"Beware that thou be not found wanting in this tryall": An introduction to Isaac Newton's chronological and prophetical studies

The posthumously published Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) and Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St John (1733) showed to the wider world that Isaac Newton devoted ample time to scholarship. The wealth of draft materials Newton left on these topics – more than half of his total manuscript nachlass – allow us to reconstruct the gestation of Newton's studies of ancient history and chronology and the working methods he employed. Traditionally considered the results of two separate projects, in this lecture I will show how Newton's chronological and prophetical studies were in fact deeply connected.

Editing Isaac: the Newton Project as a scholarly digital edition

Twenty years, seven million words – and counting. Physics, mathematics, alchemy, theology, chronology, and the Royal Mint. Originally dispersed all over the world, the online, open-access Newton Project has brought together all of Newton’s writings for the first time in three hundred years. What were once the private materials of a rather secluded individual can now be accessed by anyone, from anywhere, in a easily readable and machine-analysable format. In this lecture, I will address how the digital reunification of Isaac Newton’s papers has revolutionized modern scholarship, and how questions historians of the past did not even dare to ask can now be answered.

The early modern prisca scientia and the foundations of modern science

The seventeenth century is traditionally associated with the new experimental philosophy and the mechanization and mathematization of the sciences. Yet luminaries like Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, firmly believed in an ancient, pristine knowledge, a prisca scientia long since lost. The extent to which his belief influenced their works, and in what way it contributed to the new science, remains virtually unexplored. In this lecture I will trace the development of the prisca tradition from the Renaissance to Newton and draw some preliminary lines from the ancients to the moderns.