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Liam Sims, Martin Folkes (1690–1754): Newtonian, Antiquary, Connoisseur, by Anna Marie Roos, The English Historical Review, Volume 137, Issue 589, December 2022, Pages 1845–1847, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac248
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Extract
The printer and antiquary John Nichols, immortalising Martin Folkes in his Literary Anecdotes of 1812, wrote that ‘Mathematics and antiquities were by him, as philosophy was by Socrates, rendered familiar and intelligible to an ordinary understanding’. This brief sentence does more than any other in Nichols’s fifteen-page tribute to summarise Folkes’s dual interest in natural philosophy and the past, a common combination in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries before what we would recognise as modern scientific disciplines had taken shape. The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions was just as likely to feature papers on microscopy and anatomy as it was on Roman mosaics and medieval architecture; Edmond Halley, known primarily to us as an astronomer, published in its pages in 1695 an illustrated ‘Account of the Ancient State of the City of Palmyra’. Until relatively recently this commingling was viewed disdainfully by historians of science, but Folkes (the only individual to occupy at the same time the presidential chairs of the Royal Society and Society of Antiquaries) is the perfect prism through which to make sense of the dynamic world of Georgian scientific antiquarianism, and Anna Marie Roos has done much—in this book and elsewhere—to bring this world vividly to life.
