Enfilade

Workshop | Antiquarian Science in the Scholarly Society

Posted in conferences (to attend) by Editor on March 24, 2019

A Priestess Speaking from within a Prehistoric Barrow in Drenthe, from Johan Picardt, Korte beschryvinge van eenige vergetene en verborgene antiquiteten (Amsterdam 1660), f. 47 (Rijksmuseum, RP-P-OB-77.857).

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From the project website:

Antiquarian Science in the Scholarly Society
Society of Antiquaries of London, 1–2 April 2019

Organized by Vera Keller and Anna Marie Roos

This is workshop II of the AHRC International Networking Grant: Collective Wisdom: Collecting in the Early Modern Academy. What was the relationship between archaeological fieldwork or antiquarianism and learned travel or the Grand Tour? What does collecting on tour say about the manner and scale of personal and institutional contacts between London and the scientific world of the Continent? What tools of natural philosophy were utilised to understand buildings and artefacts? What were the implications of the collecting of ethnographic objects for political dominance and Empire?

Ex libris of Z. C. von Uffenbach (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, RP-P-2015-26-1860).

Speakers include Philip Beeley (Oxford), Dominik Collet (Oslo), Luke Edgington-Brown (East Anglia), Dustin Frazier Wood (Roehampton), Vera Keller (Oregon), Chantel Grell (Versailles), Clare Hornsby (British School at Rome), Stephanie Moser (Southhampton), Staffan Müller-Wille (Exeter), Cesare Pastorino (Berlin), Anna Marie Roos (Lincoln), Edwin Rose (Cambridge), Martin Rudwick (Cambridge), Kim Sloan (British Museum), Alexander Wragge-Morley (NYU), Elizabeth Yale (Iowa).

A working session using sources from the Society of Antiquaries Library and Museum will also be part of the programme. The Society’s library is Britain’s oldest major research library for archaeology, architectural history, decorative arts (especially medieval), material culture, and the historic environment. It contains books, archives, manuscripts, prints, and drawings. Its Accredited museum collection—which was formed before the introduction of public museums and galleries in the mid-18th century—contains prehistoric, classical and medieval antiquities, seal matrices and impressions, and paintings. Full fee: £100 including lunch. Student/Concessions: £50 including lunch.

M O N D A Y ,  1  A P R I L  2 0 1 9

10:00  Registration

10:15  Welcome and Introduction by Vera Keller and Anna Marie Roos

10:20  Plenary Talk
• Stephanie Moser (Southampton) and Christian Hoggard (Aarhus), Visual Testimony: Images and Discipline-Building at the Society of Antiquaries of London

11:15  Egypt and ‘Scientific Antiquarianism’
Chair: Roey Sweet (University of Leicester)
• Chantal Grell (Université de Versailles), Tito Livio Burattini: A Seventeenth-Century Engineer and Egyptologist
• Anna Marie Roos (University of Lincoln), The First Egyptian Society, 1741–43

12:15  Lunch

1:00  The Republic of Letters, Scholarly Societies, and Antiquarianism (Seventeenth Century)
Chair: Lisa Skogh
• Vera Keller (University of Oregon), The Ottoman History of Letters
• Dominik Collet (University of Oslo), Weak Ties, Big Science: Challenges to ‘Blended Learning’ in Early Academic Collections
• Philip Beeley (University of Oxford), ‘The Antiquity, Excellence, and Use of Musick’: Ancient Greek Music and Its Reception in Late Seventeenth-Century Oxford
• Cesare Pastorino (Technische Universität, Berlin), The Features of Early Modern English Antiquarian Metrology

3:00  Coffee Break

3:15  The Republic of Letters, Scholarly Societies, and Antiquarianism (Eighteenth Century)
Chair: Jana Schuster (Cambridge)
• Dustin Frazier Wood (University of Roehampton), Antiquarian Science and Scientific Antiquarianism at the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, 1710–55
• Clare Hornsby (British School at Rome), Winckelmann, the Descrizione della Villa dell’Em Alessandro Albani, and the Society of Antiquaries of London

4:15  Hands-On Session I

6:00  Reception

T U E S D A Y ,  2  A P R I L  2 0 1 9

10:00  Registration

10:30  Plenary Talk
• Kim Sloan (British Museum), Sloane’s Antiquities: Providing a ‘Body of History’ through Beads, Bottles, Brasses, and Busts

11:30  Ruins and Remains
Chair: Caroline Barron (Birkbeck, University of London)
• Alexander Wragge-Morley (NYU), In Search of Lost Design: The Science of Ruins in the Seventeenth Century
• Elizabeth Yale (University of Iowa), Elf-Arrows and Origins: Antiquarian Collections and Human Descent
• Luke Edgington-Brown (University of East Anglia), The 1901 Excavation of Stonehenge and Its Connection to Antiquarian Research in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan

1:00  Lunch

2:00  Eighteenth-Century Natural History and Antiquarianism
Chair: Arthur MacGregor (Oxford)
• Martin Rudwick (University of Cambridge), Volcanoes and Vases: Naturalists, Antiquaries, and the Mobilisation of Images
• Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter), Following Footsteps: Linnaeus in Lapland
• Edwin Rose (University of Cambridge), From Collection to Publication: Joseph Banks, Thomas Pennant, and Defining Natural History and Antiquarianism in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain

3:30  Coffee Break

4:00  Hands-On Session II

 

New Book | Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughters

Posted in books by Editor on March 24, 2019

Distributed in North America by The University of Chicago Press:

Anna Marie Roos, Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughters: The Art of Science in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2019), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1851244898, $40.

A royal physician and fellow of the Royal Society, Martin Lister was an extraordinarily prolific natural historian with an expertise in shells and mollusks. Disappointed with the work of established artists, Lister decided to teach his daughters, Susanna and Anna, how to illustrate images of the specimens he studied. The sisters became so skilled that Lister entrusted them with his great work, Historiæ Conchyliorum, assembled between 1685 and 1692. This first comprehensive study of conchology consisted of more than one thousand copperplates of shells and mollusks collected from around the world. Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughters reconstructs the creation of this masterwork, presenting original drawings, engraved copperplates, draft prints, and photographs of the finished books.

Susanna and Anna portrayed the shells of this collection not only as curious and beautiful objects, but also as specimens of natural history, rendering them with sensitivity and keen scientific empiricism. Beautiful in their own right, their illustrations and engravings reveal the early techniques behind scientific illustration and offer fascinating insight into the often hidden role of women in the scientific revolution.

Anna Marie Roos is a reader in the history of science and medicine at the University of Lincoln.

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