The British Association Goes West: Montreal 1884

The British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) held its 1884 meeting in Montreal, the first time the association met outside of the British Isles. The author points out that the BAAS, like many nineteenth-century institutions, sought to avoid controversy by excluding the discussion of political and religious topics from its proceedings. Non-partisanship was a veneer it could hide behind. Yet during the Montreal meeting of 1884 this “middle way” was tested. The author points out that while local and visiting Anglophones, many of them BAAS members, viewed the proceedings and character of the association as “decidedly friendly” to religion and as promoting the broad interests of Protestants, Montreal’s episcopacy and the city’s French-language press rallied against the anti-Catholic BAAS, accusing it of harboring a dangerous Masonic clique. He argues that in different material and social spaces, the relationship between science, religion, and the association was conceived in distinct ways. In examining this case, the author seeks to augment the growing body of scholarship within science studies that recognizes the importance of writing both the history and the geography of encounters between science and religion.

Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada / Délibérations et mémoires de la société royale du Canada

Vol. 20

489-497

1982

en