Jonathan R. Topham Category

Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science

“Science,” writes Nicolaas Rupke, “is not just a collection of abstract theories and general truths but a concrete practice with spatial dimensions.” It is, indeed, “situated knowledge.” Rupke comes to this conclusion in an Afterword for David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers’ (eds.) Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (2011). The essays in this volume “situate […]

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Book History and the History of Science

This morning I began reading the “special section” collection of articles published in The British Journal for the History of Science, entitled “Book History and the Sciences” (2000). Jonathan R. Topham provides an introduction explaining why historians of science have been not a little skeptical about the value of the book history approach. “It is […]

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Publishing, Reading, and Inventing Science in the Nineteenth Century

Jonathan R. Topham’s chapter in Science and Religion prompts a more careful examination of the role of science within literature, as well as the cultural embeddedness of science itself. In several other places, Topham offers a more detailed account of the pivotal roles of author, publisher, and reader of nineteenth-century print media, particularly in his […]

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Science and Religion: Some New Historical Perspectives: The Book-history Approach

As a doctoral student, Jonathan R. Topham worked under the inspiring tutelage of John Hedley Brooke, coming under the influence of his “diversity of interaction” regarding science-religion relations, which became a central part of his own study of the Bridgewater treatises of the 1830s. In his essay, “Science, Religion, and the History of the Book,” […]

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