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

Post updated to include photographs

Our Martin Lister Research Fellow Anna Marie Roos has curated a small exhibition entitled ‘The Lister Sisters and the Art of Seventeenth-Century Science’, which will run in the Proscholium of the Old Bodleian Library from 18 August to 30 September (the poster can be downloaded here [pdf]). The free display showcases a unique set of drawings, prints, and copperplates of molluscs and their shells, (re)discovered among the library’s holdings by Anna Marie in 2010, which formed the basis for the illustrations in Martin Lister’s conchological magnum opus, the Historiae Conchyliorum (1685-92). Prepared by Lister’s teenage daughters, Susanna and Anna, the materials shed light on representational conventions within late seventeenth-century natural history, as well as on the gendered nature of illustrative practice in this boom era for lavishly illuminated scientific books. Anna Marie will also be giving a free lecture on ‘The Art of Science: The Rediscovery of the Lister Copperplates’ at 1pm on Wednesday 19 September in the Bodleian’s Convocation House (more info and booking on the library website). Further details of both events on The Conveyor.

Anna Marie in front of the display

Lecturing in Convocation House

In conversation with Stephen Johnston

The exhibition proves a hit

Our third and final seminar series was rounded out this summer by a triumvirate of superb presentations with a decidedly British twist:
 

An Index of Modernity: Narratives of Communications in the Late Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic

In his paper on 31 May, Konstantin Dierks (Indiana University) spoke about the shift in the latter half of the seventeenth century from an epistolary culture to a culture of ‘communications’. This conceptual transformation was brought about particularly by the British postal acts of 1657 and 1660 which saw the creation of the role of Postmaster General and a new infrastructure of communication comprised of reliable postal routes and a series of post offices which could be held to public account. Konstantin asserted that this new infrastructure was the result of a commercial rather than imperial vision in the first instance, but that it soon became very much linked to ideologies and discourses of modernity and empire as postal systems were developed in the Americas (Boston, Philadelphia, New York City and Jamaica) which were subject to the regulatory powers of the Postmaster General in London. Konstantin argued that, rather than the intellectuals and scientists of the Republic of Letters, it was the merchants and innovators who most affected government institutions by successfully articulating an ideology around the growing importance of conveying letters and goods. In other words, early modern business and enterprise trumped intellectual enquiry when it came to influencing decisions of state. Plus ça change.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

‘An After-Suppers Work’: Sir Kenelm Digby and Varieties of Correspondence in the 1630s

Kenelm Digby

Joe fields questions

On 7 June, Joe Moshenska (University of Cambridge) spoke about the letters of natural philosopher and courtier Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), focusing especially on the impact his 1636 reconversion to Catholicism had on the nature of his correspondence. Although at the time Digby was viewed as an emblem of frivolity for being swept along in the series of fashionable Roman Catholic conversions of the 1630s, Joe showed, through a close reading of a number of letters, that Digby had actually been engaged in serious theological debate, regularly disputing with other thinkers about the true origins of the church. Digby’s correspondence was also used by Joe as a case study to explore more general questions about early modern letters. For instance, should the courtier’s 100-page work on the early church fathers, which was written in an epistolary fashion, be considered a letter or a treatise? What actually constitutes a letter? Furthermore, did early modern people assume that all letters were public documents unless the writer specifically indicated otherwise? Were explicit epistolary requests for secrecy, as found, for example, in Archbishop Laud’s letter to Digby after the latter’s conversion, genuine or mere rhetorical posturing? These and other questions about the primacy or authority of different letter versions – manuscript copies versus printed editions, for example – aroused productive methodological debate in the question and answer session.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

Editing Evelyn Editing Evelyn

John Evelyn

Discussions continue over dinner

David Galbraith (University of Toronto) brought the seminar series to an edifying close on 14 June with a paper describing the challenges of editing John Evelyn’s letterbook while also situating it within the context of his other, better-known works. Evelyn is an example of an early modern auto-archivist who, after an illness in the 1680s, began the task of reconstructing his papers for posterity in his diary and across four letterbooks. Like editors and archivists today, he used headnotes to identify his correspondents as well as an index, although he evidently had trouble dating some of his earlier communications. According to David, researchers have tended to focus solely on the diary, but it and the letterbooks were in fact parallel projects used by Evelyn as instruments of self fashioning in which he cast himself sometimes as a mediator or cultural broker between different social worlds, and other times as an agent in the transmission of knowledge or as an instructor in morality. David argued that the letters, more so than the diary, reveal a more personal side to Evelyn; he comes across as a funny, witty individual who was adept at self parody and who enjoyed the intimacy afforded by the epistolary genre. Furthermore, the letters, characterized by much stylistic variation, offer details of Evelyn’s life that are simply not found elsewhere in his oeuvre. For instance, John Beale is never mentioned in the diary, yet was Evelyn’s most prolific correspondent on gardens, a topic of enormous importance to the creator of Elysium Britannicum, an encyclopaedic assemblage of horticultural knowledge, practice, and wisdom of the seventeenth century.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

2010 Series and Podcasts

2011 Series and Podcasts

2012 Series and Podcasts

We wish to thank all twenty-six speakers, our hard-working convenors, our many chairs from within and beyond the Project, and our loyal audiences for contributing to the success of our three seminar series since 2010.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia (1596-1662) has often been portrayed as a romantic and frivolous figure; as a desperate, poverty-stricken, devout widow, or as a dilettante who spent her time going to ballets and masques and keeping the company of monkeys (which she allegedly enjoyed more than that of her children). A key constituent of these narratives has been the assumption that her political influence within Europe was negligible.

However, as Nadine Akkerman of Leiden University argued in her paper in our seminar series on 24 May (Opening up the Winter Queen’s Cabinet: The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia), this is a distorted and partial perception of the monarch that has largely arisen because historians have tended to overlook her vast correspondence. The fact is that Elizabeth’s nearly 1700 surviving letters from forty-seven archives in Europe and the US (estimated to be a mere 10% of what once existed) − which Nadine is editing for OUP − contain almost no information on her cultural life, and very little mention of plays, artists, or poets. They reveal instead that she was immersed in politics and was a keen follower of military affairs. Indeed, the underlying purpose of nearly all of her letters, Nadine argued, was to regain the lost Palatinate lands for her heirs.

Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia

Nadine fields questions over drinks.

In a stimulating and wide-ranging analysis, Nadine discussed the often ignored, though politically important, roles of royal secretaries, scribes, and letter carriers. She traced the various ways by which Elizabeth attempted to outwit her brother Charles I’s surveillance of her correspondence (by using cryptography and steganography, for example), and suggested that Elizabeth used letters as a polite instrument by which to sabotage her brother’s plans for the Thirty Years War, thus making that event last ten years longer than it might otherwise have done. In sum, Nadine posited that an examination of this important though neglected correspondence should bring about an overdue reconfiguration of the Queen of Bohemia’s pivotal role in seventeenth-century diplomatic, military, and political history.

Volume II of Nadine Akkerman’s The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, covering the period 1632 to 1642, is out now with OUP.

Podcast available on the seminar page!

In the fourth paper of our seminar series on Thursday 17 May, Dr Glenn Roe – formerly of the University of Chicago, and current Mellon Fellow in Digital Humanities at Oxford’s OERC – gave a sophisticated and suggestive paper on ‘Text-Mining Electronic Enlightenment: Influence and Intertextuality in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters’.

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Building on his recent work with the Electronic Enlightenment corpus and other online repositories of long-form historical text, Glenn started his talk by observing the irony that the recent efflorescence of big data, culturomics, network analysis, and other quantitative approaches to culture – focusing in many cases on the macro interpretation of metadata over content – has authorized and promoted a convention of ‘not reading’ within the digital humanities, in which historical texts themselves can be marginalized or effaced altogether by the superabundance of information. The ready modelling of letters as a finite number of abstract datapoints (sender, recipient, and so on) and the vast quantities of diverse and often disorganized information exchanged within epistolary systems makes correspondence highly susceptible to such an approach.

Glenn during discussion.

Visualizing influence.

As a supplement to this ‘distant’ reading, Glenn went on to demonstrate the potential of the latest machine-learning technologies to render significant volumes of transcription meaningful via text mining and the automated creation of patterns, frequencies, statistical models, and other forms of ‘mediated’ or ‘directed’ reading. Glenn distinguished between three kinds of text mining: predictive classification (used to generate new categories from unprocessed texts); comparative classification (used to correct and refine existing categories within processed texts); and similarity (used to measure broader similarities between documents and parts of documents, especially in terms of the identification of meaningful borrowing and instances of intertextuality). He then demonstrated each kind of approach within a rich series of examples drawn from his work with the ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, and most recently Electronic Enlightenment, before concluding his analysis by presenting – with caveats – some preliminary radial visualizations of textual influence generated using the D3 JavaScript library.

On 26 September 1679, while the astronomer Johannes Hevelius and his wife Elizabetha were spending a relaxing evening in gardens outside the gates of their home city of Danzig (Gdańsk), fire consumed their house in the old town. A large part of their possessions, books, personal manuscripts, and instruments, was destroyed; by the following morning the observatory which Hevelius had carefully erected on the roof of the house lay in ruins.

Much was irretrievably lost, but remarkably the letters he had exchanged with the learned men and women of Europe, including Kepler, Boulliau, Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens, Oldenburg, Wallis, and Kircher, together with his treasured collection of Kepler manuscripts, survived. At that time comprising thirteen volumes, the correspondence of Hevelius constitutes one of the great resources for the study and appreciation of early modern scientific networks.

Hevelius’s 45m focal-length telescope.

Johannes Hevelius.

Making this extraordinarily rich corpus available to the wider scholarly community is the task of a major collaborative editorial project currently underway in France, Germany, and Poland, of which I am pleased to be serving on the advisory committee. With most of the over 2,700 surviving letters now housed in collections at the BNF and the Bibliothèque de l’Observatoire in Paris, it was particularly fitting that the director of the French team Professor Chantal Grell (University of Versailles) – accompanied by Professor Robert Halleux (University of Liège) – should inform our third seminar series of the background and methodologies of this ambitious enterprise on Thursday 10 May. In a talk entitled ‘Editing the Correspondence of Johannes Hevelius: Networks, Themes, and Methodological Challenges’, Chantal first provided an overview of Hevelius’s life and letters, before giving a lively account of the complex archival afterlives of the astronomer’s epistolary collection following his death in 1687, including details of the letters famously purloined by Guillaume Libri in the mid-nineteenth century. Following a conspectus of Hevelius’s many correspondents, Chantal concluded with an analysis of the exemplary seventeenth-century scientific exchange between Hevelius and Pierre de Noyers, the secretary to the Queen of Poland. Following an interesting question and answer session – which included, inter alia, discussion of the benefits and challenges of balancing hard copy and digital outputs within large-scale correspondence projects – the evening came to fitting conclusion with a visit to the opening of the Renaissance in Astronomy exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science.

Seminars take place in the Faculty of History on George Street on Thursdays at 3pm. For future talks in the series, please see the seminar webpage. All are welcome!

Podcast available on the seminar page!

The zoological theme continued on Thursday 3 May when Florike Egmond from Leiden University (formerly of the Clusius Project) gave a talk in our seminar series entitled The Webs of Clusius and Gessner: Correspondence, Images, and Collecting in Sixteenth-Century Natural History. In a detailed and lavishly illustrated discussion, Florike described her recent discovery of two albums of original watercolour drawings created for the sixteenth-century Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner (1551-1558) within the Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam.

Crafted in Basel by the anatomist and natural historian (and Gessner’s friend) Felix Platter (1536-1614), the images – of a menagerie of marine life, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, across 369 pages – formed the basis of many of the illustrations within Gessner’s zoological masterwork, the Historiae Animalium (1551-1558). You can find out more about this exciting discovery in Florike’s recent blog post for the Picturing Science network, and in her recent article for the Journal of the History of Collections.

Conrad Gessner.

Anna Marie chairs Florike.

Renaissance correspondence networks, argued Florike, played a key role in sharing and disseminating (although not, curiously, in facilitating discussion of) manuscript images, as both Gessner, Clusius, and other naturalists solicited hand-drawn illustrations of animals to serve as the basis of woodcuts in their publications from colleagues and agents around the world. These exchanges, in turn, formed the basis of what Florike termed (with caveats) a kind of visual ‘canon formation’ within natural history, as elements of various portrayals were adapted, reworked, and reappropriated across different contexts and between media; as representational norms stabilized; and as the repertoire of animals deemed suitable for inclusion in zoological texts (whose wide remit originally encompassed familiar creatures such as cats and goats) was narrowed and standardized. A lively question and answer session focused on the artisanal communities responsible for producing the illustrations; how the works were commissioned and stored; and the frustrating but typical absence of any kind of discussion of manuscript images in the letters with which they circulated (resulting, suggested Florike, from the self-evident nature of enclosed materials).

Seminars take place in the Faculty of History on George Street on Thursdays at 3pm. For future talks in the series – and to listen to the podcast of Florike’s paper – please see the seminar webpage. All are welcome!