CALL FOR PAPERS: 'Artisans of the Surface' 1450-1750

20-21 September 2018,  King's College London

This workshop focuses on the practices of a range of artisans (tailors, barbers, cooks, cheesemakers, gardeners, and agronomists) and their relationships with the fields of meteorology, botany, natural history, medicine, earth sciences, and veterinary medicine. These artisans and their practices shared a set of skills related to the observation and manipulation of human and non-human surfaces. We will explore how, and if, practical knowledge about the surface of things and bodies (and their storage and preservation in relation to specific environmental conditions) led to the concept of nature and matter as composed of layers, and how such a framework contributed to the demise of traditional Galenic and Aristotelian views on nature.

This workshop also aims at getting past the dichotomies between quantitative and qualitative knowledge and between natural philosophy and the arts, and so we intend to broaden the focus to include a set of artisans who have traditionally remained invisible from accounts of this ‘age of the new’. We will explore the many different ways in which ‘modern science’ emerged, the relationships between social and cognitive practices, and the contribution that non-mathematical sciences gave to the mental habits of observing, collecting, experimenting with, and manipulating natural matter.

Confirmed speakers are Emanuele Lugli (York) on tailors, Elaine Leong (MPIWG, Berlin) on domestic health practices, Bradford Bouley (UC Santa Barbara) on butchers, Maria Conforti (La Sapienza) on the surface of the earth, and Carolin Schmiz (EUI) on barber-surgeons. Sandra Cavallo (Royal Holloway) will offer final remarks. We welcome proposals that complement these topics, in particular those that address the relationships between gardening, natural history, and medicine; cooking and knowledge; work on animal skin; leatherwork; or veterinary medicine. Presentations will be followed by ample time for discussion and reflection, and so we are happy for works in progress.

Proposals (up to 250 words) for 20-minute papers should be sent to Paolo Savoia at renaissanceskin@kcl.ac.uk by 8 June 2018. We may be able to provide speakers with reasonable accommodation and travel costs. Please indicate when you apply if you will require assistance with expenses.


Dr. Paolo Savoia|Postdoctoral Research Fellow
'Renaissance Skin' (Wellcome Trust)
King's College London|Strand|London WC2R 2LS|room K0.27
Phone: +393332802718|Email: paolo.savoia@kcl.ac.uk
Twitter: @RenSkinKCL
https://renaissanceskin.ac.uk/

Remembering James Petiver (1665-1718)

26th April 2018
The Linnean Society of London

Registration Now Open

Remembering James Petiver (1665-1718)

This day meeting marks the tercentenary of the death of James Petiver FRS, an important but often overlooked professional apothecary and compulsive natural historian in 18th-century London. Petiver made significant contributions to multiple fields of natural history, above all botany and entomology. An assiduous correspondent and collector, he successfully cultivated sources of natural historical intelligence and material from the Americas to the East Indies.

Speakers will assess Petiver’s life and legacy by deploying a range of historical and scientific disciplinary perspectives. On the 300th anniversary of his death, the meeting will set out to remember James Petiver:

• as a practising natural historian of substantial abilities and merit
• as a collector and cataloguer of natural historical specimens with enduring significance
• as a writer of both manuscript correspondence and published natural historical texts
• as an apothecary whose professional and private scientific interests mutually informed each other
• as a social networker both within London and across the globe
• as an historical figure whose legacy has been contested and which is ripe for reconsideration

Speakers: Dr Arnold Hunt, Dr Charles E Jarvis FLS, Sebestian Kroupa, Dr Alice Marples, Katrina Maydom, Professor Kathleen S Murphy, Dr Victoria Pickering, Professor Richard Vane-Wright FLS. Respondent: Dr Emma Spary.

Organisers: Richard Coulton, Charlie Jarvis

Dr Richard Coulton
Senior Lecturer in English
School of English and Drama
Queen Mary University of London

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'Remembering James Petiver (1665-1718)': Thursday 26 April 2018
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All Souls College Seminar in the History of Pre-Modern Science

Trinity Term 2018
Conveners: DMITRI LEVITIN and PHILIPP NOTHAFT

All sessions will be held on Wednesdays, 5.00–6.45pm. Please note that the location will alternate between the Wharton Room and the Hovenden Room – details for each individual seminar are provided below. Access to the College is via the entrance on the High Street; please ask at the porter’s lodge for further directions, or consult the information at Visiting the College. All very welcome.


25 April MICHAEL HUNTER (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘The “Decline of magic” reconsidered’ [Wharton Room]


2 May MAXIMILIAN SCHUH (Heidelberg), ‘Perceptions of nature between scholastic knowledge and individual observation: William Merle’s weather diary (1337-1344) and his De prognosticatione aeris (1340)’ [Hovenden Room]


9 May FELICITY HENDERSON (Exeter), ‘Robert Hooke, art, and craft in Restoration London’ [Wharton Room]

16 May ANDREW WILSON (All Souls College, Oxford), ‘The transmission of mechanical technologies between the Mediterranean and China in antiquity’ [Hovenden Room]

23 May MONICA AZZOLINI (Bologna), ‘News from Sicily: Italian naturalists and the Royal Society on volcanic eruptions and earthquakes’ [Wharton Room]


30 May MONICA AZZOLINI (Bologna), ‘News from Sicily: Italian naturalists and the Royal Society on volcanic eruptions and earthquakes’ [Wharton Room]

6 June MARIE-ALINE THÉBAUD-SORGER (Centre Alexandre-Koyré, Paris; Maison Française, Oxford), ‘“Airs” as boundary objects: the elaboration of a collective knowledge at the crossroad of chemistry, practical arts, and medicine in the eighteenth century’ [Wharton Room]


13 June ANUJ MISRA (Observatoire de Paris), ‘Atha brahmāṇḍanirmāṇa: an Aristotelian view of the cosmos in a sixteenth-century Sanskrit text on mathematical astronomy’ [Hovenden Room]

CALL FOR PAPERS: Scientiae 2017 - Extended Deadline

Proposals are invited for the sixth annual Scientiae conference on disciplines of knowing in the early modern world (roughly 1400-1800), which will take place at the University of Padua, 19-22 April 2017. Our Keynote Speakers will be Paula Findlen (Stanford), Claire Preston (QM London), and Antonio Clericuzio (Roma Tre).

The major premise of this conference series is that knowledge during this period was inherently interdisciplinary, involving complex mixtures of theories, practices and objects, which had yet to be separated into their modern ‘scientific’ configurations. Although centred on attempts to understand and control the natural world, Scientiae addresses natural philosophy, natural history, and the scientiae mixtae within a wide range of related fields, including but not restricted to Biblical exegesis, medicine, artisan practice and theory, logic, humanism, alchemy, magic, witchcraft, demonology, divinatory practices, astronomy, astrology, music, antiquarianism, experimentation and commerce.

This year attention is especially given to the history of early modern knowledge and erudition, the history of universities, particularly though not exclusively the history of the university of Padua, as well as the history of the book and the history of political thought.

In addition to individual papers, we seek panel proposals about, though not exclusively:

• Teaching with Collections
• The Enlightenment
• The Republic of Letters
• Early Modern Universities and Amateur Knowledge
• Venice-Vienna-Costantinople-Moscow: The Other Early Modern Europe

Please email your 250-word abstract, together with a one-page CV to Scientiae Padua

EXTENDED DEADLINE: 15 January 2017 – Accepted speakers will be notified on 22 January

The deadline for abstract submission is 15 January 2017. We shall be notifying the selection outcome by 22 January.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: Instruments & arts of inquiry: natural history, natural magic and the production of knowledge in early modern Europe

Journal of Early Modern Studies is seeking contributions for a special issue (Spring 2014)

Editors: Dana Jalobeanu & Cesare Pastorino
Deadline 1 October 2013

We seek papers exploring the intersections between the disciplines of natural history, natural magic and the books of secrets tradition in the early modern period. We are particularly interested in the various ways in which texts and practices in the tradition of natural magic and the books of secrets were absorbed, transformed and integrated in the renovated natural histories of the seventeenth century.

Further details at:
http://www.zetabooks.com/newsflash/cfp-jems-spring-2014.html

Guidelines for authors:
http://www.zetabooks.com/download2/JEMS-Guidelines.pdf

Please send your contribution by 1st of October 2013 to dana.jalobeanu@gmail.com.

dr. Dana Jalobeanu
University of Bucharest
Faculty of Philosophy
Splaiul Independentei 204
Bucuresti

History Comes to Life: Seventeenth-Century Natural History, Medicine and the 'New Science

Friday, 27 April 2012, 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Royal Society, London.

This conference considers the interrelationships between medicine and the endeavour of natural history in the seventeenth-century. It will be held to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Martin Lister (1639-1712), Royal Physician and the first arachnologist and conchologist. The meeting will not only address Lister's work but will consider to what extent practices and technologies of natural history changed between the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. We will also explore how acquisition of natural history knowledge and new schemes of taxonomy affected perception and treatment of animals for medical and experimental use.

Speakers and session chairs include:

Prof. Tim Birkhead FRS, University of Sheffield;
Dr Isabelle Charmantier, University of Exeter;

Prof. Anita Guerrini, Oregon State University;

Dr Sachiko Kusukawa, Trinity College, Cambridge;

Dr Gillian Lewis, St. Anne's College, Oxford;

Dr Dániel Margócsy, Hunter College;

Dr Brian Ogilvie, University of Massachusetts, Amherst;
Dr Anna Marie Roos, University of Oxford;
Dr Charlotte Sleigh, University of Kent;
Dr Alexander Wragge-Morley, University College, London.

The conference is organised by Dr Anna Marie Roos and sponsored by Cultures of Knowledge, University of Oxford, and the Mellon Foundation; The Fell Fund; The British Society for the History of Science; the Royal Society; and the Wellcome Trust.

The conference fee is £40 (full fee), or £30 (student/retired/unemployed). The conference fee includes lunch and refreshments. An optional conference dinner will be organised at an extra cost of £35. There are a limited number of student bursaries available to assist with conference fees and other expenses.

Registration for this event is now open online at:

http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/history-comes-to-life/

Please email Felicity Henderson (felicity.henderson@royalsociety.org) with any queries about this event.