Established in the early seventeenth century following a bequest to the university by Sir William Sedley, Oxford's Sedleian Professorship of Natural Philosophy is one of the university's oldest professorships. In common with other such positions established around this time, such as the Savilian Professorships of Geometry and Astronomy, for example, its purpose was to provide centrally organised lectures on a specific subject. While the Professorship is now a high-profile research post in applied mathematics, it has previously been held by physicians, an astronomer, and several people in the eighteenth century whose credentials in natural philosophy are much less clear. This edited volume traces the varied history of the chair through the first four centuries of its existence, combining specialised contributions from historians of medicine, of science, of mathematics, and of universities, together with personal reminiscences of some of the more recent holders of the post.

This history of the books of Reading Abbey covers the period from the abbey's foundation to its dissolution, and follows up the dispersal of the book collections to c.1610. It provides valuable material on the ways in which books were used, and about the intellectual life of medieval monastery. Alan Coates makes an important contribution to our understanding of the fate of monastic books and book-collecting in the post-Dissolution period.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.

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 'cultural capital' in the competitive climate of the mid-Victorian years, as towns raced to equip themselves with libraries, newspapers, 'Lit. and Phil.' societies and reading rooms, but the staging of the great annual knowledge festivals of the period have not previously been considered in this context. The four national associations studied are the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS), the Royal Archaeological Institute (RAI) and the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE), who held annual meetings in 62 different provincial towns and cities from 1831 to 1884. In this book it is contended that these meetings were as important as royal visits and major civic ceremonies in providing towns with an opportunity to promote their own status and identity. By deploying a wealth of primary source material, much of which has not been previously utilised by urban historians, this book offers a new and genuinely Britain-wide perspective on a period when comparison and competition with neighbouring places was a constant preoccupation of town leaders.