Examining sources and case studies, this fascinating book explores early Christianity, how it was studied, how it is studied now, and how Judaeo-Christian values came to form the ideological bedrock of modern western culture. Looking at the diverse source materials available, from the earliest New Testament texts and the complex treaties of third century authors such as Lactantius, to archaeology, epigraphy and papyrology, the book examines what is needed to study the subject, what materials were available, how useful they were, (...) and how the study of the subject may be approached. Also including a comprehensive guide for students that lists major collections of literary and non-literary sources, major journals and series, and major text books. (shrink)

Romantic sensibility and political necessity led Humphry Davy, Britain's most prominent scientist in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, to pantheism: nature worship, involving for him a fervent belief in the immortality of the soul. Rapt with a vision of sublimity, from mountain tops or balloons, men of science in succeeding generations also found in pantheism a reason for their vocation and a way of making sense of their world. It should be seen as an alternative both to active (...) participation in church life (like Faraday's) and to a gritty agnosticism (like Huxley's), indicating again how subtle and complex relationships were between science and religion in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the application of science to a practical activity. The story begins in the late eighteenth century, a period of agricultural innovation, with various authors urging that definite chemical knowledge should replace rule of thumb in the application of fertilisers. In the work of Archibald Cochrane, ninth Earl of Dundonald, we find this exhortation beginning to give way to descriptions of actual chemical experiments, and interpretations of equilibria in the soil. But it is only with Davy's (...) Agricultural chemistry of 1813 that we get clear descriptions of soil analyses that could be undertaken by a farmer, accompanied with a certain amount of biochemical information on the growth of plants. Davy's recommendations were essentially conservative; he provided support for the best practices already being recommended by innovators. His book is interesting too, for the light it casts upon his more theoretical writings. (shrink)

Historians generally grumble at the liberties taken with letters and papers by editors and biographers in the past, while reviewers may complain at the professorial pomposities which interfere with the reader's interaction with the text. Certainly, reading is not a mere matter of information retrieval or of source-mining, but a meeting of minds, and any over-zealous editing which makes this more difficult will have failed. Editors, whether of journals or of documents, are midwives of ideas—self-effacingly bringing an author's meaning and (...) style into the world. What reviewers praise is the unobtrusive, and what they damn is ‘a manner at once slapdash and intrusive’, making allowances perhaps for an ‘introduction which is as admirable as his footnotes are useless’. When in the 1960s new technology brought us a flood of facsimile reprints of scientific works, some avoided these problems by appearing naked and unashamed: but for a text on phrenology, or for Goethe's Theory of Colours, a fig leaf or two of commentary is really necessary to help the innocent reader to interact with the book. Facsimiles of nineteenth-century editions of Wilkins' papers, of some Newton correspondence, or of Henry More's poetry are even more problematic; the reader should know that these editors' assumptions cannot be taken for granted, and that their introductions are themselves historical documents. The exact reproduction of misprints and misbindings is of dubious assistance to the modern reader. (shrink)

This chapter discusses chemistry's connection to natural theology, tracing the history of chemistry from its origins in alchemy to developments in the twentieth century. Alchemists sought to ape and speed up God's creation, but were concerned about whether artificial gold would be the same as natural gold. Modern chemists too, as they sought to improve the world through their syntheses of dyes, vitamins, and textiles, have been taxed with producing poor substitutes for the natural and the organic. God's creations are (...) still seen as superior to humans'. The nature of chemistry has made it a less-obvious science for natural theology, but by no means a barren field. (shrink)

Alchemists' illustrations indicated through symbols the processes being attempted; but with Lavoisier's Elements (1789), the place of imagination and symbolic language in chemistry was much reduced. He sought to make chemistry akin to algebra and its illustrations merely careful depictions of apparatus. Although younger contemporaries sought, and found in electrochemistry, a dynamical approach based upon forces rather than weights, they found this very difficult to picture. Nevertheless, by looking at chemical illustrations in the eighty years after Lavoisier's revolutionary book, we (...) can learn about how reactions were carried out, and interpreted, and see that there was scope for aesthetic judgement and imagination. (shrink)

Oersted has been a puzzle for historians of science. Unflatteringly regarded by contemporaries in Britain and France as a metaphysician, he astonished and galvanised the learned world in 1820 with his discovery of electromagnetism. Suddenly famous, he was belatedly honoured; but, like Röntgen with X-rays, did no more serious work on the discovery that brought him renown, leaving that to Ampère and Faraday while he concentrated on an aesthetics that would bridge arts and sciences, and on building up scientific institutions (...) at home in Denmark in the wake of the Napoleonic wars and the British bombardment of Copenhagen. He lived in exciting times under the last absolutist monarchy in western Europe; and as he lay dying, his country was lapsing into civil war over the Schleswig–Holstein question, following the 1848 revolutions all over Europe. Although not geographically remote, Denmark was peripheral as far as science was concerned and was a very small country in which the int .. (shrink)

‘Read until you hear the voices’; so the maxim goes for those who would engage with the Victorians. Let us try with Thomas Henry Huxley:A great chapter in the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to (...) read, with your own eyes, tonight. Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and man's relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature. (shrink)

Summary Historians of science in Britain lack a firm institutional base. They are to be found scattered around in various departments in universities, polytechnics and museums. Their history over the last thirty-five years can be seen as a series of flirtations with those in more-established disciplines. Beginning with scientists, they then turned to philosophers, moving on to historians and then to sociologists: from each of these affairs something was learned, and the current interest determined which aspects of the history of (...) science were seen as most interesting. At first it was settling who really discovered what; then an interest in concepts, methods and case-studies; then understanding the broader historical context of science; and after that seeing science in its social context, with special emphasis on institutions and professionalization. Where we shall go next is unclear: these vagaries may be no more than examples of intellectual fashion, but we may hope that they represent a zig-zag route towards deeper understanding. (shrink)