Emily Kent
Thesis title: Cloistered Science: The Monastic Learning of Marin Mersenne (1588-1648)
PhD in History
Year of study: 4
- School of History, Classics and Archaeology
Contact details
- Email: E.Kent-3@sms.ed.ac.uk
PhD supervisors:
Background
I completed my BA at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., double majoring in music and history. Following this I lived in Austria for two years, first as as a scholar at the Universität Salzburg under a Fulbright Fellowship and then as a teaching assistant at the Pädagogische Hochschule in Vienna through the United States Teaching Assistantship Program. I completed an MSt in Early Modern History at Lincoln College, Oxford, before starting my PhD in History at the University of Edinburgh. I am generously funded by the Edinburgh Global Research Scholarship and the HCA School Doctoral Scholarship.
Qualifications
MSt in History, University of Oxford (2019)
BA in Music and History, Georgetown University (2016)
Responsibilities & affiliations
Committee member, Edinburgh Early Modern Network (University of Edinburgh)
Undergraduate teaching
I am a tutor on Medieval Worlds: A Journey through the Middle Ages (HIST08035); Early Modern History: A Connected World (HIST08034); and Introduction to Historiography (HIST08044).
Research summary
I am a researcher of early modern science and scholarship with a particular interest in the intersection between music theory and natural philosophy. I am also interested in reconstructing the various intellectual cultures (e.g. the social, institutional, or material factors shaping an individual's thinking) within which scholars and erudites worked.
My dissertation focuses on the French polymath Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), who has long been recognized by historians of science for his contributions to the new philosophy in the first half of the seventeenth century. However, this historiographical tradition has often ignored Mersenne’s identity as a friar of the Order of Minims, one of the most ascetic mendicant orders in Western Christendom. This order, of which Mersenne was a member for the entirety of his scholarly career, served as his social, spiritual, and epistemological toolbox in his quest for scientific advancement. My thesis reconstructs this monastic worldview within Mersenne's science and his philosophical aims, demonstrating how his career as a friar shaped his erudition according to a lesser understood set of institutional priorities and intellectual traditions. Through the lens of his monastic commitments, his urban setting, and his interpersonal relationships, Mersenne’s life acts as the spine to a larger cultural story about an overlooked kind of pious erudition in one of the most well-known yet misunderstood eras of scientific enterprise.
Affiliated research centres
Invited speaker
NOTCOM - Science and Consensus in the Seventeenth Century (Maison Française, Oxford 1 May 2024)
Mersenne - Reading Session
History of Science, Medicine and Technology Group Seminar (Edinburgh 6 April 2022)
"A living dog amongst dead lions: Greek classicism and natural philosophy in the music scholarship of Edmund Chilmead (1610-1654)"
Organiser
New Perspectives on Mersenne in the History of Knowledge, Music, and Religion
Co-convener for conference held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, Italy, 6-7 June 2024
The Mind is its Own Place?: Early Modern Intellectual History in an Institutional Context
Co-convener for joint Oxford-Edinburgh conference held at New College, University of Oxford, 5-6 May 2022
Enemies in the Early Modern World 1453-1789: Conflict, Culture and Control
Committee member for Edinburgh conference held online 26-29 March 2021
Papers delivered
Society for Early Modern French Studies Conference, Ways of Knowing/Modes de savoir (Exeter, U.K. 24-26 June 2024)
"Jesuit Turncoats: Marin Mersenne and the Promotion of a Monastic Natural Philosophy"
New Perspectives on Mersenne in the History of Knowledge, Music, and Religion (Rome, Italy, 6-7 June 2024)
"The Call of the Cloister: Mersenne, Maignan, and the Quest for a Doxological Philosophy"
Scottish Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy (St Andrews, U.K., 9-10 May 2024)
"Practice Makes Pedagogy: Maignan’s Cursus philosophicus (1653) and the Institutionalization of Experimental Philosophy"
ISIH 2023: Crisis and Change in Intellectual History since c. 1450 (Edinburgh, U.K., 4-6 September 2023)
"Universal Harmony" and the Monastic Vita Contemplativa after the French Wars of Religion
Consonances I: Mathematics, Language, and the Moral Sense of Nature Conference (Maynooth, Ireland, August 30-September 1 2023
"Music and the Order of Minims: Re-Contextualizing Marin Mersenne’s Mathematics in Seventeenth-Century France"
Scientiae: Disciplines of Knowing Conference (Prague, Czech Republic, 7-10 June 2023)
"Minim 'Physico-Mathematicians': Marin Mersenne and Intellectual Community in the Seventeenth-Century Order of Minims"
“The Mind is its Own Place?: Early Modern Intellectual History in an Institutional Context” (Oxford, U.K., 5-6 May 2022)
“‘Minimizing’ Marin Mersenne: Tracing the Intellectual Culture of a Seventeenth-Century Parisian Convent”