Simon Werrett
Biographic Data
| ID | 226867 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Werrett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon |
| FAMILY NAME | Werrett |
| SIGNATURE | WERRETT S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4074-5264 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
A Culture of Curiosity
The marvellous bond
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, isinglass, made from fish swim bladders, and common glue, made by boiling the hides of cattle or other animals, were put to a great variety of uses, making glue a form of 'vital waste.' This essay surveys the different forms and manufacturing processes of glue and glue's many uses in the arts, medicine, and the sciences. Focusing on the latter, I highlight the importance of glue for making natural know…
Meeting God in an ordinary place’. What can we learn from Coffee Shop Sunday about meeting God using the internet to encourage and develop fellowship
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Enlightened female networks
This special issue investigates women's scientific networks in Europe roughly between 1720 and 1830, an interesting period from a gender point of view. The articles analyse the role that networks played in enabling, shaping and circumscribing women in their intellectual pursuits, social aspirations and ideals. They also focus on the nature of the members' relationships, how women negotiated their scientific identities and how often women could us…
Voyages of maintenance
Against the common association of voyages of exploration with discovery and the arrival of modernity, this essay argues that maintenance and repair were essential to the success of such voyages and that maintenance and innovation are best seen as fundamentally integrated. Using the Russian circumnavigatory voyage of Adam von Krusenstern and Urey Lisianskii in 1803-7 as a case study, the essay explores the diverse forms and roles of infrastructure…
Diverse Shapes
Narratives of supply chains and raw materials are a poor fit for early modern Europeans' "thrifty" habit of reusing and reworking goods into new forms. This essay stresses the importance of such habits for early modern work using the example of paper, as a medium, instrument, and epistemic resource in various domestic and scientific spheres. Thrifty perspectives challenge not only linear supply narratives but also enduring accounts of the identit…
Preserving nature
Against an assumption that conservation practices only became 'scientific' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this essay shows how, on the contrary, preservation techniques in early modern England were an inspiration for new forms of scientific inquiry and knowledge. Following the framework of 'thrifty science', the essay demonstrates how the thrifty value of making use and extending the life of goods encouraged a variety of pr…
Food, Thrift, and Experiment in Early Modern England
This essay uses the framework of “thrifty science” to highlight commonalities between two early modern endeavours that seem distinct today – experimental science and cookery. Comparing Isaac Newton’s experiments on light using glass prisms with Anne Shackleford’s recipes for fruitcakes I argue that for early moderns the culture of domestic thrift united the two enterprises more than we might imagine. Thrift and frugality were values of “oeconomy”…
Introduction
Following a series of workshops funded by AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), the papers in this special issue provide new perspectives on the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820). Moving beyond a focus on Banks's work with Captain Cook's first voyage of exploration to the Pacific, the papers expand on, while challenging, views of Banks as a ‘centre of calculation’ and all-powerful agent of science and imperialism in Georgian Britain.…
History to reckon with
Compound Histories
Compound Histories: Materials, Governance and Production, 1760-1840 explores the intertwined realms of production, governance and materials, placing chemists and chemistry at the center of processes most closely identified with the construction of the modern world. Readership: All interested in European history since the mid-eighteenth century, and anyone interested in the history of industrialization, science, technology, modernization, politica…
Cycling and recycling
Cycling and recycling: histories of sustainable practices." Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 24(4), pp. 557–558
Fireworks and Color in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
It has commonly been assumed that there were no colors in fireworks prior to the early nineteenth century. This essay argues that there were a variety of color recipes in early modern manuals on fireworks, though the nature and value of color in displays differed quite significantly from later periods. Color was used in pyrotechny in production practices, and carried alchemical, medical and other associations. Colored fire was not the principal o…
Recycling in early modern science
This essay follows recent work in environmental history to explore the history of recycling in physical sciences in Britain and North America since the seventeenth century. The term ‘recycling’ is here used broadly to refer to a variety of practices that extended the life of material resources for doing science in the early modern period. These included practices associated with maintenance, repair, exchange and the adaptation or reuse of materia…
Technology on the Spot
This essay attends to actors' geographies , the constructions of space and empire that historical actors developed in negotiations over imperial technologies. Historians have contrasted "localist" and "universalist" accounts of imperial technology transfer. This essay proposes that versions of both localist and universalist accounts served actors in technological negotiations, and demonstrates this by considering the efforts of British inventor S…
Technology on Display
Watching the Fireworks
ArgumentEarly modern Europeans routinely compared nature to a theater or spectacle, so it makes sense to examine the practices of observing real spectacles and performances in order to better comprehend acts of witnessing nature. Using examples from the history of fireworks, this essay explores acts of observing natural and artificial spectacles between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries and suggests these acts of observation were mutual…
The Schumacher Affair
This essay examines the career of Johann Daniel Schumacher, secretary to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences from 1725 to 1759, in order to illustrate the flexible nature of expertise in an early scientific academy and the ways in which that expertise needed to be negotiated to suit different demands from the court, government, and academy across several changes of regime. Schumacher, whose activities have often been vilified by historians, is…
William Congreve's rational rockets
This article examines the early development of military rockets devised by the English inventor and Royal Society Fellow William Congreve in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Congreve's efforts to imitate Indian war rockets used against the British in Mysore are set within a number of local and global contexts that saw increasing attempts by Europeans to imitate eastern pyrotechnics while applying economic and scientific principles to r…
Deep Time of the Media
Reviewed by: Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means Simon Werrett (bio) Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. By Siegfried Zielinski . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Pp. xiv+375. $39.95. In the 1960s, Michel Foucault posed an "archeology" of ruptured and irregular temporal strata as an alternative to tracing progressive and increasingly complex rat…
Wonders never cease
This essay argues that the material culture of the Renaissance garden played an important role in the development of Cartesian mathematical and mechanical philosophy. Garden machinery such as Salomon and Isaac de Caus's automata and grottoes provided a model from which Descartes drew his clockwork conceptions of nature and the human body. This machinery was also crucial in the Cartesian explanation of the rainbow. Not simply an exercise in intell…
Healing the Nation's Wounds
La science et la royaute en Angleterre sous le regne de Charles II pendant la restoration au 17e siecle. L'auteur evalue l'influence du souverain sur la recherche scientifique de l'epoque
Potemkin and the Panopticon
Download this article . Simon Werrett is a doctoral student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University
Watching the Fireworks
ArgumentEarly modern Europeans routinely compared nature to a theater or spectacle, so it makes sense to examine the practices of observing real spectacles and performances in order to better comprehend acts of witnessing nature. Using examples from the history of fireworks, this essay explores acts of observing natural and artificial spectacles between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries and suggests these acts of observation were mutual…
Potemkin and the Panopticon
Download this article . Simon Werrett is a doctoral student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University
Cycling and recycling
Cycling and recycling: histories of sustainable practices." Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 24(4), pp. 557–558
Wonders never cease
This essay argues that the material culture of the Renaissance garden played an important role in the development of Cartesian mathematical and mechanical philosophy. Garden machinery such as Salomon and Isaac de Caus's automata and grottoes provided a model from which Descartes drew his clockwork conceptions of nature and the human body. This machinery was also crucial in the Cartesian explanation of the rainbow. Not simply an exercise in intell…
Voyages of maintenance
Against the common association of voyages of exploration with discovery and the arrival of modernity, this essay argues that maintenance and repair were essential to the success of such voyages and that maintenance and innovation are best seen as fundamentally integrated. Using the Russian circumnavigatory voyage of Adam von Krusenstern and Urey Lisianskii in 1803-7 as a case study, the essay explores the diverse forms and roles of infrastructure…
Recycling in early modern science
This essay follows recent work in environmental history to explore the history of recycling in physical sciences in Britain and North America since the seventeenth century. The term ‘recycling’ is here used broadly to refer to a variety of practices that extended the life of material resources for doing science in the early modern period. These included practices associated with maintenance, repair, exchange and the adaptation or reuse of materia…
Technology on the Spot
This essay attends to actors' geographies , the constructions of space and empire that historical actors developed in negotiations over imperial technologies. Historians have contrasted "localist" and "universalist" accounts of imperial technology transfer. This essay proposes that versions of both localist and universalist accounts served actors in technological negotiations, and demonstrates this by considering the efforts of British inventor S…
Potemkin and the Panopticon
Download this article . Simon Werrett is a doctoral student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University
Healing the Nation's Wounds
La science et la royaute en Angleterre sous le regne de Charles II pendant la restoration au 17e siecle. L'auteur evalue l'influence du souverain sur la recherche scientifique de l'epoque
Wonders never cease
This essay argues that the material culture of the Renaissance garden played an important role in the development of Cartesian mathematical and mechanical philosophy. Garden machinery such as Salomon and Isaac de Caus's automata and grottoes provided a model from which Descartes drew his clockwork conceptions of nature and the human body. This machinery was also crucial in the Cartesian explanation of the rainbow. Not simply an exercise in intell…
Deep Time of the Media
Reviewed by: Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means Simon Werrett (bio) Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. By Siegfried Zielinski . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Pp. xiv+375. $39.95. In the 1960s, Michel Foucault posed an "archeology" of ruptured and irregular temporal strata as an alternative to tracing progressive and increasingly complex rat…
William Congreve's rational rockets
This article examines the early development of military rockets devised by the English inventor and Royal Society Fellow William Congreve in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Congreve's efforts to imitate Indian war rockets used against the British in Mysore are set within a number of local and global contexts that saw increasing attempts by Europeans to imitate eastern pyrotechnics while applying economic and scientific principles to r…
The Schumacher Affair
This essay examines the career of Johann Daniel Schumacher, secretary to the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences from 1725 to 1759, in order to illustrate the flexible nature of expertise in an early scientific academy and the ways in which that expertise needed to be negotiated to suit different demands from the court, government, and academy across several changes of regime. Schumacher, whose activities have often been vilified by historians, is…
Technology on Display
Watching the Fireworks
ArgumentEarly modern Europeans routinely compared nature to a theater or spectacle, so it makes sense to examine the practices of observing real spectacles and performances in order to better comprehend acts of witnessing nature. Using examples from the history of fireworks, this essay explores acts of observing natural and artificial spectacles between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries and suggests these acts of observation were mutual…
Technology on the Spot
This essay attends to actors' geographies , the constructions of space and empire that historical actors developed in negotiations over imperial technologies. Historians have contrasted "localist" and "universalist" accounts of imperial technology transfer. This essay proposes that versions of both localist and universalist accounts served actors in technological negotiations, and demonstrates this by considering the efforts of British inventor S…
Recycling in early modern science
This essay follows recent work in environmental history to explore the history of recycling in physical sciences in Britain and North America since the seventeenth century. The term ‘recycling’ is here used broadly to refer to a variety of practices that extended the life of material resources for doing science in the early modern period. These included practices associated with maintenance, repair, exchange and the adaptation or reuse of materia…
Fireworks and Color in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
It has commonly been assumed that there were no colors in fireworks prior to the early nineteenth century. This essay argues that there were a variety of color recipes in early modern manuals on fireworks, though the nature and value of color in displays differed quite significantly from later periods. Color was used in pyrotechny in production practices, and carried alchemical, medical and other associations. Colored fire was not the principal o…
Cycling and recycling
Cycling and recycling: histories of sustainable practices." Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 24(4), pp. 557–558
Compound Histories
Compound Histories: Materials, Governance and Production, 1760-1840 explores the intertwined realms of production, governance and materials, placing chemists and chemistry at the center of processes most closely identified with the construction of the modern world. Readership: All interested in European history since the mid-eighteenth century, and anyone interested in the history of industrialization, science, technology, modernization, politica…
History to reckon with
Introduction
Following a series of workshops funded by AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), the papers in this special issue provide new perspectives on the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820). Moving beyond a focus on Banks's work with Captain Cook's first voyage of exploration to the Pacific, the papers expand on, while challenging, views of Banks as a ‘centre of calculation’ and all-powerful agent of science and imperialism in Georgian Britain.…
Preserving nature
Against an assumption that conservation practices only became 'scientific' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this essay shows how, on the contrary, preservation techniques in early modern England were an inspiration for new forms of scientific inquiry and knowledge. Following the framework of 'thrifty science', the essay demonstrates how the thrifty value of making use and extending the life of goods encouraged a variety of pr…
Food, Thrift, and Experiment in Early Modern England
This essay uses the framework of “thrifty science” to highlight commonalities between two early modern endeavours that seem distinct today – experimental science and cookery. Comparing Isaac Newton’s experiments on light using glass prisms with Anne Shackleford’s recipes for fruitcakes I argue that for early moderns the culture of domestic thrift united the two enterprises more than we might imagine. Thrift and frugality were values of “oeconomy”…
Enlightened female networks
This special issue investigates women's scientific networks in Europe roughly between 1720 and 1830, an interesting period from a gender point of view. The articles analyse the role that networks played in enabling, shaping and circumscribing women in their intellectual pursuits, social aspirations and ideals. They also focus on the nature of the members' relationships, how women negotiated their scientific identities and how often women could us…
Voyages of maintenance
Against the common association of voyages of exploration with discovery and the arrival of modernity, this essay argues that maintenance and repair were essential to the success of such voyages and that maintenance and innovation are best seen as fundamentally integrated. Using the Russian circumnavigatory voyage of Adam von Krusenstern and Urey Lisianskii in 1803-7 as a case study, the essay explores the diverse forms and roles of infrastructure…
Diverse Shapes
Narratives of supply chains and raw materials are a poor fit for early modern Europeans' "thrifty" habit of reusing and reworking goods into new forms. This essay stresses the importance of such habits for early modern work using the example of paper, as a medium, instrument, and epistemic resource in various domestic and scientific spheres. Thrifty perspectives challenge not only linear supply narratives but also enduring accounts of the identit…
Meeting God in an ordinary place’. What can we learn from Coffee Shop Sunday about meeting God using the internet to encourage and develop fellowship
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
A Culture of Curiosity
The marvellous bond
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, isinglass, made from fish swim bladders, and common glue, made by boiling the hides of cattle or other animals, were put to a great variety of uses, making glue a form of 'vital waste.' This essay surveys the different forms and manufacturing processes of glue and glue's many uses in the arts, medicine, and the sciences. Focusing on the latter, I highlight the importance of glue for making natural know…
History (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Art (10 works) · History (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Engineering (7 works)