Notes
1 Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge MA, 1968), p. 363; Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 1974), pp. 23, 48, 103.
2 Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature. The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 2017).
3 William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life (London, 1936), pp. 44–5.
4 Stukeley, Memoirs, pp. 38–44.
5 The Rev. Oliver Heywood … His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdotes and Event Books, ed. J. H. Turner, 4 vols. (Brighouse, 1882), 1, p. 162; The Life of John Rastrick, 1650–1727, ed. Andrew Cambers (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 173, 50–1.
6 The Life of John Rastrick, pp. 42–3, 45, 50–1, 58, 175.
7 Iliffe, citing Duport, claims that students ‘were exposed on a daily basis to learned sermons’ (p. 58). In fact, Duport reserved sermons to ‘Lords day’ only:; G. M. Trevelyan, ‘Undergraduate Life under the Protectorate’, The Cambridge review, 64 (1943), 328–30, at 328.
8 St John’s College, Cambridge, MS K. 38.
9 Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton, eds A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 369–73.
10 Rob Iliffe, Newton. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007), p. 72.
11 The Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton, 2, pp. 300, 302.
12 King’s College, Cambridge, MS Keynes 130.8 fol. 2.
13 National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Yahuda MS 1.1 fol. 1. The treatise exhibits the same confidence in his interpretative powers that he displayed in his earliest writings on alchemy. William R. Newman, Newton the Alchemist. Science, Enigma, and the Quest for nature’s ‘Secret Fire’ (Princeton, 2019), 36.
14 A similar trajectory from decipherment of texts and images to their ‘experimental’ verification can be found in Newton’s alchemical work. Newman, Newton the Alchemist, p. 100.
15 Yahuda Ms. 11 fols. 6–7.
16 Yahuda Ms. 1.1 fols. 18r –19r.
17 Jed Z. Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold, Newton and the Origin of Civilization (Princeton, 2013), chapters 4–6.
18 Dmitri Levitin, ‘Deifying Gravity’, Literary Review (September, 2017). https://literaryreview.co.uk/deifying-gravity.