Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter
Volume 1.2 (May 1994)

Ties Being Established Between Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar and Roanoke Colonies Research Office

(Note: Thomas Hariot spelled his name both Hariot and Harriot. Modern American usage is to spell his name with one r, as it appeared on the cover of Hariot’s Briefe and True Report. For this reason, the Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter follows this practice, though two r’s are used whenever appropriate, such as in references to the Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar, its newsletter The Harrioteer, in bibliographic entries, and so forth.)


On December 13, 1993, the Durham (England) Thomas Harriot Seminar heard a report from Dr. Helen Wallis about last May’s Roanoke Decoded symposium and the founding of the Roanoke Colonies Research Office. Dr. Wallis is the retired librarian of the British Library Maps Room and a member of the Roanoke Colonies Research Office advisory committee. As a result of her report, the members of the Harriot Seminar suggested that “close links” be established between the Roanoke Colonies Research Office and the seminar.


The Harriot Seminar is an annual meeting of scholars in Great Britain to present research related to Thomas Hariot (1560-1621), a member of the 1585-1586 colonization mission to Roanoke Island and author of A Briefe and True Report (1588) about the expedition’s discoveries. Hariot was also one of the most prominent astronomers and mathematicians of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Harriot Seminar deals not only with the work of Hariot, but with Hariot’s cultural milieu, covering topics as wide ranging as pharmacology, metaphysics, geography, and linguistics, as well as ideas about North America and its colonization. The seminar meets every other year in Durham and every other year in Cambridge.

In addition to its yearly meeting, the Harriot Seminar publishes a newsletter, The Harrioteer, makes papers from its seminar available to the public, and is associated with other gatherings, such as the Oxford Harriot Lecture. People interested in receiving The Harrioteer and information about the Harriot Seminar and its annual meetings should contact the Seminar’s chair, Professor G. R. Batho, University of Durham, School of Education, Leazes Road, Durham, DH1 1TA, England. Professor Batho’s phone numbers are (091) 374 3497 and 374 3498. His fax number is (091) 374 3506.

As part of the relationship being established, the Roanoke Colonies Research Office will become the official United States repository for the seminar’s papers. Details about paper titles and how to order copies through our office will be published in the next issue of the Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter.


The 1993 Harriot Seminar

At its 13-15 December meeting, the Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar heard several presentations about Thomas Hariot and the culture in which he lived. Speakers included Dr. Melanie Hansen of the University of Durham, Dr. Richard Dunn of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dr. Jan Prins of Utrecht, Dr. Jon Pepper of University College, London, and Mr. Jonathan Mirrlees-Black.

Dr. Hansen presented a paper entitled “Writing the Land : English Renaissance Antiquarianism” concerning the use of antiquarian texts in England to create national and regional identities. Recognizing the interdisciplinary nature of antiquarianism–including references to geography, cartography, history, and philosophy–Hansen pointed out that cultural materialist methodologies can be especially useful in interpreting antiquarians’ narratives. Hansen argued that with the formation of the Antiquarian Society in the 1590s came the rise of antiquarianism as a scholarly endeavor, its pursuit as a collective activity, and its use of society members’ social status to give authority to their written narratives about England’s past.

Dr. Dunn’s paper, entitled “Astrology in Harriot’s Time,” gave an overview portrait of astrology in Elizabethan England, showing that it played a central part in the beliefs and practices of Elizabethan society on all levels. Dunn emphasized three points to illustrate the important role of astrology in Elizabethan England. First, the most common astrological belief was that the stars hold some sort of unspecified influence on the earth (as opposed to the more highly questionable idea, even in Elizabethan England, that the stars influence every human action in a predictable manner). Second, astrology was employed in a wide variety of settings, from the court to the universities to rural practices, and the beliefs about astrology differed from one setting to another. Third, Dunn noted that astrology was rarely an independent study but instead was practiced as part of other endeavors, most importantly medicine, mathematics, and the magical/occult arts. Therefore, according to Dunn, ideas about astrology served as an underlying social and intellectual influence on the work of Hariot and his contemporaries, whether as an accepted methodology or in order to show astrology as an invalid practice.

In his presentation “Warner’s Ideas about Space and Time,” Dr. Prins talked about the unpublished work of the English mathematician Thomas Warner (ca. 1577 1643). Warner was an anti-Aristotelian who broke with the scholastic traditions of his day. Rather than accepting Aristotle’s view that time derives its essence from the motion of material objects in space, Warner posited that time and space were independent entities, an idea derived from the work of Italian natural philosophers of the late sixteenth century. Prin argued that by positing time and space as separate entities, Warner anticipated the idea of absolute space and time formulated by Isaac Newton.

Dr. Pepper presented his paper “Harriot’s Algebra,” which discusses the various contributions made by Hariot to the study of mathematics throughout his lifetime. Hariot’s first contributions were made in the early 1580s and consisted of solutions to the main navigational problems of the period, especially solutions that lead to the inclusion of distance rhumbs and the extension of the meridian line on Mercator charts. By the 1590s, according to Pepper, Hariot had created a new higher order mathematics to continue work on the mathematical basis of the Mercator chart. In the early seventeenth-century, Hariot was working with the mathematics of light refraction. In 1603, Hariot worked on deriving the area of spherical triangles, and in 1608, he developed a sophisticated system of modelling for ship design.

The final presentation, “Sassafras–A Cure-all of Hariot’s Time,” was read by Mr. Mirrlees-Black, but was written by his mother-in-law, the late Mrs. Gillian Mirrlees. Mirrlees noted that the name sassafras did not appear in print until 1571 when the Spanish writer Monardes wrote about its medicinal values in the book translated into English as The Joyful Newes out of the New Founde Worlde (1577). However, the medicinal qualities of the plant were known in the French colonies prior to 1571. At the time Raleigh’s Roanoke colonies were being established in the 1580s, sassafras was one of the more important natural resources explorers and settlers were looking for, in part because it had been suggested as a cure for syphilis. Other ailments that sassafras was thought to be able to cure were scurvy and ague.

The Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar will meet again September 12-14, 1994, in Cambridge, England, to coincide with a meeting of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. Scheduled presentations include Elizabeth Robertson on “Angels in Harriot’s Time,” B.J. Sokol on “The Problem of Assessing Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report,” Anna Beer, Stephen Clucas, and G. R. Batho on “The Writings in Prison of Sir Walter Raleigh and the Ninth Earl of Northumberland,” Paul Harvey on “Englishmen Describing the Non-European at the Time of Harriot,” M. Sharratt on “Look at it this way: Galileo and paradigm shifts,” Paul Hunneyball on “The Architecture of Country Houses in Harriot’s Time,” and John Fauvel on “Mathematical Language in Harriot’s Time.” Anyone interested in more information should contact Professor Batho at the address noted above. The 1995 Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar will meet in Durham 18-20 December.

Top
Contents Page