Scientific Crosscurrents between Italy and England
Italian Contributions to the «Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society», Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Backgrounding the study
- 1.1 Introduction
- 1.2 The socio-historical contexts
- 1.2.1 Notes on the history of the Royal Society and Philosophical Transactions, 17th–19th centuries
- 1.2.2 The Italian states and their academies
- 1.3 The Royal Society and Italy: A review of relevant literature
- Chapter 2 Methodological framework
- 2.1 The groundwork
- 2.1.1 Critical Discourse Analysis
- 2.1.1.1 The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA)
- 2.1.1.2 Discourse and social change – Fairclough’s approach
- 2.1.1.3 Politeness
- 2.1.2 A socio-historical approach to scientific writing
- 2.2 Approach to text analysis
- 2.3 Collection of the papers and analysis
- Chapter 3 Social, cultural and historical insights
- 3.1 17th century
- 3.1.1 Fellows and contributors
- 3.1.2 Creating a discourse community: Correspondence and information exchange
- 3.1.3 Fellows and Englishmen in Italy
- 3.1.4 Topics
- 3.1.5 Landscapes of northern and central Italy
- 3.2 18th century
- 3.2.1 Fellows and contributors
- 3.2.2 Fellows and Englishmen in close contact
- 3.2.3 A complex network of exchanges
- 3.2.4 Topics
- 3.2.5 Beauties of northern, central and southern Italy
- 3.3 19th century
- 3.3.1 Foreign Members and contributors
- 3.3.2 Fellows and Englishmen in Italy
- 3.3.3 Topics
- 3.4 Languages of the papers and translation practice
- 3.4.1 In the 17th century
- 3.4.1.1 English’d out of the Giornale de’ Letterati
- 3.4.2 In the 18th century
- 3.4.3 In the 19th century
- Chapter 4 Discourse features
- 4.1 17th century
- 4.1.1 Textual dimension
- 4.1.1.1 Macrostructural features
- 4.1.1.2 Language use
- 4.1.2 Discursive practice
- 4.1.2.1 Discourse representation
- 4.1.2.2 Meeting minutes and letter exchanges
- 4.1.2.3 Evaluation in the discourse of the PTRS
- 4.1.3 Reporting disputes and disagreements
- 4.1.4 Witnessing
- 4.1.5 Toponymy
- 4.1.6 Interdiscursivity and intertextuality
- 4.1.6.1 Dialogicity in the discourse on amianthus
- 4.2 18th century
- 4.2.1 Textual dimension
- 4.2.1.1 Macrostructural features
- 4.2.1.2 Language use
- 4.2.2 Discursive practice
- 4.2.2.1 Discourse representation
- 4.2.2.2 Evaluation in the discourse of the PTRS
- 4.2.2.3 Original, translation and publication: A brief comparison
- 4.2.3 Reporting disputes and disagreements
- 4.2.4 Witnessing
- 4.2.5 Toponymy
- 4.2.6 Interdiscursivity and intertextuality
- 4.3 19th century
- 4.3.1 Textual dimension
- 4.3.1.1 Macrostructural features
- 4.3.1.2 Language use
- 4.3.2 Discursive practice
- 4.3.2.1 Discourse representation
- 4.3.2.2 Evaluation in the discourse of the PTRS
- 4.3.3 Witnessing and toponymy
- 4.3.4 Interdiscursivity and intertextuality
- Chapter 5 General conclusions
- 5.1 Development of Anglo-Italian socio-cultural relations
- 5.2 Languages of international scientific communication and linguistic consequences
- 5.3 Development of Italian and English PTRS papers
- 5.4 Development of Italian discourse representation
- 5.5 Concluding remarks
- Appendix
- Tables of Fellows and contributors
- Loanwords in the PTRS
- Bibliography
- Primary sources
- 17th century
- 18th century
- 19th century
- Secondary sources
- Index of names
Chapter 1 Backgrounding the study
- 1.1 Introduction
- 1.2 The socio-historical contexts
- 1.2.1 Notes on the history of the Royal Society and Philosophical Transactions, 17th–19th centuries
- 1.2.2 The Italian states and their academies
- 1.3 The Royal Society and Italy: A review of the relevant literature
1.1 Introduction
The Royal Society has so just a regard & Veneration for ye memory of ye Galilei, the Borelli, Malpighi, and Bellini, yt she can never be incurious of what is doing in a Country, yt produced those Great & Excellent Genii.1
‘Tis hardly to be believed, what a high esteem all, where I have passed [in Italy], have for the Royal Society and the universal knowledge and learning of the Britons.2
The UK’s national science academy ‒ the Royal Society of London ‒ and its journal ‒ The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (hereafter PTRS) ‒ were created by a group of learned gentlemen in the 1660s. The Society’s main source of inspiration was Francis Bacon’s idea of natural philosophy based on an empirical approach to the study of nature. A few years after the Society’s founding, the PTRS started being published (1665) and soon became the leading scientific journal of the time. Thanks especially to its first secretary Henry Oldenburg,3 the Royal Society became the centre of an international network of scientific correspondence with many learned letters being subsequently published in the journal. Indeed, foreign natural philosophers became aware of the Royal Society’s prestige and Baconian agenda and wrote to the Society ←17 | 18→offering scientific information and hoping to receive approval and possibly publication in the PTRS. Publication in the Society’s journal meant not only gaining international visibility and contributing to a collective enterprise of science, but also establishing priority of one’s findings. It is moreover well known that the development of the PTRS itself traces the history of the modern scientific journal; this will also be seen in the changing nature of the contributions sent from Italy to the Royal Society and published in the PTRS, which gradually develop from personal letters to becoming more and more like present-day scientific papers.
Hence, the Philosophical Transactions, the world’s longest-running scientific journal, represents an invaluable repository of historical and linguistic material for scholars to investigate. Further, the Fellows of the Royal Society preserved originals and copies of most of their correspondence and bureaucratic documents together with instruments, portraits, natural specimens and other curiosities, which can be found in the Royal Society’s archives in London. A notable example of the historical worth of the Society’s treasures is the recently discovered holograph letter from Galileo to Benedetto Castelli (21 Dec. 1613) where he first set out his ideas on the relation between science and religion, and defended Copernican astronomy from charges of being contrary to the Holy Scriptures. This letter is of primary importance for the history of Galileo’s relations with the Church and had severe consequences; namely, the suspension of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543) and the warning to Galileo to abandon Copernican astronomy, which was seen as a threat to the traditional interpretation of the Bible. Up until this discovery, historians had relied on manuscript copies, which differed between each other. The letter has shed new light on our knowledge of Galileo and displays a more daring and compromising wording compared to its copies (Camerota et al. 2018: 1). Galileo and his letter are but one example of a long line of instances in which the Royal Society saw the value of Italian men of science and treasured material related to them.4 From the outset, the Fellows had shown great interest in the Italian Peninsula and the research of its scholars. A great deal of Italian-research-based ←18 | 19→papers have been published in the Transactions and many letters to and from Italy are preserved in the Royal Society’s archives. These resources can provide new insights into the history of Anglo-Italian relations, which have hitherto been studied primarily from a cultural and literary perspective. But as it will be seen in the course of this study, British interest in Italy was not limited to Italian literature and natural and cultural curiosities. The aim of this study is thus to investigate the Royal Society’s relations with Italy through an analysis of the Italian contributions to the Philosophical Transactions and the letter exchanges between the Fellows and the Italians.
The Royal Society and the Philosophical Transactions have been extensively researched by historians and linguists. Linguistic analyses carried out so far on PTRS articles have focused, for instance, on the development of scientific writing in general;5 on more specific fields and genres such as medical writing6 and reports of scientific experiments;7 and on select linguistic features such as stance.8 Nevertheless, many linguistic analyses carried out so far on the PTRS have focused on the English language and its stylistic development with less regard for the fact that many papers published in the journal came from foreign countries and were the result of translation.9
←19 | 20→From a historical and cultural point of view and relevant to the purpose of the present research, only a few studies have focused on the Royal Society’s relations with Italy. For instance, Knowles Middleton (1979 and 1980) and McConnel (1986 and 1993) focus on a number of Italian Fellows of the Royal Society; Cavazza (1980 and 2002) and Cook (2004) focus on the Society’s relations with specific Italian intellectual communities (from Bologna and Rome); Hall (1982) examines the role played by Italy for the Royal Society up to the 18th century; Gomez Lopez (1997) explores the correspondence between Italians and the Royal Society in the first decades of the Society’s existence; and D’Amore (2015 and 2017) shows how the journal’s papers on the Italian south were in harmony with the literary and cultural trends of the 17th and 18th centuries and contributed to increase English interest in Italy.10 These studies, however, are generally focused on individual Italian natural philosophers or limited to specific geographical areas and periods (especially the early Royal Society). Only a glimpse can be caught of the relations between the scientists of the two countries and of the scientific contributions that the Italians made to the Philosophical Transactions.
As anticipated earlier, research has also been carried out on Italian and English socio-cultural relations.11 The general picture that emerges – for the period considered here, 17th–19th century – is that after a period of decline of English interest in Italy in the 17th century – when Italy came to be seen as the country of Catholicism as opposed to the puritanism of the Commonwealth – Italy regained popularity in the 18th century and through the 19th as one of the favourite destinations of the Grand Tour and for a rediscovery of classic Italian literature and the Italian opera. From the Italian side, in the course of the 18th century England was becoming increasingly favoured in Italy as the enlightened country, appreciated for its institutions, economy, liberal thinking and literature. However, the above-mentioned studies generally focus on literary sources, while scientific exchanges offer a new perspective. For instance, religious and political views hardly interfered with the relations between Englishmen and Italians, in that the focus of the Royal Society was on experimental philosophy, which was seen as independent of metaphysical and political thinking. In actual fact, Italian religious restrictions enabled the Society to be the first to publish Italian research ←20 | 21→that met with criticism and rejection in Italy, such as the studies by the Italian physician Marcello Malpighi.
Other than the PTRS papers, Italian interest in English science and culture ‒ and, vice versa, English interest in Italian research ‒ is perceived by the considerable amount of Italians who were elected Fellows of the Royal Society – 135 between the 17th and 19th centuries – and who were given the opportunity to attend the Society’s meetings. Among them were men of science such as astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, botanists, and many physicians but also humanists such as historians, philosophers and poets. A considerable number of Italian Fellows were also statesmen and diplomats. Further, this study reveals that contributions made by non-elected Italians who had relations with the Society were often more significant than those made by elected Italian Fellows.
The present study goes beyond the research topics considered in the above-mentioned literature by carrying out a historical and critical linguistic analysis on PTRS articles written by Italians or based on Italian research and by analysing English and Italian relations through the papers and the epistolary exchanges of the scientists from the two countries. The aim from the linguistic perspective is to describe the features and development of Italian and Italian-research-inspired scientific writing in the Transactions; and ultimately, from the historical and cultural point of view, to provide a picture of Anglo-Italian relations in scientific context. The critical linguistic analysis of the primary sources here becomes functional to a more precise analysis of cultural relations. It moreover adds to the existing research on the development of scientific writing by providing a study that is focused on a culturally-restricted group of papers and which considers the original sources of the publications. Comments and descriptions on editorial and translation practices will also be provided. The period considered starts with the birth of the Philosophical Transactions in 1665 and finishes in 1900; the temporal limit is related to the great socio-historical changes that occurred in the 20th century and which subsequently influenced the Royal Society’s activity and its publications.
It is hoped that the present study will be of interest both to scholars interested in the history of science and/or the development of Anglo-Italian scientific relations, and to linguists interested in historical scientific writing. In this view, the results have been organised into two main chapters, the first focusing on the social, cultural and historical insights that arose from the analysis (Chapter 3), and the second focusing on the results of the more purely linguistic analysis (Chapter 4).12
←21 | 22→The general organisation of the study is as follows: the rest of the present chapter draws on the existing literature to provide a brief historical and socio-cultural background to the research. The information provided below is considered an integral part of the following analysis in that it provides a context for it. The central chapters will in fact present and try to account for the results by contextualising them. The following sections will thus report on the history of the Royal Society, the Philosophical Transactions, and relevant notes on Italian history and scientific academies (Section 1.2); while Section 1.3 provides information on aspects of Anglo-Italian scientific relations that have already been dealt with in the literature. Chapter 2 presents linguistic research that has inspired the methodology developed for the analysis (Section 2.1 and subsections); the approach adopted for the present piece of research (Section 2.2); and a description of how the analysis was carried out step by step (Section 2.3). The central Chapters, 3 and 4, present and discuss the results of the historical and critical linguistic analysis of the papers and letters collected. The two chapters are further divided by century and feature case studies on different aspects that were perceived to be relevant to each period. Chapter 5 provides some general conclusions to the study, adding some considerations on Italian scientific borrowings in the PTRS as a linguistic result of contact between the two cultures. Finally, the appendix provides tables of the Italian Fellows and contributors divided per century reporting brief biographical notes and the number of contributions to the journal. The second and last table lists the borrowings found during the analysis with information on their entry into the English language.
1.2 The socio-historical contexts
1.2.1 Notes on the history of the Royal Society and Philosophical Transactions, 17th–19th centuries13
The roots of the Royal Society are generally traced back to an informal meeting that was held at Gresham College in London in November 1660, when a group ←22 | 23→of gentlemen discussed the formation of an organisation for the promotion of experimental philosophy on the pattern of Continental academies.14 The main source of inspiration for the group was Bacon’s empirical approach to the study of nature. Regular meetings were held from the start, a constitution was drawn up, and the members paid weekly subscriptions. In July 1662, the Society was given chartered status by King Charles II and was officially named “the Royal Society” and, later, in a second charter of 1663, as “the Royal Society of London for improving naturall knowledge”. While remaining a private Society focused on experimental research, the chartered status meant that the Fellows were granted privileges such as direct patronage from the king, permission to print without government censorship, and freedom to correspond with other countries. From the beginning the Society had an elaborate organisational structure with a president, a treasurer and a register-keeper at its top. The Society also appointed two secretaries who were to record what went on in the meetings, manage correspondence with outside parties, and read a selection of their correspondence at the meetings. The Fellows were generally gentlemen – or virtuosi, as they were to call themselves –15 who pursued “natural knowledge” as a pastime and not as professionals. Religious and political opinions were to be left behind, with the sole subject of debate being natural philosophy.16 The concept of ←23 | 24→natural knowledge was loose, and many of the interests of the Fellows pertained to disciplines which would not in the present age be considered scientific, such as archaeology, numismatics and antiquarianism.
Details
- Pages
- 318
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631888124
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631888131
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631888094
- DOI
- 10.3726/b20113
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (May)
- Published
- Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2023. 318 pp., 1 fig. b/w, 15 tables.
