A ‘split’ study day held on Teams over three consecutive afternoons (30th March-1st April 2021, 3-6pm GMT), exploring how early modern developments in arts and techniques conceptualised, confronted, and attempted to manipulate nature as understood in the form of the four ‘classical’elements: earth, water, air, and fire.
Participants will discuss literary, technical, and artistic material, reflecting on the interrelated experimental and cultural significances of the four elements, and the relationships between them. These classic categories, though challenged and evolving, as we will see, throughout the early modern period, present a fruitful framework for the ‘Writing Technologies’
Network’s ongoing conversations on representation, analogy, imagination, inventions, and narratives.
To register, please contact Dr Jennifer Oliver
30th March, 3.00 - 6.00pm : Elemental Powers
Short presentations gathered into two panels, interspersed with discussion, will consider elemental power(s), including the interrelation of elements, and the connections between elemental and other forms of power (social, cultural, colonial...)
Welcome from organisers (3pm)
Elemental Powers I (3.10pm)
Chair: Michael Drolet (Oxford)
Tina Asmussen (Ruhr University of Bochum/ German Mining Museum Bochum): ‘The matter of air in early modern mining’
Jennifer Oliver (Oxford): ‘Trials by fire and by water: elemental powers in and across the early modern Atlantic’
Jessica Stacey (Oxford): ‘Society Must be Defended (from the Elements!)’
(short break 4.40pm)
Elemental Powers II (4.50pm) Chair: Viktoria von Hoffmann (University of Liège)
Yelda Nasifoglu (Oxford): ‘Airing lunacy in Moorfields; or, the respiration, circulation, ventilation, and instrumentalization of air in early modern London’
Marie Thebaud-Sorger (CNRS/ Oxford): ‘On air, fire and water: analogies and technical combinations for mastering fires and asphyxia in the 18th century’
31st March, 3.00 - 6.00pm : Elemental Objects
'Curators' and chairs: Vittoria Fallanca (Oxford) and Olivia Smith (Oxford)
A session conceived of as a virtual 'cabinet of curiosities', in which a series of elemental objects will be presented and discussed. Object-presenters include researchers with a range of specialisms in literature and the history of science, technology, and medicine.
Speakers: Jérôme Baudry (EPFL Lausanne), Ion-Gabriel Mihailescu (EPFL Lausanne), Simon Dumas Primbault (EPFL Lausanne), Emma Claussen (Cambridge), Vittoria Fallanca (Oxford), Rachel Hindmarsh (Oxford), Stephen Johnston (History of Science Museum, Oxford), John O’Brien (Durham), Wes Williams (Oxford, TORCH), Koen Vermeir (CNRS, Paris).
1st April, 3.00 - 6.00pm : Elemental imaginaries
Chair: Matthew Landrus (Oxford)
(3pm) Short presentations, interspersed with discussion, will consider the construction and evolution of imaginaries of the elemental across four centuries.
Alice Roullière (Oxford): 'Poetry and the Alembic: Alchemy and Elements in Ronsard, Jamyn and Desportes'
Rob Iliffe (Oxford): 'Pleasing fictions: early modern anti-mechanism and the perils of the imagination'
Michael Drolet (Oxford): 'Earth, Water, Air: Elements and Technology in the Saint-Simonian vision of the past, present, and future.'
(short break 4.30pm)
Closing roundtable, including all participants (4.45pm)
Picture: Johann Jakob Scheuchzer. Fenestra Coeli Apertae (The Window of Heaven were Opened) from Physica Sacra 1731
Writing Technologies, TORCH Networks
