There is subject well known to all blog owners that I have never talked about, spam; I get two different varieties here at The Renaissance Mathematicus. The first is spam comments, which turn up in a never ending stream but which mostly end up in Word Press’ apparently efficient spam filter. Very occasionally one or two get through and I have to weed these out from underneath whichever post they have chosen to enrich with their presence. Otherwise the only real problem I have is remembering to regularly check the spam filter for non-spam and send the rest of its contents off to rot in cyber-hell until that day dawns when the Internet is turned off forever. Maybe I shouldn’t say this but I think that the spammers might be more successful if they didn’t have email addresses such as purchase@cheapviagra.com, just a thought.
The second type of spam I receive as a blogger is in the form of emails. These are emails from people trying to get me to either let them advertise or publish something on my blog or link something to it. Again these people might be more successful if the things that they were offering and which they are so convinced that I will find interesting were actually related in anyway to the content of my blog, they never are. As a blogger I get another type of email, ones that are invariably addressed to Professor or Doctor or even in German style to Professor Doctor. I wouldn’t mind them awarding me illusionary titles that I don’t possess, and almost certainly never will, if only they would show a little imagination in addressing me, after all professors and doctors are two a penny. Were I to get an email addressed to Our Glorious, Benevolent, Gracious, Omniscient and Wise Leader in this Age of Darkness I might just be tempted to respond, but they never do and so I don’t. The emails addressing me with imaginary academic titles usually invite me to contribute articles to their prestigious academic journal that well-known rival to Nature and Science, The East Krakatoa Journal for Island Approaches to the Philosophy of Renaissance Mathematics. Dear editors, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, “I would never submit an article to a journal that would publish anything written by me”. All of these spam emails get dispatched forthwith to cyber-hell unread, unanswered and with all links left strictly unlinked. I can spread my own viruses, thank you.
Today I received an unsolicited email asking me to advertise something, help with publicizing was the actual phrase used, and I’m actually going to do so, a first as far as I can remember here at RM. The email came from David Norbrook, Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and he asked me very nicely to spread the word about his up coming conference Scholarship, Science, and Religion in the Age of Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) and Henry Savile (1549-1622) at the T. S. Eliot Theatre, Merton College, Tuesday 1st – Thursday 3rd July 20124
For those not in the know Henry and Isaac are two of the Renaissance scholars who make you turn green with envy. Each of them was brainy enough to win a round of University Challenge on their own without teammates and each of them mastered enough academic disciplines to fill a small encyclopaedia on his own.
Isaac Casaubon was a French Huguenot classical scholar, philologist, historian and theologian born to refugee parents in Geneva. Home educated until he entered the University of Geneva aged seventeen were he studied Greek and was recommended for the chair in Greek only four years later. He was a consummate classical scholar and philologist whose main occupation was the translation, editing and publication of classical Greek text. He worked most of his life in Switzerland and France torn and troubled by the religious conflicts of the age. Regarded at his intellectual peak as one of the most learned men in the whole of Europe the Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans all competed with offers of jobs, money and other inducements to win him as a propagandist for their cause. The situation has strong similarities to the attempts today of leading European football clubs to induce a star striker to sign for them and not one of their rivals. During the religious upheaval in Europe in the Early Modern Period a star polemicist was regarded as a good catch by the rival religious communities. In the end the political pressure in France caused him to move to England in 1610 were he died four years later. As a historian of science my main interest in Casaubon is his De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI published in 1614 in which he proved by philological analysis that the Corpus Hermeticus, one of the most influential collection of texts in the Renaissance, was not as ancient as claimed but was in fact a product of late antiquity. This was a key moment in the evolution of the discipline of history, applying scientific, philological analysis to texts to determine their age.
I can’t leave even this brief account of Isaac Casaubon without mentioning his son Méric, who was the man responsible for ruining John Dee’s reputation. Despite all of the misfortunes that befell him in later life, in the early seventeenth-century Dee still enjoyed a good reputation in England for his work in the mathematical sciences. Around 1650 more and more people were starting to question the existence of ghosts, witches and other aspects of the occult. Deeply religious people, of whom Méric was one, were worried that this was the thin edge of the wedge that would inevitably lead to atheism. To counter this tendency Méric published John Dee’s Angel Diaries, his account of his conversations with angels, which up till then had remained largely unknown. Méric’s intention was that Dee’s accounts should act as a proof, from a reputable scholar, that the world of spirits is real and not to be questioned. Méric’s attempt backfired ruining Dee’s reputation causing people to forget the mathematicus and only remember the notorious Renaissance magus that he now became for the next four hundred years down to the present day.
Henry Savile was educated at Oxford and, self-taught, began to lecture there on astronomy at the age of 21 in 1570. He not only lectured on Ptolemaeus but also on the works of Regiomontanus and Copernicus, real cutting edge at the time. In 1578 he went on a grand tour of Europe meeting with and learning from the leading continental mathematicians; a necessary move for anyone interested in the mathematical sciences in England at that time as England was an intellectual backwater in terms of mathematics. On his return to England, in 1582, Savile was appointed Greek tutor to Queen Elizabeth. Later he became both Warden of Merton College Oxford and Provost of Eaton. Like Casaubon, with whom he was acquainted, Savile was a classical scholar and philologist but it is for his contributions to mathematics that he is best remembered. Appalled by the primitive level of mathematics teaching in England in comparison to the continent he established the first two university chairs for the mathematical sciences in England in 1619, the Savilian Chairs for Geometry and Astronomy at Oxford. In the seventeenth-century many of England’s leading mathematicians occupied one or other of these chairs including such figures as Henry Briggs, John Wallis and Edmund Halley, whose adventures sailing around the Atlantic you can follow on Twitter (@HalleysLog).
Both Casaubon and Savile are fascinating figures, who lived in and contributed to a period of great intellectual change in European history and I’m sure the Merton College conference on these two intellectual giants will be a stimulating and informative experience. If I had the time and the money, and I don’t have either, I personally would love to take part and I can only recommend that those who do have the time and the money to do so.
Unfortunately, I only got the information on the conference today and if you want to take advantage of the early booker rebate you only have until tomorrow to do so!
