Invention, Philosophy and Technology in the Seventeenth Century

University of York
Details: kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk

Wednesday 23rd May 2012

Berrick Saul Building – Treehouse and BS/008

9.15 Registration

9.30 Technology and the mysteries of trade (Treehouse)

Ayesha Mukherjee (Exeter), The economy and philosophy of manure in Hugh Platt (title tbc)

Paddy Bullard (Kent), Isaac Walton and Joseph Moxon, on technical manuals. (title tbc)

Eleanor Decamp (Oxford), [Keep] sharpe Instruments...as neere as you can, ever hidden from the eyes of the Patient’: the visibility of surgical objects in seventeenth-century literature

10.45 Coffee

11.15 Invention, Rhetoric and the rhetoric of invention, Part 1 (Treehouse)

Tullia Giersberg (King’s College, London), Cornelis Drebbel’s Perpetuum Mobile and the Contested Meanings of Invention in Ben Jonson’s Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court (1614-15)

Raphael Hallett (Leeds), ‘Invention’, ‘Creation’ and Early Modern Laboratory Culture

12.00 Lunch

1.00-1.45 Invention, Rhetoric and the rhetoric of invention, Part 2 (BS/008)

Helen Hills (York), ‘'Inventio and invenzione: from saintly relic to art and back in baroque Italy'

Adam Ganz (Royal Holloway), “Close, naked, natural" How the Lens changed writing

2.00 Making things and the cost of labour (BS/008)

Michael Harrigan (Warwick), Plantation, Labour and Technology in the Early Modern Antilles

Katherine Hunt (London Consortium, University of London) , From procedural to miscellany: how to make a firework in the mid-seventeenth century.



Cesare Pastorino (Sussex), Francis Bacon and the State Promotion of Innovation: the Early Stuart Patent System



3.30 Coffee

4.00 Getting Dirty in Early Modern England: Mines and Drains (BS/008)

Daisy Hildyard (Queen Mary’s), ‘The Workmen could give me very little Account of any thing’: John Locke and Daniel Defoe meet miners.

Will Calvert (Cambridge), "Invention, National Power, and the Limits of the Possible in Early Stuart England."
Claire Preston (Birmingham), 'Big Dig: the poetics of early-modern drainage'.