Our 'Irrational' Past - Interdisciplinary Seminar Series

Hannah Straw

University of Warwick
IAS/History
19 Nov 2025
17:30-19:00 GMT

Hybrid Talk
Location: C0.02, Institute of Advanced Study, Zeeman Building, University of Warwick

Registration link: click here

Who is Dr Bendo? The Earl of Rochester and the History of a Lie

In 1676, John Wilmot, 2^nd Earl of Rochester, famously set up shop in Tower Street in central London, elaborately disguised as a mountebank doctor. During this masquerade, Rochester supposedly invented his own language, hired actors, and sold all manner of cures to his unsuspecting customers. The tale is representative, for academics and popular history alike, of Rochester’s libertine excess and theatrical flair. The only problem is…. it probably didn’t happen.

This talk will revisit this notorious incident, demonstrating the ways in which it has been misunderstood, embellished, and transformed over several centuries, and what this process can tell us about how we mediate histories of uncertainty. Drawing on contemporary sources, literary treatments, and the long afterlife of this anecdote in historical writing, this talk will follow this outrageous sham from Rochester’s alleged ‘performance’ to the 20thcentury, exploring broader questions about our historical gullibility – particularly when we want to believe that something is true.

Sergei Zotov

The Warburg Institute
03 Dec 2025

17:30-19:00 GMT

Hybrid Talk
Location:C0.02, Institute of Advanced Study, Zeeman Building, University of Warwick

Registration link:click here

Reason in the Furnace: Philosophers, Alchemy, and the Birth of Modern Physics

This talk revisits the alchemical pursuits of early modern philosophers — Leibniz, Kant, and Newton — to ask how their “irrational” experiments shaped the rational sciences that followed. Far from a marginal curiosity, alchemy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offered a laboratory for testing matter theory, causation, and transformation — concepts that would later underpin chemistry and physics.

Through close readings of manuscripts and laboratory notes, I will explore how Newton’s search for the vegetative spirit, Leibniz’s monadic metaphysics, and Kant’s fascination with the “dynamic” nature of matter reveal an early attempt to unite physical observation with metaphysical reasoning. I will also touch on the actual chemical practices behind their ideas — from distillation to metallic transmutation — to show that their “occult” operations often yielded real and replicable results.

The lecture will conclude by tracing how alchemical notions of the mutability of matter informed the philosophical groundwork of atomic physics in the early 20th century. Ideas first articulated in alchemical discourse — that nature was a continuum of interconvertible substances — directly shaped the intentions behind some of the earliest atomic experiments. In this sense, alchemy’s speculative models of change and hidden structure anticipated not irrationality, but a vital prehistory of the modern physical sciences.

Daniel Gettings

University of Warwick
History
05 Nov 2025

Hybrid Talk
Location: C0.02, Institute of Advanced Study, Zeeman Building, University of Warwick

‘Madding in Novelties’: Debating Waters in Seventeenth Century England

In 1656, physician Richard Short complained that ‘the whole world runs a madding in novelties, and our English men will not be left behind.’ Short’s complaint was with what he perceived to be a recent, dangerous uptick in those expressing opinions that water was safe to drink. These tracts championing water consumption, as well as work by the likes of Short deriding them, formed a substantive debate that raged over the seventeenth century. These arguments over the status of water, the body, and health in early modern England highlight that attitudes towards water’s consumption was far from settled at this time, regardless of prevailing historical myth. This talk explores the intellectual ideas backing up such debate, and the place of water more generally in society at this time to demonstrate the complexity of understanding water in the time before H2O.