The Visual Theology of Victorian Popularizers of Science
From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3461027 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bernard Lightman (York University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2000 |
| Volume | 91 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 651-680 |
| Publication date | 2000-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Isis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/384944 |
| PMID | 11284228 |
| OpenAlex | W2059111779 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 18 |
This essay examines the use of visual images during the latter half of the nineteenth century in the work of three important popularizers of science. J. G. Wood, Richard Proctor, and Agnes Clerke skillfully used illustrations and photographs to establish their credibility as trustworthy guides to scientific, moral, and religious truths. All three worked within the natural theology tradition, despite the powerful critique of William Paley's argument from design set forth in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Wood, Proctor, and Clerke recognized that in order to reach a popular audience with their message of divine wonder in nature, they would have to take advantage of the developing mass visual culture embodied in the new pictorial magazines, spectacles, and entertaining toys based on scientific gadgets emblematic of the reorganization of vision. But in drawing on different facets of the emerging visual culture and in looking to the images produced by the new visual technologies to find the hand of God in nature, these popularizers subtly transformed the natural theology tradition
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Biology · Credibility · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Natural (archaeology · Natural theology · Order (exchange · Sociology · Teleological argument · Trustworthiness · Visual arts · Visual culture · Visual media · Wonder · History · History of Science and Medicine · History of Science and Natural History · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies · Visual Culture and Art Theory
Pacific Prehistory and Theories of Origins in the Work of Reverend William Ellis
Clashes of Knowledge
Seeing Things
A Spectacular History of Survey by Flying Machine
Animating the hand of the scientist
Transport phenomena
Conversaziones and the Experience of Science in Victorian England
Introduction
Publishing and the classics
A Christian Benares’
Arthur Cowper Ranyard, Knowledge and the reproduction of astronomical photographs in the late nineteenth-century periodical press
Knowledge work and practices of seeing
The Children's Republic of Science in the Antebellum Literature of Samuel Griswold Goodrich and Jacob Abbott
Biologia
Geographers of Mars
Constructing Canals on Mars
The Joy in Believing
Popularizing the Ancestry of Man
| Unique citing works | 18 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,75 |
| Citation span | 2002 - 2019 (18) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 17 |