ENNSE · European Networks and the New Sciences in Edinburgh

European Networks and the New Sciences in Edinburgh

This project's aim was to delineate the untold story of how educational culture from the Venetian Republic and its cultural hinterland established the foundations of post-Aristotelian scientific culture in Edinburgh in the 17th century. This account lay hidden behind hierarchical official accounts (with outward conformity to local national and confessional standards), which significantly distorted the de facto reality of institutional responses to the progress of the new sciences in formal education in Europe.The researcher discovered that an unpublished manuscript commentary on natural philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics written by the largely unknown writer and academic Adam King was the foundational text for instruction in those subjects from the early to mid 17th century at what would become the centre of Britain's Enlightenment culture, the University of Edinburgh. The text betrays an intimate familiarity with the ideas of key individuals (Paduan professors and their students) and the formal teaching approaches of scholars (Cesalpino, Galileo and Clavius among others) who operated across scholarly networks from northern Europe to the Venetian Republic. The project promised a detailed intellectual study that would trace the genealogy of institutional engagement at Edinburgh with the mechanical observational astronomy, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, and proto-empirical scientific methods contained in the Edinburgh manuscript (and the student dictates and Theses spread over 50 years that quote it verbatim) back to their sources. It would offer a detailed textual account of the use educationalists made of networked educational texts as a hypertextual entry point for the new sciences in the academy in the wake of the collapse of Aristotelian cosmology. In addition to the text-based case study and philosophical survey contained therein, the project promised to provide a biographical (of key players) account that highlighted how this process of knowledge exchange was enabled by the concerted actions of a network of specific scholars from across Europe. In sum, through this process, the project aimed to offer a detailed and wide-ranging account of how non-hierarchical cosmopolitan educational networks embedded key aspects of the new sciences within formal education.Through project publications, including critical editions of key texts, narrative biographical accounts, and detailed philosophical surveys, the overall objectives were met.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union