Stephen Pumfrey

Mechanizing magnetism in restoration England—the decline of magnetic philosophy

Summary The magnet served three interests of Restoration mechanical philosophers: it provided a model of cosmic forces, it suggested a solution to the problem of longitude determination, and evidence of its corpuscular mechanism would silence critics. An implicit condition of William Gilberts ‘magnetic philosophy’ was the existence of a unique, immaterial magnetic virtue. Restoration mechanical philosophers, while claiming descent from their compatriot, worked successfully to disprove this, following an experimental regime of Henry Power. Magnetic philosophy lost its coherence and became subsumed in the study of effluvia. This contradiction of a distinct, yet mechanical magnetic philosophy came to a head in 1684 in an argument between Robert Hooke and Martin Lister. An effluvial explanation of magnetism introduced great complexity to the North-seeking behaviour of compass needles, and undermined the already troubled longitude programme. Thus magnetic philosophy no longer furthered the interests which had...

‘Your astronomers and ours differ exceedingly’: the controversy over the ‘new star’ of 1572 in the light of a newly discovered text by Thomas Digges

This article presents evidence that an anonymous publication of 1573, a Letter sent by a gentleman of England [concerning …] the myraculous starre nowe shyning, was written by Thomas Digges, Englands first Copernican. It tells the story of how it arose out of research commissioned by Elizabeth Is privy counsellors in response to the conventional argument of Jean Gosselin, librarian to Henri III of France, that the star was a comet which presaged wars. The text is significant because it seems to contain the observations and opinions that Digges held before he completed his other astronomical treatise, the groundbreaking Alae seu scalae mathematicae. It also casts some light on the development of Diggess radical and puritan views about the star, Copernican astronomy, the infinity of the universe and a belief that the ‘latter days’ of the world had arrived.

‘O tempera, O magnes!’: A sociological analysis of the discovery of secular magnetic variation in 1634

As sociologists learn more about how scientific knowledge is created, they give historians the opportunity to rework their accounts from a more contextual perspective. It is relatively easy to do so in areas with large theoretical, cosmological or overtly ideological components. It is more difficult, but equally necessary, to open up very empirical accomplishments, and recent sociological analysis of the process of science gives us some interesting insights. This paper employs some of these on the apparently unpromising subject of the ‘discovery of secular magnetic variation’ in 1634 by the Gresham professor Henry Gellibrand.

HARRIOT'S MAPS OF THE MOON: NEW INTERPRETATIONS

July 2009 is the 400th anniversary of the first telescopic observations of the Moon, made by the English scientist Thomas Harriot. Galileos later drawings were more influential, but some historians now question the traditional view that Harriots were inferior. Galileos revealed the mountainous topography of the Moon, but Harriots arguably had the different, cartographical aim of plotting lunar features precisely. This article suggests that, influenced by the remarkable work of his contemporary William Gilbert, Harriot may have devised or used his splendid Moon map, like Gilbert, to observe the phenomenon of lunar libration decades before Galileo announced its existence.

The Selenographia of William Gilbert:His Pre-Telescopic Map of the Moon and his Discovery of Lunar Libration

Some time before his death in 1603 the Elizabethan physician and natural philosopher William Gilbert (1544–1603) made astronomical history. He drew the first map of the Moon (Figure 1), and to describe the work he coined the word selenographia. More than four centuries later, it remains the only known lunar map made before the telescopic era. The sole surviving manuscript copy does not reproduce well, for which reason we are indebted to Ewen Whitaker for his careful redrawing (Figure 2). Commentators have denied it significance mainly because they find it neither detailed nor accurate. Indeed, several critics question whether it deserves to be called a map. The consequent neglect probably explains why its deeper importance in the history of astronomy has gone unnoticed for over 400 years. It can now be seen that Gilbert conceived and used the map as an instrument for detecting changes in the appearance of the lunar disc. Remarkably, the change that

Reviews : Michael Hunter and David Wootton, eds, Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, Oxford, Clarendon Press, ISBN 0-19-822736-1, 1992; 307 pp.; £69.00

Whilst the shift in dominant Western European culture from belief to unbelief is not the most important, this fascinating collection substantiates the editors’ claim that ’any account of the major transformations that have given rise to the modern world would have to give the advance of atheism, agnosticism and unbelief in general a central place. This book is concerned with the early history of that process’ (1). The historiography of unbelief is full of pitfalls, all too rarely negotiated. Its diverse currents were ignored by pious historians, or fused by others into a high road to modernity. Even the more recent exponents of mentalites who, following Febvre, have held that atheism was conceptually impossible before the high Enlightenment, are taken to task in this volume for distortion. Preconceptions seem inescapable when much of

Reviews : John W. Yolton et al., eds, The Blackwell Companion to the Enlighten ment, Oxford, Blackwell, ISBN 0-631-1540-5; x + 581 pp.; L60.00

of Prague. The confederal movement was weakened by political, social and confessional divisions and by differences between the various Estates. Antoni M~czak similarly sees internal divisions as playing a major role in the fate of seventeenth-century Poland. These were not so much within Poland itself for Magzak argues that the peculiar political structure of the Rzeczpospolita displayed considerable cohesion and durability as in the Ukraine where political, confessional and cultural differences interacted to produce a crisis that shifted much of the Ukraine into Russian hands with dramatic consequences for the balance of power in the region. In an epilogue, H.G. Koenigsberger compares the situation in Western and Central Europe in order to search for reasons for the long-term instability of the Stdndestaat or dominium politicum et regale. The most obvious were the ambition of the monarchs and the Reformation, but Koenigsberger also draws attention to those weaknesses of the Habsburg Estates discussed by earlier contributors, especially their narrow social base. He concludes by stressing the role of foreign intervention in 1619-20, the need to consider l’histoire événementielle. As a conclusion, it is worth rereading Robert Evans’s incisive and comprehensive Introduction, and considering the contrast between the position in the Erblande and that in the Empire for which, as Press reminds us, recent work has cast doubt on the traditional dualistic model of prince versus Estates.

Reviews : Patrick Curry, ed., Astrology, Science and Society. Historical Essays, Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, 1987; ix + 302 pp.; £35.00

respectively illustrate the points of criticism above and carry the subject further. N.N. Pokrovskii’s Russian-language investigation of ’Siberian seventeenthand eighteenth-century materials on &dquo;the sovereign’s word and deed&dquo; as a source for the history of social consciousness’ demonstrates the importance for Mommsen’s theme of the old official system for denouncmg treason and abuse in public life, which Mommsen ignores (Arkheologita i istochnikovedenie Slbzrz ... , ed. N.N. Pokrovskii, Novosibirsk 1988: 24-62); while English speakers seeking sources of Mommsen’s kind for pre-1917 Russian history may now consult G.L. Freeze’s collection of precisely this type of document (From Supplication to Revolutzon. A Documentary Social History of Imperial Russia, 1988).