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]