Visions of Time in Early Modern Europe

Anthony Grafton

Henry Putnam University Professor of History
Department of History, Princeton University

Tuesday, March 6
4:00 P.M. -Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
600 South Gregory Street, Urbana

Miller Comm Lecture sponsored by the
School of Architecture

In conjunction with:
College of Law, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of the Classics, Department of English, Department of French, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Department of History, Department of Landscape Architecture, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Program in Medieval Studies, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, School of Art and Design, Spurlock Museum, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University Library

Anthony Grafton recreates the discipline of chronology in early modern Europe. Technical chronology—nowadays pursued by few—was a trendy area of scholarly inquiry in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its practitioners were polymaths, who used both astronomical data and historical research to date the events of ancient and modern, Eastern and Western history. Great scientists like Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, and great scholars like Kircher and Vico devoted time, energy and ink to this difficult but once fashionable field. This lecture explains what such great intellects saw in this apparently obscure discipline.