Lorraine Daston, Simone De Angelis, Bettina Dietz, Clorinda Donato, Claudia Engler, Iris Flessenkaemper, Daniel Fulda, Marian Füssel, Martin Gierl, Rainer Godel, Karl S. Guthke, Thomas Habel, Caspar Hirschi, László Kontler, Urs Leu, Annette Meyer, Marion Mücke, Miriam Nicoli, Andreas Önnerfors, Hole Rössler, Anne Saada, Torsten Sander, Hartmut Schleiff, Ulrich Johannes Schneider, Reinhart Siegert, René Sigrist, Justin Stagl, Regula Wyss, and Simone Zurbuchen.

This book offers a fresh interpretation of a series of ground-breaking reforms introduced at the University of Oxford in the first half of the nineteenth century. Innovations such as competitive examination, a uniform syllabus and a broad range of degree subjects are often seen as products of the reforming zeal of early nineteenth-century Britain. By contrast, this book argues that many such developments are more accurately understood as attempts by senior university members and government officials to respond to the challenge posed by a new generation of confident, politically-aware students influenced by the ideas of the American and French Revolutions. As such it highlights the importance of generational conflict as a factor influencing the nature and course of university reform.

Matter and form have been fundamental principles in natural science since Greek Antiquity and their apparent rejection during the seventeenth century typically has been described as a precursor to the emergence of modern science. This volume reconsiders the fate of these principles and the complex history of their reception. By analyzing work being done in physics, chemistry, theology, physiology, psychology, and metaphysics, and by considering questions about change, identity, and causation, the contributors show precisely how matter and form entered into early modern science and philosophy. The result is our best picture to date of the diverse reception of matter and form among the innovators of the early modern period.

In Studies on Early Modern Aristotelianism Paul Richard Blum shows that Aristotle’s thought remained the touchstone of modern philosophy; for it was the philosophy taught at universities. The concept of philosophy at Jesuit schools forms the first part of this book. Their impact on the sciences and mathematics in combination with Renaissance ideas of nature is the topic of the second part. The transformation of Aristotelian metaphysics and theology under the influence of the Renaissance is the third area of this book. Surprising continuity from the late Middle Ages into modernity and the radical difference of subject centered modern philosophy from ‘teachable’ school philosophy are innovative in these studies.

Treatments of the reception of Darwinism have focused on Western Europe and North America. This book turns to Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century. Having hosted Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle, Argentina had a claim to being the cradle of Darwinism. Such claims, together with other cultural currents placed the appropriation or rejection of Darwinism at the center of the struggle to articulate the national identity of the emerging Argentine Republic. Two chapters of original historiography are followed by eight chapters of new English translations of primary sources from the Argentine reception of Darwinism, including texts (by Domingo Sarmiento, Eduardo Holmberg, and others) well known to students of Latin American letters, but never before published in English.

For more than two centuries in which Catholicism was illegal in Scotland, the Scots Colleges abroad operated as a sixth Scottish university. During this time the university’s alumni, individually and collectively, helped to ensure the survival of Catholicism in Scotland through political and military activity as well as missionary work. Earlier scholarship has treated the colleges individually and overlooked the degree to which the university corpus formed coherent networks which, over two centuries, made significant contributions to greater European cultural and intellectual movements. Through a number of examples, a picture is given of the hitherto little recognised Scottish Catholic contribution to developments in the Arts, Humanities and Sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In early modern Europe, fundamental geographical as well as religious certainties became unstable. At the intersection of the two stood sacred geography. This book examines the scope and content of this early modern scholarly genre, which engaged many of Europe’s leading scholars. On the one hand, 'geographia sacra' is analyzed in the context of antiquarian scholarship. Equipped with newly-developed sophisticated tools, scholars compiled, measured, and meticulously documented biblical and ecclesiastical space. On the other hand, this study argues, 'geographia sacra' was never detached from present concerns, and took part in confessional debates over scriptural authority, papal legitimacy, and the authenticity of liturgy. Hence today’s interest in the notions of ‘sacred space’ and spatiality had a lively, controversial, and crucial precedent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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Whereas nineteenth-century university jubilees traditionally led to the writing of histories that celebrated an individual university, in this volume they have inspired instead a stimulating comparative approach that studies jubilees themselves across Northern Europe. Starting from the bicentenary of Helsinki University in 1840 and finishing with the opening of the University of Iceland in 1911, this book focuses on the importance of these jubilees for the development of Scandinavist ideas and increasing cultural and scientific cooperation between the Nordic countries. Can these jubilees be regarded as the driving force of increasing Nordic cooperation? The analysis here shows that university and political authorities have always sought the right balance between the national, regional (in casu Nordic) and international character of their celebration.

Descartes among the Scholastics takes the position that philosophical systems cannot be studied adequately apart from their intellectual context: philosophers accept, modify, or reject doctrines whose meaning and significance are given in a particular culture. Thus, the volume treats Cartesian philosophy as a reaction against, as well as an indebtedness to, scholastic philosophy and touches on many topics shared by Cartesian and late scholastic philosophy: matter and form, causation, infinity, place, time, void, and motion; the substance of the heavens; principles of metaphysics (such as unity, principle of individuation, truth and falsity). One moves from within Cartesian philosophy and its intellectual context in the seventeenth century, to living philosophical debate between Descartes and his contemporaries, to its first reception.

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