Augustan Lecture Series 2026Join us for free, public Zoom lectures on the first Saturday of each month. Members are welcome to invite family, friends, and colleagues. Save these Saturdays!Join author Alan Montgomery for a presentation based on his new book, The Road to Mons Graupius. Praise for the Book About the Book The Road to Mons Graupius records a journey from the Scottish Borders to the edge of the Highlands along the route of a Roman road. On the way, Montgomery searches for evidence of the first century Roman invasion of northern Britain led by renowned general Gnaeus Julius Agricola, which concluded in a confrontation with the indigenous tribes next to a hill called Mons Graupius. As well as featuring some of Scotlands most intriguing ancient monuments, it also examines the Roman author Tacitus account of this invasion, a unique text that has fascinated and frustrated Scots through the ages and inspired a fanatical hunt for the elusive site of Scotlands first recorded battle. About the Author Born in Glasgow and raised in Edinburgh, Alan Montgomerys lifelong love of history was largely inspired by regular childhood visits to Scotlands historical monuments. After studying History of Art at the University of Glasgow, he spent many years working in the art world. Returning to academia in 2010, his MA in Classical Civilisation at Birkbeck, University of London, included a thesis focusing on the post-Roman history of the Antonine Wall. His subsequent PhD at the same institution investigated eighteenth-century attitudes towards Scotlands Roman past. Elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 2018, he is the author of Classical Caledonia: Roman History and Myth in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (EUP, 2020) and Walking the Antonine Wall: A Journey from East to West Scotland (Tippermuir, 2022). 11 July | 9 AM Pacific When we think of coats of arms, we think of knights, noble families, and the battlefield. We rarely think of logarithms, radioactive decay, or the wave-particle duality of light. Yet some of history's most celebrated scientists and mathematicians were armigerous, and the charges they bore, or inherited, or deliberately designed, tell a story about the relationship between intellectual achievement and social standing that spans five centuries. In this talk, James will trace two distinct traditions within the heraldry of science. The first is the inherited arms of figures such as Newton and Napier, whose shields predate their discoveries entirely and invite us to read scientific meaning into charges that carry none, a kind of heraldic pareidolia that reveals more about how we mythologize genius than about the armigers themselves. The second is the far more interesting tradition of self-selected arms, from Humphry Davy's baronetcy shield explicitly commemorating the invention of the miners' safety lamp, to Rutherford's exponential decay curves and Niels Bohr's yin-yang, designed from scratch to encode the principle of complementarity in medieval heraldic grammar. Along the way, the talk will argue that the heraldry of scientists is not merely a curiosity but a map of when and how science became a legitimate source of social standing. Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest intellect of the Renaissance, died without heraldic standing of any kind, a pointed illustration of a system that rewarded birth over brilliance. The modern tradition of scientists designing arms that speak to their work emerges only when that begins to change, and in the shields of Davy, Rutherford, and Bohr we find something genuinely unexpected: medieval heraldry pressed into service as a language of scientific self-expression. 8 August 5 September 3 October 5 November | 9 AM Pacific 7 December | 9 AM Pacific |
