Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Since its arrival from the New World and a serendipitous combination with milk and sugar the cacao bean has held European taste-buds in its thrall, and those who craved ‘a fix’ during the Lenten fast might empathise with Andreas Colvius who wrote to Isaac Vossius in 1643 with a request to salute the Spaniards and ‘ask for a description of chocolate’ together with ‘a capsule of it’.

A commodity from the outset – its shipment and delivery by carrier would have been awaited with impatience – and, as addictive then as now, chocolate was what Heinsius pleaded with Graevius to remember, and its price was of particular interest to the early modern consumer: in addition to an enclosed ‘packet of Chocolate’, in 1712 Sir Philip Sydenham considered it worth passing on to the master of University College, Arthur Charlett, that what he could buy in ‘Oxford for 4/-’ was ‘2/6 better’ in Bath.

Cherry-picking letters in EMLO as indolently as truffles, I’ve encountered a physician indulge his son as he slips treats into books and sends with pamphlets ‘three pounds of the best chocolate he ever made using double refined sugar’, and reading of the drink prescribed to Thomas Brett as part of a beneficial diet (‘chocolate, no tea, coffee is the devil’), and of Brett himself hoping to host Lady Cotton with the delicacy. The year before his death, Savilian professor of Astronomy Edward Bernard considered chocolate ‘with chicken broth’ (itself a well-known restorative) to be his ‘greatest diet’, whilst a doting niece sent a treat to her uncle Thomas Turner, president of Corpus Christi, Oxford, together with instructions to ‘make and flavour the drink’. Chocolate ‘without vanillias’ was dispatched in gratitude to botanist Richard Richardson, and Richardson penned a request that cocoa seeds be sought out in Jamaica and brought home.

It was the ubiquitous Hans Sloane who suggested the addition of milk (having considered chocolate too bitter when drunk, as in Jamaica, with water) and, convinced of its beneficial properties, promoted this practice back home. As a beverage, chocolate was swiftly normalised within metropolitan society and a range of consumer behaviours developed around the exotic new product. Individuals began to meet ‘over cups of chocolate’ and chocolate houses proliferated. One such establishment was ‘Mrs White’s’ (forerunner of the esteemed club) and Richard Rawlinson recorded its calamitous destruction by fire in a letter to Thomas Hearne. This fire, emanating from a room named ‘Hell’, burned with such ferocity that the licencee’s wife hurled herself through a window and, as Rawlinson notes, it destroyed a significant portion of Sir Andrew Fountain’s valuable art collection. A century after Sloane’s death, Cadbury Brothers chose to market Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Chocolate with the following instructions: ‘one Ounce of Chocolate (which is two Squares) to a Pint of boiling Milk, or a pint of Milk and Water; add Sugar and milk as other Chocolate’. Today, I hope, like our early modern forebears, you will take a slab of best-quality chocolate and create a treat to revive purged palates, perhaps whilst savouring a rich assortment of early modern letters.

Letters in Focus with Miranda Lewis

Miranda is editing metadata from the Bodleian card catalogue of correspondence for our union catalogue, Early Modern Letters Online. On a regular basis, she brings us hand-picked and contextualised records.

Indulge

We are delighted to share the programme for the third and final Project seminar series. Entitled Cultures of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, and this year convened by Howard Hotson (following sterling work by Pietro Corsi and Peter Harrison on the 2010 and 2011 cycle), the series assembles yet another glittering cast of eight authorities on early modern letters and correspondence. As ever, our speakers will range widely over the topic, providing status updates on world-renowned editions, rich historical case studies, state-of-the-art digital approaches, and theoretical reflections that encourage us to think differently about early modern epistolarity. Podcasts and write-ups from the 2010 and 2011 series will give you a flavour of the talks; for exciting discussion, slides, and an opportunity to engage with speakers informally over wine and nibbles following their papers, you are welcome to join us.

Seminars take place in Trinity Term 2012 on Thursdays at 3-5pm in the Faculty of History‘s light and airy Colin Matthew Room. For the full programme and further details, please see the seminar webpage. The seminar poster (pdf) can be downloaded on the right.

We are pleased to report that Volume III of The Correspondence of John Wallis (1616-1703) – one of a number of epistolary editions the Project is supporting, and the latest installment of the prestigious multi-volume edition of the mathematician’s letters – is now available for pre-order from Oxford University Press, pending publication in May. Painstakingly crafted by our Research Fellow Philip Beeley in conjunction with Christoph J. Scriba, work on the third volume began in the context of the AHRC-funded Wallis Project, and has been completed under the auspices of Cultures of Knowledge.

Consisting of 254 letters in total, the volume covers the exciting period 1668 to 1671, during which England was at peace with itself and its neighbours, publication techniques were becoming ever-more sophisticated (especially with the emergence of academic journals), and scientific activity thrived across the continent. It finds Wallis embroiled in fascinating debates on techniques for determining areas contained by curves (quadratures) and figures (cubatures), as well as on theories of motion and the nature of tides. Other volume highlights include Wallis’s celebrated disputes with Thomas Hobbes and French mathematician François Dulaurens, and ceremonial visits to Oxford by the Crown Prince of Tuscany and William of Orange, during which – in telling evidence of rapid disciplinary consolidation – Wallis presented the visiting dignitaries with examples of state-of-the-art geometrical thinking. Below, Philip discusses the latest installment and looks ahead to Volume IV, which will be delivered in the summer.

For further publication details and to pre-order your copy, please visit the OUP website. For background information about Wallis and other outputs emerging from this sub-project (including podcasts, video, and a complete catalogue of Wallis’s extensive correspondence within Early Modern Letters Online), head along to the Wallis webpage.

Having stumbled across a discussion, inter alia, of early modern sleep and nocturnal activity in an article on the BBC News website, I found myself deep in EMLO this week on the elusive trail of sleeping patterns and experiences. As you might expect, cacophonous night-time irritants – cockerels, ostlers ‘scraping horses down and removing stones from their hooves’, fellow academics and students discoursing in the small hours – conspired to rob the worthy of their peace at night. We find poor Comenius and Johan Christoph Wolf suffering from insomnia, the latter ‘prostrated’ as a result. Sir John Cotton records being ‘indisposed for want of sleep’, and Narcissus Marsh finds himself so overworked he is rendered ‘unable to stand without help and more fit to sleep than write’. Dutch scholar and poet Nicolaas Heinsius the elder deserves our sympathy. Clearly a poor sleeper, he makes repeated reference to sleeplessness in letters spanning from 1650 to 1680, and the problem seems to have become especially acute towards the end of his life. Had he known of her, he might have envied the unfortunate unnamed woman, the subject of a curious case recorded in 1723, who slept ‘continuously for more than 6 weeks’ (presumably she was in some sort of coma).

Tips and recommendations for more effective slumber abound. To aid sleep, I found remedies of a cowslip mixture prescribed by Sir Hans Sloane to a long-suffering patient, and advice to Arthur Charlett, should he wish to sleep during the day, to indulge himself but to ‘sleep in a chair & not lying down’. The best counsel, however, came from none other than our own Jan Amos Comenius who, in a letter to a young man called Jindřich Dobříkovský, suggested dividing the day, taking eight hours for sleep, eight for work and study, and eight for recreation. All wonderfully wholesome and wise. As late as 1785, John Scott Hylton was writing to the Reverend Mark Noble with rules for ‘healthy living (light supper, bed and asleep by 11: nocturnal studies as bad as nocturnal revels)’. No excuse, then, for either of these gentlemen dropping off in the library.

Letters in Focus with Miranda Lewis

Miranda is editing metadata from the Bodleian card catalogue of correspondence for our union catalogue Early Modern Letters Online. On a regular basis, she brings us hand-picked and contextualised records.

Snooze Button

Much of the seventeenth century was blighted by conflict, and the Thirty Years’ War, which stretched the length and breadth of Europe, affected every aspect of life. The implications for educational institutions and resulting intellectual networks and traditions were wide-ranging, and as such the Bodleian cards refer frequently to the effect of the conflict on universities and those teaching and studying within them. For example, in today’s card – sent on 3 February 1641, when war had been raging for over twenty years – John Christenius (1599-1672) laments the ‘injurious effect’ of the pan-European conflict on ‘the quality of the intake and studies at his university’. The original card compiler speculated that this letter might have been written from Deventer (where Erasmus had been at school a century and a half before, and the economic decline of which was attributed to religious war), and in Dirk van Miert‘s Humanism in an Age of Science: The Amsterdam Athenaeum in the Golden Age, 1632-1704 we read that from 1637 Christenius had indeed held a position at the newly formed Deventer Athenaeum. As students rush their work, emerging ‘unfit for a profession or status’, Christenius suggests to Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577-1649), professor of history at Amsterdam’s Anthenaeum Illustre, that a teacher capable of inspiring the ‘studiously inclined young men to cultivate their minds towards a more scholarly standard’ be found, recommending the appointment of Hamburg-born Johann Frederick Gronovius (1611-1671). This suggestion met with approval and, following travels in England, France, and Italy, Gronovius was duly appointed professor of rhetoric and history at Deventer, a post he retained until his transfer to Leiden in 1658.

According to other EMLO records, Gronovius was no stranger to the city. In 1631 he was writing from there and, by January 1644, the scholarly situation at the Athenaeum appears to have improved to such an extent under the auspices of its new star professor that Vossius praises the ‘great flow of good works from G’s. university and hopes that this will stimulate the senators of G’s. city, renowned for its academic traditions and as the place where Erasmus studied, to provide further for the dissemination of the university’s world-wide fame through monumental works of genius and learning’. Although he encountered problems – see the complications concerning one particular ‘homicidal maniac’ – Gronovius found his lectures ‘well attended’, and it’s a relief to find a productive pedagogical outcome despite (or perhaps even because of) the persistent maelstrom of war.

Letters in Focus with Miranda Lewis

Miranda is editing metadata from the Bodleian card catalogue of correspondence for our union catalogue, Early Modern Letters Online. On a regular basis, she brings us hand-picked and contextualised records.

Launch Record of the Week

Our very own Kate Bennett will deliver an Oxford Bibliographical Society lecture on John Aubrey and the Printed Book at the Taylor Institution on Monday 5 March at 5.15pm. John Aubrey is not known primarily for his publications, but for his manuscripts, including his letters, which the Project is editing for publication and calendaring within Early Modern Letters Online. This is often construed negatively, as a failure to print. In her lecture, Kate will reconstruct and explore Aubrey’s complex relationship with printed texts, through his library (full of annotated books), his relations with publishers, his interest in bibliography and the history of the book, and through the libraries of others which he consulted. She will also examine his relationship with the books of those with whom he collaborated, including Anthony Wood and Robert Plot. She will consider how Aubrey balanced print and manuscript as a way of avoiding the risks involved in printing modern histories and lives; and, ultimately what the printed book meant to him. All are welcome!