Early Modern Science

(Note Special Day) The group will being discussion of Science in the Age of the Baroque (Springer, 2012), edited by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris. The first set of readings will be Part I: Order. 

Note New Time
Harun Küçük, Introduction and Chap. 3 of work-in-progress on Ottoman science. 
Please note that we are changing the time for the April and May meetings from noon to 5 pm (Eastern).

Three (relatively) recent takes on questions central to the historiography of the scientific revolution:
Daniel Garber, "Why the Scientific Revolution Wasn't a Scientific Revolution, and Why it Matters" (2016)
Peter Dear, "Historiography of Not-So-Recent Science" (2012)
Robert Westman, short selection from The Copernican Question (2011)

We discussed a selection of articles from the June 2017 special issue of History of Science on Iberian science.  Maria Portuondo, who wrote the introduction to this issue, joined us from Johns Hopkins.  To keep the reading at manageable quantity, we picked articles that engage particularly with historiographical questions.  Interested readers may want to check out the rest of this very interesting  journal issue. 
Click on the Downloads tab on this page for the pdfs of the articles.
Readings:
María Portuondo. “Iberian Science: Reflections and Studies”

Juan Pimentel and José Pardo-Tomás. “And yet, we were modern. The Paradoxes of Iberian Science after the Grand Narratives”

John Slater and Maríaluz López-Terrada. “Being Beyond: The Black Legend and How We Got Over It”

Henrique Leitāo and Antonio Sánchez. “Too Much To Tell: Narrative Styles of the First Descriptions of the Natural World of the Indies.”

* Note Special Day

We discussed two papers by Richard Oosterhoff (University of Cambridge, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities [CRASSH]) on Renaissance practices of reading and advancing knowledge claims in mathematical and astronomical texts.

1) "A Book, a Pen, and the Sphere: Reading Sacrobosco in the Renaissance,"
History of Universities 28, no. 2 (2015): 1–54.

2) "Idiotae, Mathematics and Artisans: The Untutored Mind and the Discovery of
Nature in the Fabrist Circle," Intellectual History Review 24 (2014): 1–19.

Discussion of Matthew Crawford, The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (Chicago, 2016)
The author joined us.  We focused on the Introduction, Chap. 1 and Chap. 4
Please find a pdf of these chapters under "Current Download"
 

 
Discussion of two recent articles in Isis:
J. Andrew Mendelsohn and Annemarie Kinzelbach, “Common Knowledge: Bodies, Evidence, and Expertise in Early Modern Germany,” Isis, June 2017:259-279.
 
Evan Ragland, “‘Making Trials’ in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Academic Medicine,” Isis, September 2017: 503-528.

POSTPONED Sophie Weeks, "The role of mechanics in Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration," from Zittel, Engel, Nanni, and Karafyllis, eds., Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and His Contemporaries.

"A Second Look: Leviathan and the Air Pump," published in Isis, volume 108, No. 1, March 2017. 

Readings included a recent essay review from Isis by John Henry, a chapter from David Wootton's Invention of Science, and some extracts from Floris Cohen's Rise of Modern Science Explained.

Bob Westman of UCSD and André Goddu of Stonehill College discussed with group participants their recent work on Copernicus.

Robert S. Westman, Copernicus and the Astrologers, Dibner Library Lecture, December 12, 2013, Smithsonian Libraries. (Available here.)

André Goddu, “Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer and Curtis Wilson on the Origin of Nicholas Copernicus’s Heliocentrism,” Isis, v 107, no 2, June 2016, pp. 225-253. (DOI: 10.1086/687031)

Participants in Consortium Working Groups attended remotely a symposium held at the University of Minnesota. The symposium will produce a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History on the topic "Beyond the 'Scientific Revolution:' Thinking Globally about the History of Modern Science." The presenters were:Jorge Canizares Esguerra, UT Austin Hal Cook, Brown Harun Küçük, UPenn Carla Nappi, UBC Ahmed Ragab, Harvard Kapil Raj, EHESS Paris Daniela Bleichmar, USC JB Shank, UMN Program and details

The group discussed Peter Dear's "Afterword" for the Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Science and Mary Baine Campbell's chapter on "Literature" from The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 3, Early Modern Science (2006), edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston.

We read the first two chapters from David Wootton's recent book, The Invention of Science, L. Daston's review (from the Guardian), and A. Wulff's review (from the Financial Times).

The group discussed Kleber Cecon's "Chemical Translation: The Case of Robert Boyle's Experiments on Sensible Qualities," Annals of Science, Vol. 68, No. 2, April 2011, pp. 179-198, as well as Pamela Smith's "In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, and Meaning," West 86th, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring-Summer 2012), pp 4-31.

The group joined the "Science Beyond the West" group for a special event: Dimitri Gutas and H. Floris Cohen discussed Cohen's recent book, How Modern Science Came Into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough (Amsterdam University Press, 2011).

Planning meeting for 2015-2016

Sue Wells of Temple University introduced her draft chapter, "'The Anatomy of Melancholy' and Early Modern Medicine."

Nahyan Fancy of Depauw University introduced his paper, "Avicenna, Ibn al-Nafis, and New Developments in Physiology in Western Eurasia, 1200-1560"

Harun Küçük of UPenn introduced his draft paper, "The Compass and the Astrolabe: Religion and Empirical Knowledge in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire."