Thomas Harriot Research Articles

Language and Society in Early Modern England: Selected Essays, 1981-1994

1. Editor's Foreword 2. I. Surveys of 16th and 17th Century Linguistic Scholarship 3. 1. Effort and Achievement in 17th-Century British Linguistics 4. 2. Anglo-Dutch Linguistic Scholarship 5. 3. Views on Meaning in 16th-Century England 6. 4. Language Politics of the 16th and 17th-Century English Church 7. II. On Universal and Individual Traits of Language 8. 5. William Bedell and the Universal Language Movement in 17th-Century Ireland 9. 6.Wh- and Yes/No Questions: Charles Butler's Grammar (1633) and the history of a linguistic concept 10. 7. Nathaniel Chamberlain and his Tractatus de Literis et Lingua Philosophica (1679) 11. III. Language Learning and Language Instruction 12. 8. Thomas Harriot (1560-1621) and the English Origins of Algonkian Linguistics 13. 9. The Study of Foreign Languages in 17th-Century England 14. 10. Arabists and Linguists in England in the 17th Century 15. 11. Missionary Linguistics in 17th-Century Ireland 16. 12. Bathsua Makin (1600-c.1673): A pioneer linguist and feminist 17. Appendix: List of Publications by Vivian Salmon, 1988-1996 18. Index of Personal Names 19. Index of Subjects, Terms and Languages

Introduction: Children's Literature and New Historicism

Introduction:Children's Literature and New Historicism Lynne Vallone (bio) In the 1980s, Post-structuralism married Marxism, and gave birth to the "new historicism" (Kelly and Kelly 681). Tony Watkins's essay "Cultural Studies, New Historicism and Children's Literature" carefully enumerates the primary tenets of the various practices of new historicism (and its cousin, cultural studies), especially as they relate to children's literature. It is not my intention here to rehearse his discussion, but rather to remind us of the issues at play and at stake in this type of literary criticism. Many overviews of the practices of new historicism begin with a question: "Are We Being Historical Yet?" "What's So Historical About [New Historicism]?" In the context of this introduction to the special issue "Children's Literature and New Historicism," I would like to ask one, too: "What has new historicism done for you—or children's-literature scholarship generally—lately?" In a properly new historicist way, I would like to begin my answer to the above question by offering an anecdote of personal history. In the spring semester of 1985, I came to new historicism by way of Marxist criticism in a graduate seminar on the industrial novel.1 Although I enjoyed reading Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Benjamin Disraeli, and their novels of social unrest and economic distress, I was well on my way to creating my own surplus value in the form of a child, and was thus engaged in a personal class struggle between my lumpen proletariat body and my bourgeois intellect. The proles won, as Marx predicted they would, and I took an incomplete in the class. As I later cast about for a topic for a catch-up seminar paper, I read some of Harriet Martineau's political writings ("Half a Loaf Is Better Than None," for example), and then Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts. I had found my topic in the "riches" of the latter, and newly sensitized to issues of class, power, and age, and energized to read more "low culture" texts as literature, I wrote my first "children's literature/new historicist" paper on the "industrial child" in More's tracts. The paper became part of my dissertation and eventually the germ of a chapter in my book Disciplines of Virtue: Girls' Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Thus as a children's-literature scholar I see myself as a historicist by temperament, made new by the new historicist 1980s, a combination of nature and nurture that formed my subsequent reading and writing preferences and practices. My anecdote attempts to do double new historicist duty by functioning as both a "historeme," in Joel Fineman's term for history reduced to its smallest unit (qtd. in Zammito 789), and as a self-conscious method to reveal the critic—by tracing personal history within the history of new historicism. But what is the history of new historicism? How is it different from old historicism? Why are these questions so difficult to answer? And finally, what's in it for us? One of the tenets of new historicism, although a literary historicism, is the importance of casting a wide net to include nonliterary texts under the rubric "literature" and reading them in the same way as traditional literature. These pairings of literary texts with "extraliterary" texts (sermons, recipes, pamphlets, institutions, advertisements, and so on) result in explicating by particulars the history or culture that helps to inform and construct the literature, just as literature helps to inform and construct that history or culture. To this end, Gillian Brown reads Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables with the writings of domestic architect and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing (Domestic Individualism 69-77), and the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt reads Thomas Harriot's sixteenth-century missionary text A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia with Shakespeare's Henry plays (Shakespearean Negotiations 21-65). One of the greatest strengths of new historicism is its interdisciplinarity, its sense of play and unlimited possibilities. As the great energy and excitement created by new historicism in the middle 1980s attest, new worlds open up when the...

Contact and contagion: The Roanoke colony and influenza

A comparison of the writings of Thomas Hariot, leader of the ill-fated Roanoke colony, and John Smith, founder of the first successful British settlement in North America, reveals that the Roanoke colonists were the vectors of epidemic disease. The disease was probably influenza, and it was especially lethal to the American Indians whom the Roanoke colonists contacted. Thomas Hariot recorded direct observations of the progress of the epidemic, including symptoms, mode of transmission, and virulence. John Smith, upon his arrival in the Chesapeake Bay region, heard stories of a devastating epidemic that had ravaged the Accomac, one of the groups visited by the Roanoke colonists during the winter of 1585/86. This article critically assesses the historical evidence surrounding this epidemic and proposes influenza as the probable pathogen. Depopulation of American Indians in the vicinity of the Roanoke colony, specifically the Accomac, is placed within the wider context of European epidemic disease in the New World. One implication of this historical record is the identification of Virginia’s Eastern Shore as an area likely to contain archaeological resources relevant to the research problem of American Indian demographic change during the Contact period.

The problem of assessing Thomas Harriot's A briefe and true report of his discoveries in North America

Summary Recent influential criticisms attack the reputation of Thomas Harriot by citing the contents of his ethnographic and economic survey, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, first published in 1588. This interpretation makes Harriot, together with Shakespeare and others, agents of a colonialist project. But profound differences are indicated in the comparison of the relatively unbiased depiction and analysis by Harriot and his artist collaborator John White with the interpretations of America and Americans by some of their contemporaries. A briefe and true report conveys, and John White's drawings support, insight into particular non-European features of the cultural and economic lives of the Algonquian peoples. On the contrary, Captain Arthur Barlowe's Discourse and the illustrations by Theodore de Bry for the 1600 edition of Harriot's book instance romanticizing, stereotyping, and unanalytic condescension very unlike Harriot's and White's. These differences prove the faultiness of the recent assessment.

John White: Renaissance England's First Important Ethnographic Illustrator

John White was England's first important ethnographic illustrator. Collaborating with one of the Renaissance's most innovative scientists, Thomas Hariot, while working as an expedition artist on Sir Walter Raleigh's 1585 attempt to colonize Virginia, White produced influential illustrations of American Indians that were published as etchings and widely distributed in Theodor de Bry's America (1590). Apprenticed as an artist in Elizabethan England, White redirected this traditional training as a limnist and a costume painter to scientific, ethnographic purposes.

The Feathered Scribe: The Discourses of American Ornithology before 1800

B IRDERS interested in American history are fond of noting that Columbus knew he was near land when he saw a flock of migrating birds.1 Thus Europe's discovery of the New World is synchronous with the discovery of New World birds. This fact is not just a starting point for the present article; Columbus's use of the birds is symptomatic of the next three hundred years of American ornithological writing. He was not interested in determining the species; these birds were but a chance sign in a more important venture, and birds as signs were incorporated into the discourse of discovery. Indeed, few American ornithologists writing before the publication of Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands ( 73 I-I743)2 described birds in a discourse we would consider ornithological. The principal function of such early tracts as Thomas Hariot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land in Virginia (i 590), William Wood's New Englands Prospect (i634), and Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (i637) was to promote immigration by advertising a colony's opportunities. These tracts listed birds primarily to assure potential settlers of an adequate food supply; hence these field reporters classified birds as a natural commodity. Southern reporters such as John Lawson in A New Voyage to Carolina (I 709) and William Byrd in Natural History of Virginia, or the Newly Discovered Eden (I737) claimed to write natural history, and they treated the land and its inhabitants in much greater depth than the earlier writers had.3 Lawson signed himself Surveyor General of Caro-

The Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar: Thomas Harriot and His Times Durham, December 14–15, 1987

The Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar: Thomas Harriot and His Times Durham, December 14–15, 1987

The History of Southern Literature

As its title proudly promises, The History of Southern Literature is an ambitious feat of American collective scholarship. In several senses of the term, it is indeed a monument. Imposing in size (626 pages) and scope, it sets out to record Southern writing and writers from 1588 to 1982, from Thomas Hariot's A Brief and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia to Sylvia Wilkinson's Bone of My Bone. In addition to the seven expert editors, some forty other scholars and historians have contributed seventy-five chapters on literary periods, figures, and genres, as well as historical events and cultural movements. This four-pound monument to a tradition still significantly anchored in place and past was subsidized a private foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sponsored the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, it is issued by the leading scholarly publisher in the field of Southern history and (p. xiii). The project enjoyed the support services of librarians, computer experts, and typists from half a dozen Southern universities. On these and more intrinsic grounds, The History of Southern Literature claims an authority and cultural status no previous history or textbook of Southern writing earned for Louise Manly, W.P. Trent, Leonidas Warren Payne, or Jay B. Hubbell, whose 1954 study, The in American Literature: 1607-1900, is the immediate ancestor of this volume. Given these circumstances, one is encouraged not only to consult but to read this history both for what it says about Southern writing, past and present, and for what it represents as historical-cultural document, the expression of values and beliefs of an influential group of contemporary intellectuals. Consulting The History provides ample, generally reliable information, much pleasure, and some frustrations. The varied riches of this regional (and universal) literature are chronicled, often celebrated, and less often critically evaluated in a roughly chronological series of brief chapters. Even for the expert, new names and titles and unexpected connections pop up. Consulters and readers generally will know, and know how to judge discussions of, George Washington Harris and Joel Chandler Harris, but how many will as readily recognize Bernice Kelly Harris or Corra Harris? On broader topics and more major writers, too, there are nicely compressed chapters like Richard J. Calhoun's Literary Magazines in the Old South and Mary Ann Wimsatt's William Gilmore Simms. However, The History is not always as discriminating as it is en-

Thomas Harriot and Atomism: A Reappraisal

Thomas Harriot and Atomism: A Reappraisal

Solar Rotation Determined from Thomas Harriot's Sunspot Observations of 1611 to 1613

In 1612 the sun's mean sidereal rotation rate was only 13.3 degrees per day based on a series of 199 unpublished drawings by Harriot. By comparison with the rates in 1625 to 1626 and 1642 to 1644 it appears that the solar rotation was accelerating significantly in the cycles leading up to the Maunder minimum.

Thomas Hariot's De Reflexione Corporum Rotundorum: An early solution to the problem of impact

Thomas Hariot's De Reflexione Corporum Rotundorum: An early solution to the problem of impact

Harriot's manuscript on the theory of impacts

Summary In a manuscript summary, probably written in 1619, of his otherwise unknown earlier work on the oblique impact of elastic spheres, Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) gives a largely ‘correct’ theory for their subsequent motion. He derives various consequences from his theory, but gives little indication of the observations (if any) or the first principles on which it may have been based. The text of the summary, and of some related fragments, is given.

Harriot's Achievements. (Book Reviews: Thomas Harriot. Renaissance Scientist)

Harriot's Achievements. (Book Reviews: Thomas Harriot. Renaissance Scientist)

First map of the Moon

Thomas Harriot: Renaissance Scientist. Edited by John W. Shirley. Pp. x+181+4 plates. (Clarendon: Oxford; Oxford University: London, June 1974.) £6.50.

Thomas Hariot and the Virginia Voyages of 1602

Thomas Hariot and the Virginia Voyages of 1602

Raleigh, Hariot, and Atheism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England

It has long been accepted as fact that Raleigh was an important figure in a coterie of maverick intellectuals, generally referred to as the School of Night. The assumptions are that this coterie was a structured group; that it concerned itself with iconoclastic attitudes toward religion and philosophy, politics, literature, and the sciences; and that the Raleigh coterie was in active opposition to a rival group, the members of which included the Earl of Essex, the Earl of Southampton, and William Shakespeare. However, two concerns need clarification to evaluate the evidence that Raleigh was a member of such a group: were the attacks on him as an atheist justified, and what were his attitudes toward intellectual pursuits ? It would then be most practical to ascertain on what evidence the School of Night theory is based, how it is presented and interpreted by twentieth century scholars, and whether or not earlier accounts of Raleigh ascribe to such theories, examining along the way what Raleigh's beliefs were as can be determined by his writings and what contemporary attitudes were toward Raleigh and his associates. It may then be possible to judge if there is justification for asserting that Raleigh was a leader--or even a member--of such a group, and indeed, if any such group is likely to have existed.In 1592, in answer to Elizabeth's proclamation against the Jesuits, Father Robert Parsons published his Responsio in which he deplored the notion that Raleigh might become a privy councilor and thus introduce an atheistic policy into England, through the agency of his conjurer, usually taken to be Thomas Hariot. An Advertisment, the English summary of the Responsio, repeated the charge but did not speculate on Raleigh's appointment to the Privy Council. “Of Sir Walter Raleigh's school of atheism by the way, and of the conjurer that is M[aster] thereof, and of the diligence used to get young gentlemen to this school, wherein both Moses and our Savior, the Old and New Testament are jested at, and the scholars taught among other things to spell God backward”.

A Contemporary List of Hariot References

Sometime about 1603, Thomas Hariot (1560-1621) reflected on fame and reputation and on references and allusions that had been made to him personally by contemporary authors. On the back of the final folio of his nearly finished work ‘The Doctrine of Nauticall Triangles Compendious,’ Hariot jotted down a series of references to books which, on examination, seem surely to refer to Hariot or his beliefs. Such a list could have been compiled from curiosity or vanity or for use in conversations with his friends. But it may have had a more specific purpose, since Hariot was a controversial figure frequently called on to account for his ideas or his associations. The making of such a list could therefore have been to forearm himself against the kind of evidence which might be adduced against him from printed sources.

Harriot's calculation of the meridional parts as logarithmic tangents

Many approximate solutions of the problem of constructing a true sea-chart or Mercator's projection were worked out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was not until after the middle of the latter century that it became widely known that the solution was very closely related to logarithmic tangents. However, unpublished manuscripts in private possession in England show that the problem had been completely dealt with much earlier by Thomas Harriot (1560–1621), the contemporary of Napier and Briggs, who is best known in the history of mathematics for his work on algebra. Harriot was successively scientific and navigational adviser to Sir Walter Ralegh and under the patronage of the earl of Northumberland. As a young man he produced an approximate solution of the Mercator problem, which is now lost. He then developed theories of the conformality of stereographic projection, the rectification and quadrature of the equiangular (logarithmic) spiral, used the exponential series, devised interpolation formulae, and applied these results to the calculation of the so-called meridional parts (latitudes croissantes) used in the construction of a Mercator chart, which was most probably completed in 1614. Transcriptions of many of the relevant manuscripts are included in the article.

A Letter from Nathaniel Torporley to Thomas Harriot

A Letter from Nathaniel Torporley to Thomas Harriot

The Study of Thomas Harriot's Manuscripts

The Study of Thomas Harriot's Manuscripts