Scholarship, Science and Religion in the Age of Isaac Casaubon & Henry Savile
Oxford's Centre for Early Modern Studies 6th Annual Conference
Plenary speaker: Anthony Grafton (Princeton)
Participants: Rhiannon Ash (Oxford), Philip Beeley (Oxford), Paul Botley (Warwick), Matteo Campagnolo (Geneva), Andrea Ceccarelli (Padua), Ingrid de Smet (Warwick), Mordechai Feingold (Caltech), Robert Goulding (Notre Dame), Nick Hardy (Cambridge), Scott Mandelbrote (Cambridge), Jean-Louis Quantin (Paris), Paul Quarrie (Maggs Bros.), André-Louis Rey (Geneva), Thomas Roebuck (UEA), Richard Serjeantson (Cambridge), Robin Sowerby (Stirling), Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven), Benjamin Wardhaugh (Oxford), Jan Waszink (Utrecht), Joanna Weinberg (Oxford), David Womersley (Oxford).
Henry Savile (1549-1622) and Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) were two contrasting giants of late humanism. Savile, Warden of Merton College, Oxford, was a key figure in the history of English science and a formidable presence on the English scholarly and political scene, whose translation of Tacitus led to political controversy and whose editio princeps of Chrysostom in Greek won admiration across Europe. Casaubon, perhaps the leading Greek classical scholar of his generation and a great correspondent within the intellectual exchanges of the Republic of Letters, used his scholarship to become a formidable Protestant polemicist, publishing a vast philological critique of the authorized Catholic ecclesiastical history of Cesare Baronio.
Their lives and works raise questions at the heart of contemporary interdisciplinary early modern studies:
- What was the relationship between philological scholarship and religious polemic?
- How did philology shape early modern science?
- How did scholars from across the Republic of Letters communicate with one another? And how did those communications shape their works?
- What and how did they read?
- What records of their reading are preserved today in annotated books and manuscript notebooks?
- How did scholars and political elites interact with one another?
- What was the impact of scholarship upon literary style and genre?
- Why and how did scholars encounter Hebraic learning?
2014 is the 400th anniversary of Casaubon's death and the 750th anniversary of the foundation of Merton College, the institution which Savile shaped. Our conference brought together, for the first time, a group of leading scholars from around the world and across disciplines to celebrate this occasion by exploring their lives and works, and, in turn, showing how these figures help us to answer vital questions about the world of late humanist erudition and science. It included a reception at the Divinity School, Bodleian Library, to mark the opening of a small exhibition.
With thanks for the generous support of: Merton College, Oxford; The Bibliographical Society; the Modern Humanities Research Association; Society for Renaissance Studies; the University of Notre Dame; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Faculty of English Language and Literature, Oxford; The John Fell OUP Research Fund.
