Thomas Harriot: Science and Discovery in the English Renaissance

Robert Fox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000811148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume sheds new light on one of the most remarkable polymaths of the English Renaissance. It offers original perspectives not only on Harriot's personal achievements in mathematics and natural philosophy but also on the wider realms of exploration, colonial ambition, and philosophical debate in which he earned the attention and respect of contemporaries in and far beyond the socially elevated circles of his two great patrons, first Walter Ralegh and then Henry Percy, the ninth Earl of Northumberland.

Harriot's sixteenth-century world was one of unprecedented expansion in both scientific understanding and the discovery of new lands and peoples. The essays gathered here bring out forcefully the effect of this expanding vision, encapsulated in Harriot's Briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1588), the first detailed description of America to be published in the English language. In addition to an essay by a recent biographer of Harriot, the volume contains reworked versions of seven Thomas Harriot Lectures, an annual lecture series inaugurated in 1990 in Oriel College, Oxford. It follows two earlier volumes of Harriot Lectures, also edited by Robert Fox, that appeared in 2000 and 2012.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Thomas Harriot Lectures 1990–2021
• Introduction: Thomas Harriot. Science, Mathematics, Exploration in the English Renaissance
• 1 The Certain and Full Discovery of the World: Richard Hakluyt and Thomas Harriot
• 2 Thomas Harriot in the Twenty-First Century: 25 Years of the Harriot Lecture
• 3 ‘Our learned countryman’. Thomas Harriot and the Emergence of Mathematical Community in Seventeenth-Century England
• 4 Thomas Harriot: The World’s First Ethnographer?
• 5 Harriot, Hakluyt, and the Briefe and true report … of Virginia
• 6 ‘Cause Both to Feare and Love Us’: How to Found an Empire in Harriot’s Day
• 7 Thomas Harriot’s Magnificent Book: Creating Europe’s First Illustrated Exploration Narrative
• 8 On Writing Harriot's Biography
• A Bibliography of Secondary Sources Relating to the Life and Work of Thomas Harriot Published since 2010
• Index