Scientific crosscurrents between Italy and England : Italian contributions to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 17th-19th centuries

Soon after its foundation in the 1660s, the Royal Society became the centre of an international network of scientific correspondence and many of the learned letters it received were subsequently published in its journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (PTRS). The relations of Italian learned men with the Society allowed several discoveries – such as Marcello Malpighi’s anatomical studies and Alessandro Volta’s invention of the battery – to receive the attention of the international scholarly community and become the subject of further research that allowed medical, scientific, and technological advancement. The PTRS papers and the letters preserved in the Society’s archives provide precious insights into the making of science and the workings of the Republic of Letters in the early and late modern periods. This book investigates the Royal Society’s relations with Italy through a socio-historical and critical linguistic analysis of the papers concerning Italian research published in the PTRS and of the epistolary exchanges between the Society’s Fellows and Italian scholars. The aim from the linguistic perspective is to describe the features and development of Italian-research-based papers in the PTRS, as well as the discursive aspects that characterise the exchanges between the two countries. Ultimately, from the historical and cultural point of view, the study will provide a picture of the development of Anglo-Italian relations in a scientific context from the mid-17th to the end of the 19th century