Northern Networks: Astronomical and Medical Knowledge from the Baltic to East Central Europe, 1550-1750

Anglophone scholarship has overwhelmingly privileged the history of correspondence in early modern Europe at the expense of knowledge-making (and sharing) across Northern and Baltic locations. Our workshop series responds to this gap, with the primary aim of drawing a new map across Northern European centres of learning. The objective is twofold. Firstly, the network emphasises the impact of academic mobility through the early modern migration of people and ideas, identifying, for the first time, an epistemic unity from the Baltic to Central Europe which linked geographical areas that might otherwise seem separate. Secondly, this focus fosters closer, interdisciplinary work on collections of early modern knowledge that have been hitherto marginalised within Anglophone scholarship. The network transcends national and disciplinary boundaries by bringing together intellectual historians, historians of science, literary scholars, art historians, maritime historians, linguists, and curators, from the UK, continental Europe, and North America. Northern Networks provides a platform for these different academic communities - who rarely otherwise collaborate in research - to meet, share and expand knowledge of the understudied intellectual networks across early modern Northern Europe.

The first workshop will be held at the University of Aberdeen in March 2022. The focus will be on sixteenth and seventeenth-century medical research and academic mobility between Scotland and continental Europe. Our aim, drawing on the rich collections at the Sir Duncan Rice Library, is to reconsider the foreign transactions in medical research that paved the way to Isaac Newton's era in the British Isles. This workshop will focus especially on the archive of the physician Duncan Liddel (1561-1613) and the work of the Edinburgh-born medical practitioner John Craig (died 1620), who was first physician to James VI, later James I of England, and a practicing astronomer. Both the geographical focus and the designated time period of this research have been overlooked by past scholarship, which has tended to focus on continental academic activity during the 'Republic of Letters', later in the seventeenth century.

The second workshop takes place at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Our disciplinary focus for this gathering is the history of collecting, and the methodology is artisanal epistemology, or making as a way of knowing, which enables a brand new study of mathematical communities in Central Europe who negotiated with their Northern counterparts. We chose Prague because of the well-known presence of Kepler and Tycho Brahe, but also to complement Aberdeen and Uppsala with a major imperial court. Within this scheme, we will attempt to highlight the rich cosmological production of makers such as Erasmus Habermel (1538-1606), Joost Bürgi (1552-1632) and the Prague-born clockmaker Heinrich Stolle. Building on the existing expertise of local scholars, who will 'dissect' a few selected pieces, this object-based workshop makes full use of the digital dissemination we explain in our management section of this bid.

The third workshop will be at Uppsala University in March 2023. The Carolina Rediviva Library houses a collection of early modern astronomical texts known as the Copernicana, thought to have been owned by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) - the largest number of texts with his provenance in the world. In addition to its invaluable contribution to Copernican studies, the library also provides rich resources for the history of early modern medical research in the Waller Collections, which hold over 50,000 natural philosophical works dating from the middle ages to the 1950s. With a focus on the contents of these extraordinary archives, this workshop will reconsider the substantial, yet significantly understudied, early modern Swedish contribution to Northern European intellectual networks.