A microscopic organism and a camera obscura, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, No. 42, Monday, December 14, 1668. (Leslie Smith)

11:15 am-12:15 pm  saturday, october 8

Rachael Scarborough King: Samuel Johnson and Spectral Evidence ♠ 
Leslie Smith: Reports of Private Wonder and Public Astonishment

[King was unable to attend the conference; her presentation was not delivered]

Leslie Smith’s research of seventeenth-century oddities in print embarked from a desire to map thought and to understand both the process of seeing in private versus public, and how that seeing is represented from a historical perspective. To do this, she studied diagrams, drawings and plates from texts that described accounts of curious observation, like in Nathaniel Crouch’s (Richard or Robert Burton, pseud.) The Surprising Miracles of Nature and Wonder (1683). In one such plate, spectators are publicly observing an array of cosmic spectacles in the sky—blazing stars, light rays, and clouds. The method used to depict these spectacles informs contemporary viewers of the visual experience itself, as does the way in which the onlookers are shown huddled in groups, with their fingers pointed towards the sky, informs us of the historical experience of observation.  [Read more]