11 November 2025, 4pm GMT
Simon Building, Room 2.61 [maps and travel]
Online: https://zoom.us/j/98754598345

Dr Lewis Bremner, University of Cambridge

The Heart of the Eye and the Heart of the Sun: The Struggle to Translate Science in Tokugawa Japan

Abstract: In 1802, the Nagasaki-based translator Shizuki Tadao completed the final volume of a work that presented Japanese readers for the first time with explanations of universal gravitation, Newtonian optics, and several other groundbreaking scientific ideas. That work was Rekishō shinsho (‘New Book on Calendrical Phenomena’). It was based on a book by the Oxford professor John Keill, yet in Shizuki’s manuscripts we also find ideas about the nature of the universe – even the existence of alien life – that were entirely distinct from Keill’s.

This talk uses these points of difference as anchors to investigate the motives and modes of translation in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Japan, and by so doing re-examine the role of translation in the emergence of modern science

Dr. Lewis Bremner is a Teaching Associate in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He works on the history of science and technology in Japan. He recently co-edited the volume Reopening the Opening of Japan: Transnational Approaches to Japan and the Wider World (Brill, 2024), and he is currently completing a book on the history of the magic lantern in Japan

All welcome!

Convenors: Dr Amelia Bonea and Dr Aya Homei

Seminar Programme on the CHSTM Website

Related