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

Bodleian Library, Lister Copperplates 858 (plate 787), Conus Marmoreus

When it came time to publish Historiae Conchyliorum, Lister also called upon the scientific and artistic expertise of his two daughters, Susanna and Anna Lister, who were the primary draftswomen for the copperplates and who may well have been the first women to use a microscope to assist them with their scientific illustrations.

Susanna and Anna’s copperplate etchings and other scientific drawings are currently being featured in an article and slideshow on the news page of the journal Nature, and the women’s role in early science is one of the topics discussed in Roos’s forthcoming biography of Lister, Spiderman: Martin Lister (1639-1712), Naturalist and Physician.

A collection-level description of Martin Lister’s manuscripts in the Bodleian, as well as a description of Martin Lister’s books now held by the Bodleian, are available on the library’s website. The copperplates are kept in preservation envelopes and individual plates can be located using a handlist available from the Bodleian Rare Books Section (rare.books(at)bodleian.ox.ac.uk).

Detail of a letter from van Gogh to his brother. Arles, on or about 20 May 1888. (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, b529 a-c V/1962).

A lecture on ‘The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: Book and Web Edition’ will take place at the Maison Française, Oxford on Wednesday 28 April at 4.30pm. Part of the Digital Humanities Seminar 2010, the event will showcase ‘Vincent van Gogh: The Letters’, which launched simultaneously as a six-volume book edition and scholarly web edition in October 2009 after fifteen years of research by the van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute. Two of the creators of the resource, Nienke Bakker (van Gogh Museum, Amserdam) and Peter Boot (Huygens Institute, The Hague), will discuss the genesis of the project, the depth and variety of the research, the importance of the letters both as an art historical source and as literature, and the rationale for publishing both a voluminous book edition and a free web edition. For further information, please see the lecture flyer. For the project website, please see www.vangoghletters.org.

Electronic Enlightenment, the pioneering online archive of over 55,000 eighteenth-century letters, has just released its second version. New features introduced include additional content (for example the correspondence of Gustavus III and Adam Smith), and a more powerful range of search and browse functions (you can now sort letters by language, age of writer/recipient, and date range; lives by occupation and nationality; and sources by archive/country and title/publisher of early editions). The site has also been given a fresh new look. Electronic Enlightenment is a research project of the Bodleian Library and the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford, and is distributed by OUP.

To celebrate its 350th anniversary, a selection of papers published by Royal Society since its foundation has been made freely available online. The Trailblazing site, launched on 30 November 2009, showcases sixty articles from the Society’s archive of more than 60,000 published since 1660. Publications are presented along an interactive timeline, which places them in the context of social, political, and economic events. While no works by John Aubrey, John Wallis, or Martin Lister are featured, seventeenth-century papers include Newton’s work on light and colour from 1672 and Antonie van Leewenhoeck’s 1676 treatise on ‘little animals in water’. Halley’s account of the 1715 solar eclipse is also included, in which he reports his own detailed observations, as well as the unfortunate circumstances that led the Professors of Astronomy at both Oxford and Cambridge to miss the celestial event. The former, Dr John Keill, was thwarted by excessive cloud cover; the latter, Rev. Mr Roger Cotes, ‘had the misfortune of being oppressed by too much Company, so that, though the Heavens were very favourable, yet he miss’d both the time of the Beginning of the Eclipse and that of total Darkness’. The concept of ‘Company’ was most frequently used by early modern Britons as a euphemism for social drinking.