Space and spectacle : science and religion at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1840-1890
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines public encounters between science and religion that took place in connection with the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) between 1840 and 1890. Throughout, it is argued that these encounters are always made in place, and are profoundly shaped by the local, regional and national settings in which the BAAS met. This is explored through five meetings of the Association, including Cork (1843), Edinburgh (1850), Bath (1864), Bristol (1875) and Montreal (1884). From the politic-religious debates around Irish Repeal in Cork, the Disruption in Edinburgh's Established Church and the publication of Vestiges, or indeed the civic divide between Montreal's Protestant elite and the ultramontanist Catholic population, in each the boundaries between science and religion were differently shaped, contested and framed by local circumstances. As well as placing each meeting in its local, regional and national setting, attention is drawn to the importance of rhetorical geographies and 'communicative acts' in making science-religion encounters. The BAAS's dedication to political and religious neutrality in 1831 was a crucial organising protocol that limited the expression of religious ideas and the use of confessional language in the official confines of the meeting. Breaching this protocol, more often than not, invited controversy. At the same time, 'communicative acts' in different places also played a crucial role in mediating encounters. Spectacles, such as John Tyndall's 1874 'Belfast address', or the appearance of Bishop Colenso in Bath, or even minor religious services, were central in shifting and staging science-religion boundaries in particular times and places. Throughout the thesis, the profound spatial implications of the BAAS's prohibition on religion is highlighted. Indeed, attention is drawn to how the Association's leadership fostered the middle Sunday of the Association's week - a day left free from official business in the programme - as a rhetorical and material space where ideas banned from the Association could find expression. This space helped relieve tension between the Victorian appetite for religion and the BAAS's proscription. Finally, uncovering the Sunday activities attached to the Association helps, as is shown, counter a grand narrative of secularisation that ties science and professionalisation to religious decline.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".