Isaac Newton - manuscripts digitized and now available online

There is a pretty fascinating site now available for your viewing and studies.  Want to look back into the late 1600’s?  Now you can. Here’s an excerpt from the description of the collection:

“There are at least three reasons why these papers are important, even though they do not always speak directly to the canonical Newton. First, the manuscripts help illuminate Newton’s science. Newton’s piety served as one of his inspirations to study nature and what we today call science. But Newton’s theological papers also tell us much about his inductive methods and his views on the unity of God’s Creation.

Second, the manuscripts illuminate the person of Newton. The figure once viewed almost uniformly as an icon of cold rationality, now appears as an alchemist, a biblical scholar and a religious devotee who pored over the symbols of the Books of Daniel and Revelation for decades in an attempt to decode the meaning of the future foreordained by God. Newton can now be studied as an alchemist and a theologian in his own right.

Third, the unpublished papers illuminate Newton’s age. Newton’s collection of transcribed and originally-composed alchemical manuscripts was perhaps the largest in Europe in his lifetime and would merit study on this basis alone. And a corpus of three million words on theology, church history, Jewish ritual and prophetic exegesis from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would be significant, even if their author were not the one many credit with founding modern science.”

See the entire description of the collection at https://jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/mss/newton/collection_eng.html. Head on over the site entrance at https://jnul.huji.ac.il/dl/mss/newton/index.html.