Dear All,

This is just  reminder that the 2014 Thomas Harriot Seminar will be held at Birkbeck’s 43 Gordon Square building on the 11 July. This year there are are papers on Harriot, William Gilbert, Thomas Digges, and Francis Bacon, and topics include mechanics, gunpowder experiments and medical distillation. Registration is free, but please email if you plan to attend ([log in to unmask]). The programme follows.

Stephen

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THOMAS HARRIOT SEMINAR 2014

Friday 11 July 2014. Birkbeck, University of London.

43 Gordon Square, room 124 (first floor)

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 late sixteenth and 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. This year’s seminar will include a keynote address by Matthias Schemmel, author of The English Galileo: Thomas Harriot's Work on Motion as an Example of Pre-Classical Mechanics, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol. 268 (Springer, 2008). For more information about the Seminar please visit the Thomas Harriot Seminar website: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_seminars/thomas-harriot-seminar

Registration is FREE, but if you would like to attend please email Stephen Clucas: [log in to unmask]

10.00-11.00

Keynote speaker: Matthias Schemmel (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin):

‘Geometry in Flux: Thomas Harriot's Geometry of Motion’

11.00-11.30 Tea and Coffee

11.30-13.00

Stephen Pumfrey (University of Lancaster): ‘Annihilating the sublunary world: the background to

     William Gilbert’s revolutionary cosmos’.

Glyn Parry (University of Roehampton): ‘Thomas Digges, Persecutor’.

13.00-14.00 LUNCH

14.00-15.30

Haileigh Robertson (University of York): ‘Gunpowder Experiments in Early Modern Natural

     Philosophy.’

Fabrizio Bigotti (Warburg Institute) ‘Distillation and medicine in Italy at the age of Antonio de'

     Medici (1576-1621).’

15.30-16.00 Tea and Coffee

16.00-17.30

James Everest (UCL), “That no due investigation has been made […] may be considered an

     astonishing piece of negligence”: Francis Bacon and the ‘Form’ of Light

Gavin Selerie, ‘Harriot in Re-performance: a Poet’s View.’

Dr Stephen Clucas,

Editor, Intellectual History Review

Reader in Early Modern Intellectual History,

English and Humanities,

Birkbeck, University of London,

Malet Street,

London, WC1E 7HX

Tel: 020 3073 8421