Friday (Isaac) Newton Blogging

This week’s bit of Newtoniana:

There is one story told by every Newton chronicler (including me) that is supposed to capture the great man’s puritanism in action.

Newton was famously a man of few friends, especially in his Cambridge years (1661-1696). One of those few was the immigrant chemist Giovanni Vigani (whose chemical chest — complete with some of its original ingredients survives at Cambridge to this day). Newton conversed with Vigani, entertained him in his rooms, and even shared or gave him space in his little laboratory shed.

And then it all stopped. Why?

Because Vigani had the temerity to tell a lewd story about a nun.

A nun? Why did that detail stick in memory? Nuns were famously satirized as sexually profligate before Henry VIII, but they had not been a common feature on the landscape in Protestant England for more than a hundred years

If I were trying to do real history here, I’d be more careful. But as long as everyone understands that this is speculation, two thoughts:

First — this is a reminder of the internationalization of the community of scientific thinkers. Vigani was born in Italy, a Catholic — a country and a condition where jokes about overly-enthusiastic nuns came naturally. He ended up in Cambridge, an Anglican, but his sense of humor remained continental. The fact of his presence in the intellectual backwater that was Cambridge in those days is one small measure of how the scientific revolution took place on the ground, as interested parties spread all over Europe, bringing with them evolving new methods of figuring things out.

Second: it helps remember that Newton was a man of many parts, and many dislikes. He hated loose talk (though he had greater tolerance for the fact of other people’s sex lives than he is given credit for. After all, he shared his London house with his niece Catherine Barton, the toast of the Kit Kat Club and Lord Halifax’s mistress.) He also hated the Catholic Church and what he saw as its centuries long perversion of true religion. A joke about nuns, whatever else it might contain, would hardly have seemed funny to the man who saw the history of organized Christianity since the third or fourth century as one long travesty of false belief.

I wish, after all this, I could tell the joke itself. Sadly, only its ghost remains, in one line from a posthumous memoir of Newton. Perhaps someone could suggest what it should have been. Maybe a competition will be in order when the blog community accumulates….

posted by thomas levenson

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