Events

Female Figures on the Moon: Intertwining Science, Philosophy and Literature

Research Seminar
In this lecture, Natacha Fabbri will introduce her recent work on the multifaceted relationship between women and the Moon in Western culture from the 16th to the 19th century. The talk will discuss the pioneering women who studied, described, and depicted the Earth’s satellites, as well as the role that the new image of the Moon played in the debate on the querelle des femmes, serving as a tool to challenge prejudicial readings. [more]

New Perspectives on Mersenne in the History of Knowledge, Music, and Religion

In the historiography of the philosopher, mathematician, and Minim theologian Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), 2024 marks 91 years since the publication of the first volume of his Correspondance, 81 years since Robert Lenoble’s trailblazing biography, and 36 years since Peter Dear’s revisionist study of Mersenne and the Jesuit milieu that produced his “deliberately unrevolutionary” scholarship in a rather revolutionary period. [more]

Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions

This conference brings together almost five years of research from the Max Planck Research Group “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions.” The Research Group has compared different scientific disciplines of the late medieval and early modern periods, from anatomy to the study of magnetism. [more]

Drawing Comparisons: Images in Comparative Anatomy, 1500–1900

Conference
The history of art and the practice of anatomy have long depended upon similar acts of comparison: identifying, visualizing and describing likenesses. This workshop investigates the role of images in developing comparative anatomy — the study of anatomy across species — in early modern Europe. [more]

From Leeuwenhoek to the Electron Microscope

Lecture
Join us for a discussion and Q&A with Professor Katharine Cashman FRS, Professor Matthew Cobb, and Dr Dirk van Miert to celebrate Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and the development of microscopy to the present day. [more]

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) and His Impact on the History of Microscopy

International Conference
Three hundred years ago the Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek died. He had been corresponding with the Royal Society for fifty years. Leeuwenhoek, born in Delft in the Netherlands in 1632, developed himself into one of the most prolific early microscopists. He made his own lenses and small hand-held microscopes which were more versatile than most other devices at the time. With these instruments and his outstanding preparation and observation techniques, he was the first to see and describe red blood cells, bacteria and many other things. [more]

Artists as Futurists? On the History of Durability in Art and the Making of the Future

Research Seminar
Why did artists want to make objects they hoped would last a long time? And why did their patrons want to own long-lasting works of art? This talk will give an introduction to Dynamics of the Durable: A History of Making Things Last in the Visual and Decorative Arts (DURARE), a project funded by the European Research Council. [more]

Observing and Thinking through Drawing

Workshop
In this workshop we explore practices of drawing as an act of observing the world. With examples from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries we will discuss the traces of thinking, learning and observation that we can find in drawings by artists and scientific practitioners. [more]

Time As Form and Movement in Medieval Diagrams

Research Seminar
Located between the sensory and the imaginative, the quadrivium of musica, cosmology, arithmetic, and geometry was nonetheless grounded in the realm of the visual. In manuscripts, time and eternity appear as diagrams, graphs, and line drawings using parchment, ink, and pigments. [more]

Marks of Music: Sound and Visualization in the Early Modern Period

Workshop
“Marks of Music: Sound and Visualization in the Early Modern Period” is an interdisciplinary workshop on the manifold uses and trajectories of notating and visualizing music in the early modern period. [more]

Portraits and Pathologies. Likenesses and Clinical Pictures in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Research Seminar
This lecture engages with relations between portraits of people and portraits of diseases. It will argue that definitions and practices of portraiture evolving around the notion of character were crucial for the development of the pathological image meant to capture the ‘characteristic traits’ of a disease. [more]

Media Involution and Political Conflict in Fifteenth-Century England

Research Seminar
Over sixty years ago, Curt Bühler, curator of rare books at the Morgan Library, mused, “The fifteenth century, it may well be said, was one of the most curious and confused periods in recorded history. Not the least curious and confusing of its aspects is the story of the book production in that century.” While Bühler was reflecting on the impact of print, his comments apply well to England’s situation, which, for the most part of the fifteenth century, remained unrocked by any media revolutions. [more]

Sensors of Capital: Drawing for the English East India Company circa 1800

Research Seminar
This talk explores the relatively little-known visual work of military officers employed by the English East India Company for surveying, mapping, and illustrating. [more]

Seeing like Dante: Similis and the Reader's Eye

Research Seminar
In this illustrated lecture, Bill Sherman will introduce his recent work on reading—and readers’ responses—as a visual rather than verbal phenomenon. Between the 13th and 17th centuries, in fact, there are all kinds of overlooked traces of visual responses to texts, from isolated doodles to fully fledged illustrative schemes. But we have never really known what to do with them, or even what to call them. [more]
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