Isaac Newton at University: A Remarkable New Source, and a New Vision of Late 17th-Century Intellectual Culture

Co-sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar in the History of the Book and by the Dept of History of Science, Harvard

Speaker: Dmitri Levitin (All Souls College, Oxford)

Abstract:
This talk focusses on the recently discovered notebook of Isaac Newton’s
university roommate of more than twenty years, John Wickins, which is being
edited for publication by Dmitri Levitin and Scott Mandelbrote. The notebook
contains remarkable new information about Newton’s university life, his
collaboration with Wickins, and the way in which his institutional setting
stimulated his religious heterodoxy. More broadly, it allows a broader discussion
of—and new perspective on—the nature of intellectual culture in the late
seventeenth century, one which focusses on institutions of higher education,
social mobility, and homosociability more than on gentlemanly culture and
fledging and precarious enterprises such as the Royal Society.