On Newtonian History

Abstract

It is easy to pass off Isaac Newton’s preoccupations with chronology and history as divertissements. The great man himself sometimes wrote of them disparagingly in this way, and a common impression has stuck ever since that his work on ‘natural philosophy’ was of far greater importance for him than dating ancient reigns and personages or unravelling the symbology of apocalyptic.1 The sheer bulk of his writing, however, bespeaks otherwise. From the event-filled year of 1666, when the plague and the Great Fire traumatized London, and when the British fleet turned national disaster into an Annus Mirabilis by defeating the Dutch admiral de Ruyter (and forcing the ignominious resignation of Cornelius Tromp), twenty-three year old Newton was already dabbling in divinely appointed dates, while also purchasing prisms and pondering falling apples and ‘the force of gravity’.2