2017 - 2018 Critical Witness Sessions

Below are the descriptions for the Critical Witness sessions that took place during the 2017-2018 academic year. These include the title, author, and a brief description of the book selected along with the specific sections that were read.

February 7, 2018

Book: Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Author: Michael Guasco

Sections Read: Introduction and Chapter 4

Brief Description: In wide-ranging detail, Slaves and Englishmen demonstrates how slavery shaped the ways the English interacted with people and places throughout the Atlantic world. By examining the myriad forms and meanings of human bondage in an international context, Michael Guasco illustrates the significance of slavery in the early modern world before the rise of the plantation system or the emergence of modern racism. As this revealing history shows, the implications of slavery were closely connected to the question of what it meant to be English in the Atlantic world. Presented by

March 7, 2018

Book: Power of Gifts

Author: Felicity Heal

Sections Read: Chapters 1 and 2

Brief Description: The Power of Gifts is aboutgifts and benefits - what they were, and how they were offered and received in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It shows that the mode of giving, as well as what was given, was crucial to social bonding and political success.'The volume moves from a general consideration of the nature of the gift to an exploration of the politics of giving. In the latter chapters some of the well-known rituals of English court life - the New Year ceremony, royal progresses, diplomatic missions - are viewed through the prism of gift-exchange. Gifts to monarchs or their ministers could focus attention on the donor, those from the crown could offer some assurance of favor. These fundamentals remained the same throughout the century and a half before the Civil War, but the attitude of individual monarchs altered specific behavior. Elizabeth expected to be wooed with gifts and dispensed benefits largely for service rendered, James I modeled giving as the largess of the Renaissance prince, Charles I's gift-exchanges focused on the art collecting of his coterie. And always in both politics and the law courts there was the danger that gifts would be corroded, morphing from acceptable behavior into bribes and corruption. The Power of Gifts explores prescriptive literature, pamphlets, correspondence, legal cases and financial records, to illuminate social attitudes and behavior through a rich series of examples and case-studies. Presented by long-term Folger-Mellon Fellow Julianne Werlin.

April 4, 2018

Book: Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science

Author: Richard Yeo

Sections Read: Introduction and Chapter 5

Book: Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain

Author: Elizabeth Yale

Sections Read: Introduction and first half of Chapter 4

Brief Description: The selections from these two recent books address important "paratexts" for the study of natural philosophy in 17th-century England: scientific correspondence (in Elizabeth Yale's Sociable Knowledge) and notebooks (in Richard Yeo's Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science). Both of these studies have been enormously helpful to Folger Fellow Dr. Jessica Wolfe in her work on the physician and naturalist Thomas Browne, who bequeathed to posterity a sizable correspondence with fellow natural philosophers including John Evelyn, Henry Power, and George Ent, as well as a dauntingly voluminous (and often indecipherable) collection of notebooks, mostly held at the British Library. Dr. Wolfe is interested in how both of these recent studies at once extend and complicate prior scholarly arguments about the nature of scientific authority and the establishment of truth claims. That is, how do the particular kinds of primary materials under investigation here help us to understand more fully and with greater subtlety key terms and concepts employed by historians of the "scientific revolution", such as "experience," "observation," "experiment," "practice," and "collaboration"? (We can also discuss why she’s putting the term "scientific revolution" in quotation marks, whether it was a discrete event and if so, where and when that event took place).