1st Edition
Meeting Places: Scientific Congresses and Urban Identity in Victorian Britain
By Louise Miskell
Copyright 2013
208 Pages
by
Routledge
204 Pages
by
Routledge
204 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
The promotion of knowledge was a major preoccupation of the Victorian era and, beginning in 1831 with the establishment of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a number of national bodies were founded which used annual, week-long meetings held each year in a different town or city as their main tool of knowledge dissemination. Historians have long recognised the power of... Read more
Contents: Introduction; Movable feasts: Victorian knowledge associations and the evolution of the annual meeting; The bidding contest; Running the meeting; Experiencing the meeting; Beyond the meeting: host towns and the parliaments of science effect; Conclusion; Appendices; Bibliography; Index.
Biography
Louise Miskell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Classics at Swansea University.
'The book's primary focus upon the urban dimension of the weekly parliaments rather than their scientific or intellectual content pays real dividends. The richly documented and meticulous case-studies illuminate the impact of the congresses upon the towns involved ... By deploying a wealth of primary source materials, most of which have not been exploited by urban historians in this kind of way before ... this book offers a new and genuinely Britain-wide perspective on a period when comparison and competition between neighbouring places was a constant preoccupation of urban elites.' Urban History 'While the British Association for the Advancement of Science has long formed a subject of research for historians of science, Louise Miskell does a useful service by putting it in the context not of the reforms of the Royal Society or the foundation of disciplinary societies, but of other similar peripatetic associations and of the urban locations that hosted them.' British Journal for the History of Science
