THE 2006 THOMAS HARRIOT SEMINAR
St. John's College, University of Durham
Durham, England
18-20 December
REPORT FROM THE SEMINAR
by Larry E. Tise, Department of History
Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences
East Carolina University
19 December 2006
The venerable and unique Thomas Harriot Seminar (THS) held at St. John's College, Durham, England, opened punctually at 15:15 hours (3:15 pm) on Monday, 18 December in Leech Hall at St. John's College.
Professor Gordon Batho, chair of the seminar, inaugurated the proceedings in his usual fashion--on time--with a three-minute history of the seminar and a brief report on the proceedings of the Thomas Harriot Lecture held at Oriel College, Oxford, on 18 May 2006. This year's Oxford lecture was given by Stephen Pumfrey of Lancaster University, who was acknowledged as present in Durham and prepared to make a presentation at the 2006 THS. Professor Batho also mentioned several publishing projects of the THS, completed and in process, and acknowledged that he himself was as fit as he had been in many years and was ready for a great seminar.
Professor Batho introduced Professor Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck College, University of London). Professor Clucas is vice-chair of the THS and was also the first speaker.
Without a moment's delay Clucas dived into his topic, titled, "Early English Mechanics: Thomas Harriot and Walter Warner on Colliding Bodies." Before the days of billiard balls, he noted, Thomas Harriot spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what would happen when objects of equal weight and of differential weight were caused to collide. In extensive notes, calculations, and diagrams, Harriot had worked out the course and consequences of such collisions both in theory and in mechanical philosophy. But, as in so many other instances, there was little evidence that Harriot had moved from theorizing and making calculations to the experimental realm. Clucas, a veteran in many realms of Harriot studies, delivered this paper on a newly-examined set of Harriot documents with charm and humor.
Clucas in turn introduced Ayesha Mukerjee, a doctoral candidate at Trinity College, Cambridge, who spoke on a fascinating contemporary of Thomas Harriot and Walter Raleigh--Hugh Plat. Her title was "Dearth Science 1580-1608: The Writings of Hugh Plat." According to her research Hugh Plat was a major figure of the period who, despite a large body of papers and publications, had remained largely unstudied. Plat led a virtual one-man campaign in the last quarter of the 16th century to establish a scientific basis for examining recurring social phenomena of famine, starvation, and catastrophic poverty. Plat's writing touched dozens of topics from a more efficient way of planting corn, a better system for making flour from wheat and corn, and methods of tracking stricken populations. In her opinion, in part from her background as a native of India, she thought Plat brought the study of the social phenomena to the level of scientific examination and that the field warranted its own label--"dearth science." I must say that her presentation was most compelling, and she won me as a convert to the use of the term "dearth science" as a name for a set of social problems that needs critical examination today as much as it did in the time of Harriot and Raleigh.
Following a sumptuous dinner, Professor Batho introduced me for my presentation that I titled, "The First American Coloring Book: A Brief History of Thomas Harriot's 'Briefe and True Report on the New Found Land of Virginia'" (1590). My presentation was an interim report on my research into colored versions of the Theodor De Bry edition--complete with copper engravings--in Latin, German, French, and English. Thanks to the assistance of Harriot College and particularly Joyce Joines Newman at the College, I was able to present a lively set of 86 color slides in a Powerpoint presentation showing the development of the colored versions from the original John White watercolors made on Roanoke Island in 1585 through the black and white De Bry engravings and on to sample colorized versions in Latin and German. Unfortunately, images from French and English versions had not arrived in time for the presentation. Following the presentation, I was able to field a number of excellent questions on the naming of Harriot College at ECU, the efforts to acquire a copy of the Harriot book for ECU, and excellent observations on interpreting these colorized images. The commentary on the topic afterward met and exceeded my fondest expectations.
When the group resumed on the morning of 19 December--again in Leech Hall--the topics got more heavy duty on the mathematical, theoretical, and computational mental life of Thomas Harriot.
Professor Robert Goulding of the University of Notre Dame (on leave for a year in Rome) made a presentation titled, "Optical Powers: Harriot on the Efficacy of Burning Glasses." Professor Goulding delved into a topic known to perhaps every child in the world--the science of making use of magnifying glasses to burn things. As it turns out, there had been speculations and calculations on this phenomenon from Euclid in classical Greece to Harriot's time. But despite many investigations and theories over the years, the geometry and science remained unknown of how the rays of the sun proceeded from the convex surface of the sun to a flat or circular or triangular piece of glass or mirror, and was then retransmitted to concentrate the rays and heat of the sun on a spot and ignite burning or fire. In a set of documents that Guilding had been poring over for the past several years, he recently discovered while on his fellowship to Rome just how Harriot made extensive calculations of the concentration of solar rays on concave and parabolic mirror surfaces. While, once again, we do not have evidence that Harriot carried out experiments to test his theories and calculations, Goulding concluded that Harriot's studies had indeed advanced measurably his understanding of this special phenomenon that has intrigued humans from time immemorial. As Goulding did the scholarly thing of showing just how Harriot's calculations proceeded on this topic, I was reminded of this special curiosity to which I was introduced when a very young child and had never come face to face with the question of just how it worked.
Professor Pascal Brioist of Tours, France, followed with another almost incredible presentation titled, "Thomas Harriot: Reader of Niccolo Tartaglia." Not being a Tartaglian myself, I did not have a clue as to what his presentation would concern. As it turned out, it was again of almost fantastic import. Tartaglia, a native Prussian who had settled in Italy, wrote a book in 1537 or thereabouts which he dedicated to King Henry VIII of England on the topic of the proper angle of a cannon to deliver a cannon ball as far as possible. Once again Tartaglia and many others argued extensively and endlessly about just how a cannon of a certain size, power, and weight of ammunition should be aimed. Tartaglia thought that the proper angle for a cannon was 45 degrees. Later military and artillery theorists disagreed and came out with their own analyses. Since this was in part a problem of geometry and mathematical calculation, Harriot dived into the fray and came to the conclusion that the most efficient angle for a cannon blast was 27 degrees and 55 minutes. Brioist proceeded to show how Harriot came to this conclusion and how he explained his calculations to various authorities. All of this was very interesting in showing the versatility of Harriot's interests and the range of his geometric and theoretical calculations. But in the end Brioist also agreed that Harriot had not tested his theories experimentally. If he had, he would have found that his theories and conclusions were so far off base that his artillery pieces would have instantly lost their war. This led me and others at the seminar to wonder just how much Harriot ever moved from the fascination with theorizing and calculating to the realm of practicality.
But fortunately we have three additional speakers scheduled for the remainder of the seminar and a lot of informal discussions to go. So there will doubtless be more insights among the very devoted and attentive participants in this year's THS.
PART II, January 24, 2007
Following a most enjoyable lunch and much conviviality, we continued our intense focus on things Harriot in the afternoon.
Some of us headed off for a tour of the University Library at Durham. Perhaps due to its remoteness from other English universities and perhaps due to its proximity to Edinburgh just off to the north, this University Library is very well endowed, whole private libraries having been contributed intact and kept intact to the present. Although the library does not have a copy of Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report on the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), it has virtually everything else from that era.
Our next presenter in the afternoon was Stephen Pumfrey of Lancaster University. I had heard Stephen give a very interesting presentation at Oxford earlier in the year on Harriot and the importance of a writer having patrons in order to get into print in the Elizabethan-Jacobean era. He continued here to connect Harriot with another great scientist of the period, William Gilbert, on whom Stephen is an expert. As Stephen demonstrated, Harriot was clearly reading Gilbert’s works when he began to study the vacuum or void between the earth and the moon and attempted to understand the principles of magnetic attractions between the stars and planets and moons of planets. In the Q & A period that followed, there was some discussion about Harriot and alchemy—a topic that seemed to pervade a good deal of the seminar.
Fine dining and Christmas musical entertainments by the AK Chorale filled out the evening as this group of singers presented some pretty jocular music from the period in honor of Harriot and his friends.
The next morning we got deep, deep into Harriot’s geometry and mathematics when Jean-Jacques Brioist from France spoke on “Harriot and Conics.” Despite being a sturdy graduate of introductory math, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus, I did not always find it easy to follow all of Jean-Jacques' impressive presentation on Harriot’s venture into conics. But one thing I did get from it was that Harriot took algebra to a new height in his analyses of compound circular and elliptical forms. Although Harriot was not an experimentalist, his theoretical analyses of the parabola and ellipse were thorough and quite convincing even for today.
Our final presentation at the seminar was by Peter J. Forshaw of Birkbeck College of the University of London. Peter was one of those present who had attended a conference on alchemy held in Philadelphia in July 2006. And because we had been discussing some of the secrets and interesting scientific features of alchemy earlier in the conference, Peter’s presentation on “Ritual Magic in Elizabethan England” was absolutely fascinating. Even though Harriot and his friends were renaissance scientists in the best sense of the term, they also believed totally in the existence and efficacy of magic, and Peter proceeded to adduce a number of instances in which some of these hearty people of science got into situations where they could refer only to magic as the solution to perceived phenomena. Needless to say, Peter’s talk fed an already growing awareness that we should not simply pass over as naivety some instances where our Elizabethan heroes talk about other forces at work in their experience. We should rather try to understand the worldview in which they operated.
Following Peter’s very stimulating presentation, the Harriot Seminar moved into a business meeting during which Professor Batho recounted the history, the achievements, the finances (which are good), and the future plans of the seminar. All is well in the world of the Thomas Harriot Seminar.
Not to upset the smooth flow of activities—but hopefully to add a bit more luster to Thomas Harriot’s halo—I presented a report on the plans of Harriot College to do more and more to promote a greater understanding and appreciation of Thomas Harriot—both in the colonies (US) and across the world. Indeed, I posed the notion that Harriot College might hold a world conference on Thomas Harriot in 2009 in connection with the 400th anniversary of Harriot’s astronomical observations.
The plan was greeted with considerable enthusiasm as others present, including Ann Mills representing the British astronomical scene, discussed other plans for a Harriot Quadricentennial in 2009. The group moved to endorse the idea of a world Harriot conference in North Carolina in 2009, including a jaunt to the Outer Banks of NC. Since the Royal Astronomical Society is planning a commemoration in July 2009 in the UK, it was suggested that the best times for the US conference might be May or September.
We all left Durham thereafter to our various destinations. London fog had become more than a trendy clothing label. Heathrow was closed down due to heavy fog. This caused the cancellation of many trains from the north into London. All of us who had reservations on fancy fast trains from Edinbrough ended up on cattle car trains from Durham to Darlington and from there to London. But like all good cattle, we just held onto our little spots in the trains and talked about the world of Harriot all the way back to London, where we soon encountered real London fog. Fortunately, by the time I left London for my return to the US on 25 December, the fog had lifted and my plane, thankfully, took off right on time.
So three huzzahs for this most recent Thomas Harriot Seminar and for the rising fortunes of the curious Mr. Harriot.
