A Life in Things: Thinking with Early Modern Matter

In A Conference With a Lady About Choice of Religion, Sir Kenelm Digby, courtier, diplomat and inventor of the glass wine bottle, apologised to his addressee for using 'two wordes appropriated to philosophy' and failing to abstain, as he had promised to do, from 'terms of artificial learning'.

Those opaque and abstract terms were 'matter' and 'form'. In this talk, I will explore the hold that matter had on the early modern imagination, asking how we should think differently about materiality, pursuing the tangled roots of early modern matter theories, and making the case that metaphors that treat language as matter do matter. The paper will touch on everything from beached whales to Renaissance molecular gastronomy, and from Bacon’s plagiarism to Shakespeare’s forays into the subatomic realm.

Please register to attend online.

Lunch and refreshments

• Refreshments (tea and coffee) will be provided 15 minutes before the advertised start time. 
• If you'd like to stay for lunch, please sign up.