Blazing New World: Maths, Science, Truth and Probability

Week 9

Tutor: Michael Bycroft

This seminar...

Required preparation

Seminar questions

Something about expertise and scientific truth?

Something about the relationship between science and religion?

Something about risk, probability and uncertainty?

Key texts

• Michael Bycroft and Alexander Wragge-Morley, 'Introduction: Science and Connoisseurship in the European Enlightenment', History of Science 60 4 (2022), 439-457.
• Michael Hunter, 'Science and Heterodoxy; An Early Modern Problem Reconsidered', in David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (eds), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), 437-460.

• Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in C17th England (1985).

• Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in C17th England A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (1983).

• Margaret Poovey, The History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998).

• Rachel Trubowitz, 'The Reenchantment of Utopia and the Female Monarchical Self: Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World',Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 229-245.

Primary sources

Margaret Cavendish, Blazing New World (1666) [excerpt] ?

Further reading

On probability and uncertainty

Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability(1975).

Douglas Patey, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (1984).

Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth century (1996).

H G Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Uncertainty in English Thought 1630-90 (1963).

On Cavendish and women in science

Emma Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (2003)

Susan James (ed) Political Writings: Margaret Cavendish (2003)

Anna Batigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the exiles of the mind (1998)

Michelle Dimeo, Lady Ranelagh – The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle`s Sister (2023)

On science, taste and expertise

Michael Bycroft, Gems and the New Science Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution (2026).

Michael Bycroft, 'The Hand of the Connoisseur: Gems and Hardness in Enlightenment Mineralogy', History of Science 60 (4) (2022), 500-523.

Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, The Cambridge History of Science vol 3 : early modern science (2003).

Michael Hunter, Science and the shape of orthodoxy : intellectual change in late seventeenth-century Britain (1995).

Michael Hunter, Establishing the new science : the experience of the early Royal Society (1989).

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the air-pump : Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (1985)

Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (1996)

Alexander Wragge-Morley, 'Taste, Intersubjectivity and Medical Expertise: The Correspondence of George Cheyne, Selina Hastings and Their Patients', BJHS Themes 7 (2022), 139-156.

Charles Webster, The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).

Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (London, 1975)