Margaret C. Jacob

A women's scientific society in the west. The late eighteenth-century assimilation of science.

The Natuurkundig Genootschap der Dames (Women’s Society for Natural Knowledge), formally established by and for women, met regularly from 1785 to 1881 and sporadically until 1887. It challenges our stereotypes both of women and the physical sciences during the eighteenth century and of the intellectual interests open to women in the early European republics. This essay aims not simply to identify the society and its members but to describe their pursuits and consider what their story adds to the history of Western science. What does this society’s existence tell us about the relationship between women and early science in general and about science and society in the Dutch setting in particular? Science and gender look rather different when observed through the activities of the immensely prosperous women of Middelburg, citizens of one of the most highly literate Western countries. The elite lives of the first‐generation members of the women’s society also offer us a glimpse into the early domestication of science, a process vital to its acceptance and assimilation.

Science and social passion: the case of seventeenth-century England.

Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981,233 pp., plus introduction and appendix. John Bowle, John Evelyn and His World. A Biography. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, 277 pp. Brian Easlea, Witch-hunting, Magic and the New Philosophy. An Introduction to Debates of the Scientific Revolution, 1450-1750. Harvester Press, Brighton, Sussex and Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1980. Morris Berman. The Reenchantment of the World. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1981. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1980, 348 pp. plus introduction.

The Saints Embalmed. Scientists, Latitudinarians, and Society: A Review Essay

Slightly more than two decades ago in an article entitled “Scientists and society: the saints preserved” we began an historiographical intervention into the debate about the social origins of modern science. In that 1971 review essay we argued that recent work on the Restoration latitudinarians, particularly the important contribution of Barbara Shapiro, did not adequately account for the role played in latitudinarian thought by political and ecclesiastical interests. The time has come to return to the discussion. This occasion has been presented by the publication of a book of essays written for a conference held in 1987 at the Clark Library, entitled Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700 , and edited by Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin. The volume constitutes one of the few recent contributions to an important debate about science and religion that was noisy in the 1970s and largely ignored during the Tory backlash of the 1980s. But the times are finally changing, and revitalization may now be occurring in British cultural and intellectual history. The newly edited volume stands at the cusp of the revitalization. It struggles to move forward to fresher approaches toward culture, i.e. toward the view that texts require historical and linguistic location. Yet the volume is trapped by those few contributors who are still wedded to conventions and attitudes now largely confined to the high churchmen of the 1980s. The volume revolves around two themes: the nature of liberal English Protestantism after 1660 and the contested role of science in that mental and social construct. These are themes basic to English historiography in this century, if not before, and they are very much associated with the writings of Robert Merton and Christopher Hill. Their work largely focused on the mid-century Puritans; in the 1970s attention turned to the latitudinarians and their scientific associates, from Boyle to Newton.

The Importance of Early Modern European Science and the State of the Field

Multiauthored volumes such as the one under review mark the state of a field at a moment in time. Thus this review seeks to assess where we are in the field of early modern history of science early in the twenty-first century. Over thirty contributors from both sides of the Atlantic wrote chapters for this eight-hundred-plus-page tome, and, with a few notable exceptions, almost all of the contributors fall chronologically between two watershed historiographical moments in the field: the vast majority did their graduate training when the war between the internalists and externalists had run out of steam in the late 1970s and an attendant corollary, British Marxism, had lost its cutting edge; and almost all were in the profession in some capacity during the Sokal affair of the mid 1990s and its aftermath (and not least, the accompanying Zeitgeist, the rise and demise of postmodernism).1 Arguably, the effects of both cultural moments, spanning the 1960s to the 1990s, can be seen in many of the essays here discussed. On the positive side, none of the anxiety about what constituted true science in early modern Europe—so commonplace in the 1960s and directly correlated with internalist concerns—finds a place in these essays. As the editors—as well as Daniel Garber, Lynn S. Joy, William Eamon, Ann Blair, Steven Shapin, Steven J. Harris, and many others— continually note, the modern terms “science” and, certainly, “scientists” pose hazards that can undermine any attempt at verisimilitude about what early modern approaches

Marion Brétéché, Les Compagnons de Mercure: Journalisme et politique dans l’Europe de Louis XIV

Marion Breteche, Les Compagnons de Mercure: Journalisme et politique dans l’Europe de Louis XIV (Dissertatie Universite Paris-Sorbonne; Ceyzerieu: Champ Vallon, 2015, 356 pp., isbn 979 1 02670 022 7).

Freemasonry and the Enlightenment

Of the many forms of new social behavior to become an integral part of enlightened culture during the eighteenth century, Freemasonry has been the most difficult to understand. Secretive, ritualistic, devoted in many Grand Lodges to hierarchy that would be one set of characteristics. Benjamin Franklins Freemasonry warrants further consideration for what it can tell one about the role of Freemasonry in the Enlightenment and vice-versa. Indeed there are a host of major themes emerging out of Franklins relationship to Freemasonry. Freemasonry played a significant and complex role in the development and transmission of intellectual currents in Enlightenment thought as well as in the revolutionary creation of democratic republics on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, and other European locales before the middle of the eighteenth century, women were welcomed as members of lodges, sometimes in the same lodges as men. Keywords: Benjamin Franklin; democratic republics; enlightenment naturalism; European locales; Freemasonry

In Praise of Ordinary People

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Religious Knowledge And The Origins Of Modernity

The link between secularization and modernity has long been debated, but only someone with the acuity and deep learning of Jan Bremmer could succeed in making us look with fresh eyes at this crucial issue. There would be no secularization without religion in first place, and religion itself has become a highly contested concept. Do all cultures have religion, or is religion a concept that only has meaning in the now secularized Christian world? That is to say, does religion exist as a distinct phenomenon only where church and state are separated as they are in the West? In the spirit of contributing to the genealogy of the concept religion and its relationship to Modernity, this chapter looks in depth at one of the earliest European works Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde , that offered a comparative analysis of religious ceremonies and customs throughout the world. Keywords: Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde ; Christian; church; religion; religious ceremonies

Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe . Edited by Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. ix, 437.

The Marxists had it right all along, they just got tripped up by their materialism. Early modern capitalism opened vast new worlds, particularly in the arts and sciences, only the traffic went both ways. Creative agents invented new markets and pushed commerce in directions that favored enterprises immensely cosmopolitan and innovative, often solely for the sake of beauty and display. Commerce offered a context but the nobility, and not an imagined bourgeoisie, had the edge when it came to exploiting the market for objets . Paintings could be traded for property, land, and houses. Princes could sponsor natural philosophers, and the fluidity in values meant that good investors, like good practitioners of the arts and sciences, took an interest in all aspects of learning. The interrelatedness of the representational arts and natural philosophy stands as one of the central themes in this tightly integrated collection of essays. We now have a vast historiography telling us that we should no longer teach early modern science without reference to the art of the time, and vice-versa. The point is beautifully illustrated by an exhibition recently held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (spring 2002) on the art of Pieter Saenredam. Working in Utrecht in the 1630s, he used geometry to regularize and make precise the angles and corners found in the exquisite paintings he made of the citys churches. He knew as much about geometry as he did about chiaroscuro. At precisely the same moment, an hour or two away by barge, Descartes in Leiden put the final touches on his Discourse on Method (1637). In effect he explained to the world why precision and clarity of thought made possible the kind of beauty that Saenredams paintings would come to embody.

27.95.

handful of unexplained music-speciac terms. Some of the literature cited may be unfamiliar to those outside of musicology, and the composers named are not always the most famous, though, in context, their appeal may be broader (for example, Soterraña Aguirre Rincón discusses known works of Josquin des Prez and Nicolas Gombert, two popular composers of the Renaissance who could be used to illuminate the court of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V).