Sociable Knowledge - Elizabeth Yale Material Texts

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These studies set the scope of natural historical investigation by the political and cultural boundaries of counties, political administrative units hovering between local village society and the institutions of king, courts, and Parliament. Such studies included Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxford-shire (1677) and John Aubrey’s Naturall Historie of Wiltshire. There were also county-based studies of antiquities, such as William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656). These books were conceived of as components within an ideal “whole body and book” of British natural history and antiquities. Some books attempted to sum the components, aspiring to contain the entire field of counties in a single volume: these were the Britannias. Childrey’s Britannia Baconica was one such, as was Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica, a survey of ancient British monuments. Over the decades the “whole body and book” grew, as many scholars working over decades read, copied (sometimes with and sometimes without citations), and added to each other’s work.

      County and regional studies collected local particulars in more or less depth, depending on the patience and knowledge of their authors. Studies focused on single counties were often the most detailed, offering information on winds and water courses, plant and animal species, farming practices, local industries and inventions, antiquities, and noteworthy residents, such as those who had lived to extraordinarily great ages. Scholars writing in this tradition modeled their work on a number of different antecedents; one source was classical works in descriptive and mathematical geography and natural history, including those by Ptolemy, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder. Pliny’s Natural History, known through the Middle Ages but available in a relatively complete version again only in the early modern period (it was printed in an English translation by Philemon Holland, who was also responsible for the 1610 translation of Camden’s Britannia), was an encyclopedic review of nature, arts, and inventions. Though it had a broader scope than many seventeenth-century county natural histories, it shared with them a particular focus on human uses of plants, animals, minerals, and other natural resources. County and regional studies were also modeled on late medieval and Renaissance exemplars, such as Flavio Biondo’s Italia Illustrata (1482), a humanist topographical survey of Italy.8 As these examples make clear, early modern topographers working in these traditions did not share divisions that moderns make between the study of nature and that of culture. Rather, everything—human, animal, mineral, and plant—that was of, on, or involving the land was of interest to them, though some were more interested in some of these categories at the expense of others. Some authors focused more on antiquities and others more on nature, but all participated in a common scholarly community, as will be evident throughout this book.

      Although this book focuses largely on county and regional studies, it also considers the adjacent, related genre of natural histories organized around natural kinds rather than political boundaries.9 In the latter third of the seventeenth century, John Ray, working from his own notes and those he inherited from his friend Francis Willughby, produced a series of studies cataloging plant and animal life. In these works nature was increasingly, though not totally, abstracted from the land; Willughby’s and Ray’s catalogs were not organized as travelogues, though Ray was also known for his books of travels. Nature too was shorn of the classical and humanist literary framework in which fifteenth- and sixteenth-century naturalists had embedded it. Rather than list all previous references to a particular animal in earlier literature, as had continental scholars such as Conrad Gesner, Ray preferred to provide descriptions (and when finances allowed, images) of species based on his observations of them. Whereas the overriding focus of county and regional natural histories was the human presence in and human use of the natural world, these descriptions were less obviously linked to human needs. Despite these differences, however, the two genres of natural history were deeply related. Ray, for one, still corresponded widely with naturalists engaged in both kinds of studies, and he participated in joint projects organized around geographical principles.10

      Both kinds of studies, those organized around political and cultural topography and those organized around natural categories, required intimate, detailed knowledge of human and natural landscapes and natural kinds, which was gained through travel and intercourse with others, whether in conversation, correspondence, or reading printed books. Scholars necessarily drew on each other’s knowledge about particular places and particular subjects in order to build up British natural history and antiquities in both depth and breadth. Late seventeenth-century naturalists often credited Francis Bacon with inspiring and encouraging such collaboration.11 In his Great Instauration, Bacon called upon men to “join in consultation for the common good; and being now freed and guarded by the securities and helps which I offer from the errors and impediments of the way, to come forward themselves and take part in that which remains to be done.”12 Restoring and expanding natural knowledge were massive tasks and would certainly take more than one generation, but investigators believed that if they worked together, they could be accomplished. Early in his career, for example, the botanist John Ray began to assemble a complete list of plants observed in counties across Britain, a project that resulted in his Catalogue of English Plants (1670), his Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum (1690), and the county-by-county lists of plants in Edmund Gibson’s 1695 revised edition of William Camden’s Britannia. As a young man, Ray traveled widely to collect plants. But even in his younger days, before illness restricted his movements, he also worked collaboratively through his correspondence, engaging “friends and acquaintance[s] who are skilful in Herbary … to search diligently his country for plants, and to send me a catalogue of such as they find, together with the places where they grow.”13 In the prefaces to the second edition of the Synopsis, Ray acknowledged fifteen named contributors, among them Hans Sloane, Jacob Bobart, Robert Plot, and Edward Lhuyd.14

      Bacon’s writings were not the only origin point for collaboration, the use of which stretched back into the sixteenth century. Collaboration as well as observation, experiment, and fact gathering were long evident in the practices and writings of surveyors, antiquaries, artisans, natural historians, alchemists, physicians, humanists, gentlewomen, gardeners, and many others in England and abroad.15 Although William Camden, writing at the turn of the seventeenth century, acknowledged few contributors to his popular Britannia by name, we know that he drew upon the works of many topographers and antiquaries, including William Lambarde, Sampson Erdeswicke, John Dee, George Owen, John Stow, and Richard Carew.16 Likewise the absorption of the older topographical tradition into writing that was self-consciously “Baconian” indicates a fundamental sympathy between the two. In his Britannia Baconica, Joshua Childrey drew many of his remarks from earlier writers such as Camden and Carew.

      Though this study focuses on the topographical disciplines, the formation of a widely dispersed correspondence was not unique to them; Bacon’s injunctions were widely influential, as attested by the early history of the Royal Society and the correspondences developed by such figures as Samuel Hartlib and Henry Oldenburg, which touched on many scientific fields. There were also many similarities between the topographical correspondence and the sixteenth-century astronomical community visible in the letters of Tycho Brahe.17 More broadly, topography and astronomy required geographically dispersed observers to collaborate with each other. Investigators distributed across different cities and countries cultivated connections with each other through travel and correspondence because developing knowledge in these fields required contributions from a wide geographical area. In the case of astronomy, this meant dispersal around the globe, as, for example, with the eighteenth-century effort to observe the transit of Venus. The more widespread observers were, the more accurately they could calculate the distance from the earth to the sun from transit data.

      Correspondence and collaboration in natural history and antiquarian studies were shaped, however, by the particular priorities and demands of these fields. In the topographical disciplines, because investigators were dispersed across the landscape and the goal was to build up a complete understanding of that landscape, each one had a unique store of knowledge to contribute (even more so, perhaps, than in astronomy). This meant that priority—being scooped—was less of a concern. Though concerns related to priority and plagiarism were by no means unheard of in the topographical fields, they seem to have been more of a concern in the mathematical disciplines, natural philosophy, and mechanical

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