Course texts:
Students should get their own copy of Brian Vickers, ed., English Science, Bacon to Newton (Cambridge UP, 1987 – paperback). Please also use the Penguin Classics edition of Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (2004 – paperback). The remaining seventeenth-century texts will be made available on Fronter, together with the required secondary material listed below. Recommended background reading: Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1996 - paperback). The course will also refer to various issues covered in the introduction to Rhetoric and the Early Royal Society: A Sourcebook, eds. Tina Skouen and Ryan J. Stark (Brill, 2014), pp. 1-37 (to be distributed). Suggestions for further reading will be posted on Fronter.
Prose:
- Francis Bacon, excerpts from Preparative towards a Natural and Experimental History, appended to the Novum Organum (the “New Instrument” of scientific method, 1620); excerpt from New Atlantis (c. 1624) (both texts in Vickers, English Science, pp. 23-44).
- William Harvey, excerpts from An Anatomical Disputation Concerning the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Living Creatures (De motu cordis, 1628), 35 pages.
- Robert Boyle, excerpts from Experiments with the Air-Pump (1660) (in Vickers, pp. 45-67).
- “Tryals Proposed by Mr. Boyle to Dr. Lower, to be Made by Him, for the Improvement of Transfusing Blood out of One Live Animal into Another,” Philosophical Transactions Vol 1 (1665-1666), 3 pages.
- Henry Power, excerpts from various experiments with the microscope in Experimental Philosophy (1664) (in Vickers, pp. 88-98).
- Robert Hooke, from Micrographia (1665), excerpts from the Preface, plus Observations I and VI (in Vickers, pp. 99-113); and excerpts from the Observations of insects (Vickers, pp. 124-133).
- An account of Micrographia, or the Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, made by Magnifying Glasses. Philosophical Transactions Vol 1 (1665-1666), 4 pages.
- An account of [blood] transfusion, Philosophical Transactions Vol 2 (1666-1667), 8 pages.
- Thomas Sprat, excerpts from The History of the Royal Society (1667) (in Vickers pp. 160-182); Dedication “To the King”
- Isaac Newton, Preface (1687) and General Scholium (1713) to The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosphy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (University of California Press, 1999), pp. 381-383 and pp. 939-944.
- Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666), in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Lilley, pp. 123-225.
- Student’s choice of a full preface (or a selection of prefatory material) from one of the above works to be studied in more detail
Poems:
- Abraham Cowley, poem addressed “To the Royal Society” (1667)
- Edmond Halley, “Ode on This Splendid Ornament of Our Time and Our Nation, the Mathematico-Physical Treatise by the Eminent Isaac Newton” (1687)
- John Theophilus Desaguliers, “The Newtonian System of the World, the best Model of Government: An Allegorical poem” (1728)
Required secondary reading (available via Fronter):
- Roy Porter, “The Culture of Science,” in Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Allen Lane, 2000), pp. 130-155.
- Peter Dear, “Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society,” Isis 76:2 (1985), pp. 145-161.
- Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross, “First English Periodical,” Chapter 1 in The Scientific Literature. A Guided Tour, eds. Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross (University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 1-38.
- Alan G. Gross, “The Case for the Rhetorical Analysis of Science,” in Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies (Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), pp. 3-47.
- Brian Vickers, “Introduction” to English Science, Bacon to Newton, ed. Vickers, pp. 1-22.
- Paul Nurse, “The New Enlightenment” (The Richard Dimbleby Lecture 2012)
Online resources:
Students are encouraged to explore the current website of the Royal Society (the UK’s academy of science) at royalsociety.org (incl. blogs, Facebook, Twitter). Other key resources include oxforddnb.com (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), eebo.chadwyck.com (Early English Books Online), rhetoric.byu.edu (The Forest of Rhetoric - encyclopedia).