CALL FOR PAPERS: Thomas Harriot Seminar

Are you a researcher working on the late-sixteenth or early seventeenth century? Do you have research interests in any of the following fields: history of science, history of mathematics, the history of maritime exploration, navigation and early colonial America? If so, you might be interested in the Thomas Harriot Seminar, which meets annually (alternating between Durham University and Birkbeck, University of London). The seminar is named after the Elizabethan mathematician Thomas Harriot (1560-1621), and is devoted to the study of all of the areas in which Harriot was involved, this includes topics such as astronomy, atomism, alchemy and metallurgy, optics, statics and mechanics, algebra, geometry, number theory, navigational mathematics, maritime history, ballistics, the art of war, and early linguistics and cryptography. We would particularly welcome papers from younger scholars working in any of these fields (or cognate areas).

For more information please contact the Chairman, Dr Stephen Clucas or visit the Seminar’s website: Thomas Harriot Seminar


Dr Stephen Clucas,
Editor, Intellectual History Review

Reader in Early Modern Intellectual History,
Birkbeck, University of London,
Malet Street,
London WC1E 7HX

Tel: 020 3073 8421

Thomas Harriot Seminar 2015

Durham Castle, University of Durham, 6-7 July 2015

The Thomas Harriot Seminar celebrates the life and times of the mathematician Thomas Harriot (1560-1621), and welcomes papers on Harriot himself as well as on the history of mathematics and science in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century more generally. We particularly welcome papers on subjects of interest to Harriot, which included: pure and applied mathematics, the new world, astronomy, natural philosophy, alchemy, optics, linguistics, and the art of war. For more information about the Seminar please visit the Thomas Harriot Seminar website:


Richard Osterhoof (CRASSH University of Cambridge) “Gabriel Harvey and the utility of mathematics”

Robert Goulding (University of Notre Dame), “Through a glass, darkly: shadows, light, and prismatic colours.”

Glyn Parry (University of Roehampton), “The Ordeal of Thomas Digges”

Cathy France (University of Leeds), “Thomas Digges and the ballistic trajectory”

Stephen Johnston (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford), “Edward Wright at Sea – Detected and Corrected”.

David Harris Sacks (Reed College, Oregon), “Learning to Know: Richard Hakluyt and Thomas Harriot in Oxford.”

Todd Andrew Borlik (University of Huddersfield), “John Dee’s ‘Hydragogie’ and Fen Drainage in the Seventeenth Century”

Susan Maxwell (Independent Scholar), “Preparing for circumnavigation: Thomas Cavendish and Francis Drake”

Registration fee: £95 (includes accommodation at the Castle, drinks reception, conference dinner on the 6th and buffet lunch on the 7th). Non-residential fee (without dinner and lunch): £35. Two bursaries are available for MA or PhD students, covering residential registration (if you would like to apply for one of these, please email the Chairman explaining why attending the seminar would be useful to your research). To register please email the Chairman Dr Stephen Clucas.


Dr Stephen Clucas
Editor, Intellectual History Review
Reader in Early Modern Intellectual History,
English and Humanities,
Birkbeck, Univesity of London,
Malet Street,
London WC1E 7HX

Thomas Harriot Lecture 2014: “The Certain and Full Discovery of the World: Thomas Harriot and Richard Hakluyt”

Thursday 29 May 2014, 5pm, in the Champneys Room, Oriel College Oxford.

David Harris Sacks
Richard F. Scholz Professor of History and Humanities
Reed College, Portland , Oregon USA
Life Member, Clare Hall, Cambridge UK

Richard Hakluyt the younger and Thomas Harriot, in their different ways, were explorers and discovers in newly-opened territories of learning. The former promoted ventures of overseas discovery and published the results of those who had made them. For him the world was the terrestrial globe, the earth. His own explorations, as he would emphasize, were largely in journeys to libraries and archives. He made what might be called second-order discoveries, derived primarily from the larger narrative that emerged from his arrangement of the sources he collected, edited and published, mainly in his Principal Navigations of the English Nation, which first appeared in 1589 and was then substantially into three large volumes published between 1598 and 1600.It is a work he undertook in fulfillment of “the certain and full discovery of the world,” a project, first focused on and then developed in the era of Europe’s wars of religion, that he made his life’s work. Hakluyt was a conduit for knowledge acquired by others, and a promoter and guide to discovery.

Harriot, in his way, also sought certainty and fullness of knowledge, but for him the “world” included the celestial as well as the terrestrial globe. He made discoveries at the first hand, some in Virginia with which Hakluyt was especially connected, but most in the realms of mathematics and what we now call the natural sciences. However, apart from his account of the “new found land of Virginia,” which he published under his own name in 1588 and which Hakluyt helped make widely available thereafter, none of his discoveries reached print during his lifetime. As he would say, he “was contented with a private life for the love of learning” in order that he “might study freely.” While he lived, his numerous discoveries circulated primarily to his patrons and intimate friends. But by the time he had significant new discoveries to report in the first years of King James I’s reign, both his patron—Sir Walter Ralegh and the 9th Earl of Northumberland—were incarcerated in the Tower of London at the King’s pleasure, and as he suggested in a letter to one of his correspondents, he found it dangerous in these circumstances to philosophize openly on matters that might arouse accusations of religious or moral heterodoxy.

This lecture examines the wider cultural significance of this drive for certainty in what could be known about the world as God had created it and explores the circumstances, conditions, and contexts underpinning it. It treats the ideas and desires of both men in light of their associations with an Erasmian form of irenicism, which inculcated in each of them, it will be argued, not just in their intellectual and religious upbringing but in their experiences of the brutal religious and political upheavals of their era and its effects on individuals influential in their lives—not least Sir Walter Ralegh on whose patronage the two men depended early in their careers. For purposes of the lecture, particular attention will be given to their educations, especially in Oxford during their student days.

Thomas Harriot Seminar 2012

The Thomas Harriot Seminar (THS) exists to promote the study of the life and times of the Elizabethan mathematician and natural philosopher Thomas Harriot (1560-1621). The THS meets biennially in Durham (in December) and features papers both on the work of Harriot himself, and on various aspects of the history of sixteenth- and early-seventeenth century science and mathematics (including the history of navigation) and the discovery and colonisation of the New World. It publishes an occasional newsletter, and a series of Occasional Papers (details of how to purchase these are available on the website).

The next Thomas Harriot Seminar will be held at St Chad's College, University of Durham on the 15-17 December 2012. Speakers will include: Matteo Valleriani, Adam Mosley, Alexander Marr, Jim Bennett, Philip M. Sanders, Makiko Okamura, Jackie Stedall, and Robert Goulding.

The 2012 Thomas Harriot Lecture (by Professor Lesley Cormack of the University of Alberta), organised and hosted by Oriel College, Oxford, will be on the 31 May. More details of both events can be found on the website.

If you have any news items relating to Thomas Harriot, or you would like to hear more about the Seminar and its activities, please contact the Vice-Chairman of the Seminar, Dr Stephen Clucas (s.clucas@bbk.ac.uk)

Thomas Harriot Seminar 2012