The Making of a Virtuoso

McCormick, Ted

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199547890.003.0003

Cited by 3 publications

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“…71 Never reluctant to contemplate radical solutions himself, Petty was greatly interested in polygamy as an aid to multiplication, but perhaps out of deference to English sensibilities, he kept the topic for private papers relating to the American colonies and, on one occasion, to the Irish. 72 If it had been advocated in any version of the 'Multiplication of Mankind', Southwell would surely have mentioned it. The proposals which were there, and to which Southwell reacted with horror, were radical enough.…”

Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 99%

William Petty, the Multiplication of Mankind, and Demographic Discourse in Seventeenth-Century England

Slack¹

2017

Hist. J.

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In the 1650s, after a century of increase, the population of England stopped growing. It was not to increase substantially again before 1750. Over the same interval, and not wholly coincidentally, scholars and theologians were trying to defend the orthodox account of how global population had increased since the Creation and must continue to do so, and the first political arithmeticians were trying to measure and analyse demographic change. This article seeks to throw fresh light on this many-sided discourse by examining William Petty's attempt to write an account of the multiplication of mankind, and the reasons why he failed to complete it. It focuses particularly on Petty's part in developing methods of measuring population density which highlighted the potential for future growth, and on the equally important demonstration by John Graunt that high and rising mortality in cities was hindering population growth in reality. As Petty's cousin Robert Southwell pointed out, Graunt's ‘rule of mortality’ was wholly incompatible with any coherent account of the future multiplication of mankind. At the end of this particular discourse, newly discovered facts about demography triumphed over the presuppositions of divinity.

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Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 99%

William Petty, the Multiplication of Mankind, and Demographic Discourse in Seventeenth-Century England

Slack¹

2017

Hist. J.

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“…More specifically, it was a form of Baconian natural history, something Graunt and Petty both likely encountered through the Protestant "intelligencer" Samuel Hartlib and his circle in the 1640s. 46 For Hartlibians like Gerard Boate, author of Irelands Naturall History (which Petty was invited to complete and which his 1655-56 "Down Survey" of Ireland superseded), natural history geared empirical observations to both the advancement of learning and the productive "improvement" of nature, whether by scientific, economic, or political means. 47 Answering the Cambridge Platonist Henry More's criticism of the Hartlibians, Petty himself espoused a vision of philosophy grounded in the compilation of natural histories, which he preferred to the "Vaporous garlick & Onions" of more speculative philosophy.…”

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confidence: 99%

Political Arithmetic and Sacred History: Population Thought in the English Enlightenment, 1660–1750

McCormick¹

2013

J. Br. Stud.

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Current approaches to the history of early modern population thought focus on the state and secular governance, while standard treatments of Restoration and Augustan "political arithmetic" emphasize its economic or social-scientific content. This article recovers nonsecular uses of demographic quantification, excavating the use of political arithmetic in religious polemic between ca. 1660 and ca. 1750. As a form of empirical natural philosophy, political arithmetic suited the polemical needs of latitudinarian Anglicans and others combating deism, atheism, and preadamism; the demographic regularities it revealed furnished evidence of providential solicitude, while the history of population growth was a potential prop for scriptural chronologies. A strand of "sacred" political arithmetic thus contributed to natural theology while modeling-albeit inconsistently-new historical applications for empirical methodology. The article concludes by considering possible causes for the decline of this "sacred" strand of demographic quantification, while suggesting connections between it and better-known secular forms of Enlightenment-era population thought.

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Francis Harding’s “In Artem Volandi” (1679) and the early modern art of flying

Bičak¹

2016

The Seventeenth Century

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The Making of a Virtuoso

Cited by 3 publications

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William Petty, the Multiplication of Mankind, and Demographic Discourse in Seventeenth-Century England

William Petty, the Multiplication of Mankind, and Demographic Discourse in Seventeenth-Century England

Political Arithmetic and Sacred History: Population Thought in the English Enlightenment, 1660–1750

Francis Harding’s “In Artem Volandi” (1679) and the early modern art of flying

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