The Dutch navigator Abel Tasman, under the commission of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), became the first recorded European to visit New Zealand on 13 December 1642. For the Netherlands, a maritime nation deeply invested in global exploration, the accurate determination of longitude at sea remained an enduring and critical challenge. To address this, the States General of the Netherlands established a significant prize to incentivize solutions to this pressing navigational problem.
In August 1636, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) proposed an innovative method for determining longitude at sea, based on his discovery of Jupiter's satellites. Through a detailed analysis of Galileo’s correspondence, this paper examines the historiography of his proposal, explores its reception by the States General, and investigates the reasons for the delayed official response to Galileo’s groundbreaking idea.
Two decades later, in 1656, Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) designed the first pendulum clock, which was built by instrument maker Salomon Coster and patented in 1657. Drawing on Galileo’s earlier discovery of the principle of isochronism, Huygens' clock represented a leap forward in timekeeping precision. However, this paper argues that the pendulum clock was initially unsuitable for determining longitude at sea. It further explores how Huygens adapted his invention in pursuit of a solution to this enduring navigational challenge.

During the 17th Century the terms used to talk about, compute and practice the measurement of time were constantly negotiated and underwent considerable changes. Natural philosophers, instrument makers, mathematicians, mathematical practitioners and musicians were debating the nature of repetition in time and its possible consequences for different fields of knowledge. Following this century long project, by the turn of the 18th Century some of our basic concepts of timekeeping were formed and canonized. This talk will focus on a specific aspect of this process, namely the mathematization and mass production of an independent self-standing measure of time. It will look at three different instruments which served as models for thinking periodicity; the string, the pendulum and the spring, along their mutual influence and entangled metaphoric and mathematical language.
Until late 16th Century the main discourse in Europe engaged with periodic motion and its possible quantification was music theory and the Greek science of harmonics, its main mathematical model being the vibrating string. Early 17th Century sees a new trend of comparing the string with the pendulum and the spring, both gradually replacing it. But these alternative models suggested very different epistemic advantages and were used in different contexts. While the pendulum offered exact quantification and rigorous mathematization, the spring was more easily technically manipulated, and enabled easier mass production. The examination of their interchanging roles can help shedding new light on the formation of the fundamental concepts of modern timekeeping, as well as of our own contemporary epistemology of time.

Typhus, recognized as circulating in the premodern era, has received scant attention from historians. Records of pestilence have generally been assumed to be plague. Yet Europeans began to distinguish different types of pestilential fever in the sixteenth century. The first clinical description of typhus is credited to Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro in De contagione (1546), but significant focused attention came later in Spain. In 1574, Luis del Toro, Alfonso López de Corella, and Luis Mercado all published on this fever, commonly known in Castilian as tabardillo. The appearance of multiple treatises at the same time reflects ongoing debates over the differentiation of pestilence as well as how to respond to particular epidemics. Analyzing published medical treatises as well as archival records from epidemics, this paper argues that sixteenth-century medical authorities worked to distinguish different forms of pestilence based on their experiences, particularly noting different patterns of symptoms and mortality. They developed differential diagnoses which civic authorities then relied upon to develop a scale of responses. Plague’s high mortality rate, coupled with the drastic public health measures created to suppress it, created an atmosphere of dread and fear surrounding even the possibility of an outbreak. Typhus, on the other hand, came to be defined as a more “ordinary” pestilence, which required similar but less drastic measures in response. Thus, reactions to epidemic diseases began shifting in the late sixteenth century, as typhus and other contagious fevers emerged from the shadow of plague.

In this work we study Lima's medical networks (17th c.) and analyze the relevance of Vargas Machuca's work regarding the circulation of Western medical knowledge in Andean indigenous communities. Francisco de Vargas Machuca (Lima, 1656) was a doctor who had a relevant participation in the scientific field in the Viceroyalty of Peru at the end of the 17th century. He was the personal physician of viceroy Melchor Liñan y Cisneros, as well as head of the hospitals of Santa Ana and San Bartolome, member of the Protomedicato (most important institution for physicians in the Spanish Monarchy) and professor at the Royal University of Lima. His close relationship with the medical networks in the city allowed him to publish a book in 1694, "Médicos discursos y prácticas de curar el sarampión", which contains instructions for treating and curing measles.
Based on the review of this book and additional documentation of the Archive of the Indies (Seville, Spain), we find that this book shows the medical knowledge transmission between the Spanish or creole population and the indigenous communities. Vargas Machuca wrote this book with the intention of distributing it among the Andean indigenous communities far from health centers so they can cure sick people without the help of certified physicians. Finally, we discuss about the Spanish authorities' concern in preserving the indigenous population, specially driven by economic interest; and the influence of the medical networks developed in Lima in the production of medical knowledge during the final decades of the 17th century.