The Faculty
Dr Richard Serjeantson
Fellow and Lecturer in History, Trinity College
Cambridge CB2 1TQ
Websites:
Subject groups/Research projects
Departments and Institutes
Research Supervision
I offer research supervision in topics from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, with a focus on seventeenth-century Britain, for History and History and Philosophy of Science.
I teach for the M.Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History, the M.Phil. in Early Modern History, and the M.Phil. in History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine. My recent Master's students have written on: the reception of Lucretius in Renaissance Europe; the status of war in humanist educational writings; theories of error in seventeenth-century philosophy; the natural philosophy of William Gilbert; Francis Bacon's natural theology; Thomas Hobbes's changing account of the state of nature; George Rust and intellectual life in 1650s Cambridge; James Harrington as a reader of John Selden; John Locke after 1689; the vegetarian ideas of Thomas Tryon; Samuel Clarke and ideas of human nature; Jean-Théophile Desaguliers; anti-Trinitarian debates in the earlier eighteenth century; perceptions of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman pasts in William Lambarde, David Hume and Edward Gibbon; and John Adams and republican political thought after the American Revolution.
Past and present Ph.D. students have worked or are working on: the theory and practice of princely education in sixteenth-century Britain (Dr Aysha Pollnitz); the doctrine of presumptions in late Renaissance civil law (Dr Adolfo Giuliani); natural philosophy and natural theology in the period 1570–1630 (Dr Thomas Woolford); historiography and law at the turn of the seventeenth century (Dr Rei Kanemura); and natural histories of religion in the century after 1650 (Robin Mills).
Teaching
My undergraduate teaching takes three principal forms. (1) With Dr Michael Edwards, Dr Dmitri Levitin, and Mr Scott Mandelbrote I lecture for and supervise the Part II Specified Subject on the Politics of Knowledge from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment. (2) I supervise and often also lecture for the two papers in the History of Political Thought (pre- and post-1700). (3) I also teach, with Dr Clare Jackson, the Themes and Sources course on Utopian Writing, 1516–c.1789.
In addition, I lecture annually on Renaissance and Reformation historiography for the Historical Argument and Practice paper and, on occasion, for the Department of History and Philosophy of Science on topics in the history of the natural sciences of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Other Professional Activities
I sit on the Editorial Boards of Intellectual History Review and Renaissance Studies.
Keywords
|
Key Publications
- (ed. and introd.) Generall Learning: A Seventeenth-Century Treatise on the Formation of the General Scholar, by Meric Casaubon (Cambridge: RTM, 1999; 2nd edn. New York: Continuum, 2004) [MRTS | Essay review]
- 'Testimony and Proof in Early-Modern England', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 30:2 (1999), 195–236 [ScienceDirect]
- 'The Passions and Animal Language, 1540–1700', Journal of the History of Ideas, 62:3 (2001), 425–44 [JSTOR | Project Muse]
- 'Thomas Farnaby', in British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500–1660: First series, ed. by Edward A. Malone (Detroit: Gale, 2001), pp. 108–16 [Gale]
- 'Herbert of Cherbury before Deism: The early reception of the De veritate', The Seventeenth Century, 16:2 (2001), 217–38 [PDF]
- 'Natural Knowledge in the New Atlantis', in Francis Bacon's 'New Atlantis', ed. by Bronwen Price (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 82–105 [Googlebooks]
- 'Hume's General Rules and the "Chief Business of Philosophers"', in Impressions of Hume, ed. by Marina Frasca-Spada and P. J. E. Kail (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 187–212 [Oxford Scholarship Online]
- 'Proof and Persuasion', in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. III: Early Modern Science ed. by Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 132–75 [Cambridge Histories Online]
- 'Hobbes, the Universities, and the History of Philosophy', in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger, and Ian Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 113–39 [CUP]
- 'Elizabeth Cary and the Great Tew Circle', in The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680, ed. by Heather Wolfe (London: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 165–82 [Palgrave]
- 'Testimony: The artless proof', in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. by Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 179–94 [CUP]
- '"Human Understanding" and the Genre of Locke's Essay', Intellectual History Review, 18:2 (2008), 157–71 [Informaworld]
- (with Thomas Woolford) 'The Scribal Publication of a Printed Book: Francis Bacon's Certaine Considerations Touching the Church of England (1604)', The Library, n.s. 10:2 (2009), 119–56 [PDF]
- 'Samson Agonistes and "Single Rebellion"', in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. by Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 613–31 [OUP]
- 'The Soul', in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Desmond M. Clarke and Catherine Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 119–41 [OUP]
- 'Hume's Natural History of Religion (1757) and the demise of modern Eusebianism', in The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy 1600–1750, ed. by John Robertson and Sarah Mortimer (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 267–95