Workshop on Mathematical and Astronomical Practices in pre-Enlightenment Scotland and her European Networks

23-24 Nov, 2018, St Andrews

Outline of meeting:

The workshop will focus on Scottish natural philosophy and mathematics, and their innovative developments between 1550 and 1750. The astronomical observatory James Gregory founded at the University of St Andrews in 1673, six years behind Paris, but two years ahead of Greenwich, is just one example of relevant institutional initiatives that were taking place in 17th-century Scotland. However, despite the major shifts in scientific culture taking place elsewhere, traditional Scottish historiography of the period has been framed in terms of religious factions. The question of how scientific innovations flourished in this context has been little addressed.

To understand this question, we are particularly interested in mathematical practices related to measurement both in astronomy and in contexts such as navigation, surveying, cask gauging, grain measuring, and so on. Early modern professional gaugers and measurers were essentially authoritative mediators, often at the service of local authorities, powerful lords, or the crown itself, mediating between merchants, bankers, landowners, town dwellers, and public authorities. Some apparently paradoxical processes of conceptual change in early modern mathematics, such as of ratio and proportionality, can only be understood by examining the mathematical collective tacit knowledge developed through practices with measuring instruments. Such instruments, and the associated practices, concepts, and books, circulated through networks of exchange.

Provisional Programme:

Friday 23 November

9.00-9.30 Registration

9.30
Alison Morrison-Low (National Museums of Scotland): Surviving scientific instruments from early modern Scotland: a survey

Samuel Gessner (Lisbon): Thinking with instruments and the appropriation of logarithms on the Iberian Peninsula around 1630

11.00 Coffee

11.30 Kevin Baker: Practices of Reading the Principia: How contemporaries engaged with Newton’s book in the years immediately after publication

Olivier Bruneau (Lorraine): Colin MacLaurin (1698-1746): a Newtonian between theory and practice

13.00 Lunch

14.00 Visit to Special Collections to see St Andrews' collection of Medieval and Early Modern mathematics and astronomy books

15.30 Tea

16.00
Steve Russ (Warwick): John Napier: the mysterious making of a mathematician

David Horowitz (St Andrews): John Craig (1663-1731)

Saturday 24 November

9.00
Davide Crippa (CNRS, Sphere): James Gregory and his Italian readers: beating untrodden paths

Pilar Gil (St Andrews): Building an astronomical observatory in the knowledge community of St Andrews in the 17th century

Bruno Almeida (Lisbon)

11.00 Coffee

11.30
Alex Craik (St Andrews): George Sinclair on Hydrostatics

Jane Wess (Edinburgh): Colin MacLaurin on Wind and Water: the Local and the Universal

13.00 Lunch

13.45 Albrecht Heefer (Ghent): The difficult relation of surveyors and algebra: the hundred geometrical questions of Cardinael

Philip Beeley (Oxford)

Antoni Malet (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)

15.45 Close

Workshop on Mathematical and Astronomical Practices
Pdf version of provisional programme and abstracts, as of 22-10-18

Registration

This event is organised in conjunction with the British Society for the History of Mathematics and sponsored by the British Society for the History of Science and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, to whom many thanks.

If you have any enquiries, please contact Isobel Falconer

Organised by the BSHM and the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews; sponsored by the British Society for the History of Science, and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications

CALL FOR PAPERS: Shakespeare in the North

Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
2 June 2016

Keynote speakers: 

Professor Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam)

Professor Richard Wilson (Kingston)

Professor Peter Davidson (Aberdeen)

The four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016 will, more than ever, focus attention on this question: where and to whom does Shakespeare belong? Much critical work has been done on Shakespeare’s global reach and ‘travels’, especially in relation to processes of colonisation and postcolonial emancipation. Through this work, Shakespeare has been shown to be ‘local’ to many environments across the globe, however problematically. Equally, thinking about Shakespeare’s role in, and appropriation and construction by the various, conflicted, diasporic, devolving and devolved communities of the British Isles has become a critical orthodoxy. Yet what of Shakespeare’s position in locations which, while not seeking independence or devolution through political means, retain a strong sense of being different and separate from official (privileged) strands of national culture? Because they do not fall neatly into the categories of either the ‘nation’ or the ‘colony’, these locations and their engagement with Shakespeare can become invisible and critically neglected. This neglect corresponds with such locations’ perceived and actual socio-political distance from sites of cultural and political power.

We therefore welcome 200-word abstracts for 20-minute papers that might address the following questions or related topics:

• As we approach another moment of significant reflection on Shakespeare’s place in the world, can and should we speak of ‘Shakespeare in the North’?
• When we say the ‘North’ where do we mean? What are the North’s edges and boundaries? How does addressing questions like these affect perceptions and uses of culturally central figures like Shakespeare?
• How can we extend our understanding of the tensions involved in seeing Shakespeare as a ‘universal’ writer and seeing him as a property of a particular nation, to a micro-level of regional reception, reinvention, and appropriation?
• In what ways has Shakespeare been appropriated in the ‘North’ of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland? What effects has this appropriation had on Shakespeare and the regions of the ‘North’?
• How, for example, do Barrie Rutter’s Northern Broadsides challenge understandings of ‘metropolitan’ Shakespeare?
• What might the function and history of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s annual visits to Newcastle upon Tyne tell us about the role of professional (and amateur) Shakespearean theatre in provincial locations?
• In a political climate in which Northern territories actively query notions of ‘British unity’ (in both Scotland and Northern Ireland), what relevance might Shakespeare have to ‘Northern’ political autonomies?
• What theoretical frameworks might be applicable to understanding ‘regional’ or local Shakespeares?
• What is at stake in the scholarship surrounding the biographical and religious controversies surrounding Shakespeare’s ‘time’ in the ‘North’?
• How did Shakespeare and his contemporaries demarcate and perceive the ‘North’ and Northern-ness?

Please submit abstracts to Adam Hansen by 1 January 2016 (adam.hansen@northumbria.ac.uk).

International Symposium on Sir David Lyndsay’s A Satire of the Three Estates,

Registration is now open for the International Symposium on Sir David Lyndsay’s A Satire of the Three Estates, which will take place at Pollock Halls of Residence, Edinburgh, on 6-8th June 2014.

The symposium is sponsored by the AHRC-funded ‘Staging and Representing the Scottish Renaissance Court’ project, led by Professor Greg Walker (Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, University of Edinburgh), Professor Thomas Betteridge (Chair of Theatre, Brunel University), and Dr Eleanor Rycroft (University of Bristol) in collaboration with Historic Scotland.

In June 2013, the project was responsible for the staging in Linlithgow of the first full-length professional production of The Three Estates since the original performances in 1552 and 1554, and for the recreation of Lyndsay’s 1540 Interlude in Linlithgow Palace and Stirling Castle. The project website (http://www.stagingthescottishcourt.org/) contains more information along with film of the performances.

The full symposium programme along with links to registration can be found here.

The conference fee is £82 for the three days, or £35 for Saturday only; B&B accommodation at the venue is an additional £42 per night. In addition, a small number of full bursaries for registered postgraduate students are available. If you wish to be considered for one, please write directly, with a short description of your situation, to greg.walker@ed.ac.uk.

Please note that registration will be open until the conference itself, but if you are booking accommodation, we ask that you do so by 30 May.

You can find us on Twitter @Satire3Estates.