Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: discovering the Renaissance reader
- Part I THE MATERIAL TEXT
- Part 2 READING AS POLITICS
- Part 3 PRINT, POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE
- Part 4 READING PHYSIOLOGIES
- 7 Reading bodies
- 8 Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society
- Part 5 READING IN THE TIME
- Index
8 - Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: discovering the Renaissance reader
- Part I THE MATERIAL TEXT
- Part 2 READING AS POLITICS
- Part 3 PRINT, POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE
- Part 4 READING PHYSIOLOGIES
- 7 Reading bodies
- 8 Reading and experiment in the early Royal Society
- Part 5 READING IN THE TIME
- Index
Summary
The business of the Society as I sayd before [is] three fold to wit the perusall of Bookes, the consulting of men & the Examination and tryall of things … acquisitions shall be brought into and Read in the Society at the usuall place & time & then recorded in their proper place there to be perused at any convenient time by the members of the Society & by none els whatsoever.
Robert HookeREADING IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE
Back when everyone accepted that the Scientific Revolution was something that had actually happened, one of its defining features was always said to be a turning away from the world of ‘words’ towards that of ‘things’. The existence and importance of the shift seemed incontrovertible. It was everywhere visible and prominent. All the new philosophies of the seventeenth century, however erudite, obscure or occult they may have seemed to modern eyes, loudly claimed to be abandoning slavish and idle adherence to ancient authority in favour of active and powerful engagement with the powers of nature themselves. The general trend was exemplified by an anecdote that Johann Joachim Becher, an enterprising mid-seventeenth-century chymist, economic innovator and natural philosopher, was fond of telling to anyone who would listen. The anecdote described an alchemical adept who, on hearing a scholastic professor lecture on the impossibility of transmutation, got up in front of the class and turned lead into gold there and then.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England , pp. 244 - 272Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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