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- The Gresham College group was a loose collection of scientists in England of the 1640s and 1650s, a precursor to the Royal Society of London. Within a few years of the granting of a charter to the Royal Society in 1662, its earlier history was being written and its roots contested. There is still some debate about the effect of other groups on the way the Royal Society came into being. The composition of those other groups is unclear in parts; and the overall historiography of the early Royal Society is still often regarded as problematic. But this group has always been seen as fundamental to the course of events. Both the location and the staff of London's Gresham College, a foundation outside the old universities at which lectures were given for the general public, played significant roles in the events leading up to the charter given to the Royal Society. More accurately, there were at least four identifiable successive groups of virtuosi (as they would have been called at the time), natural philosophers and physicians, in London and Oxford, in the period from the outbreak of the First English Civil War to the English Restoration of 1660. Of those, two were based at Gresham College: the so-called 1645 group concerned with experimental science; and the 1660 committee of 12 who steered the early days in which the Royal Society was formed, i.e. in the period October 1660 to 1662. According to a history of the College: the scientific network which centred on Gresham College played a crucial part in the meetings which led to the formation of the Royal Society. The traditional account, represented by the Royal Society's handbook from a century ago, which took at face value some of Thomas Sprat and John Wallis's statements about the pre-history, is more cut-and-dried than current views about the central role of the "Gresham College group". Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667) is now generally considered a work of apologetics rather than reliable history; and Wallis was writing much later, with his own agenda. But with some nuances, the outline of the events connected with Gresham College remains much the same. (en)
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