Magic and Intellectual History
CREMS, University of York
Thursday 5 March, 2015
Keynote speaker: Dr Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck)
This symposium will explore the place of magic in the intellectual culture of early modern England and Europe. It will focus on how magic was perceived and understood in philosophical, religious and scientific thought, and the ambivalence that surrounded it as topics of scholarship.
Papers might attend to the following:
- How did early modern thought accommodate magic into its disciplines?
- Why was magic the object of so much ‘elite’ scientific and philosophical thought?
- Magic and the study of nature
- Magic and the ineffable
- Redefining the parameters of magic
- Magic and religion
- The occult and hidden operations of nature
- Scepticism and magical thought
- Magic and language / magic and metaphor
- Literature and the portrayal of magic
- Magic and the devil
- Magicians and their day-jobs
Abstract deadline: 15 October, 2014 (c. 250 words)
Contact: Kevin Killeen, kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk
This symposium is part of a diffuse and ongoing Thomas Browne Seminar that has digressed quite far: http://www.york.ac.uk/english/news-events/browne.
The Thomas Browne Seminar is a forum for exploring the intellectual history of the seventeenth century, the relations between its apparently incompatible disciplines and the social, scientific and political contexts in which they arose. It is not, by any means, restricted to Thomas Browne himself, but also examines more broadly the intellectual culture in the mid-seventeenth century.
Papers are invited on any aspect of mid-century culture, the history of science and scholarship, religious and antiquarian thought, natural history, politics and the history of trivia, in particular, but not restricted to, those related to Browne. As the seminar will involve an ongoing series of meetings, ideas for future seminars are also invited.
The TBS is run jointly by the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Thomas Browne was a significant figure in the scholarly and scientific community of the seventeenth century, who nevertheless defies categorisation and whose blend of humanism, scholasticism and natural philosophy is testament to the intellectual flux of the period.
