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

As I finalise annotations for Volume IV of The Correspondence of John Wallis (OUP), I encountered afresh one of the more curious letters in the corpus (pdf). In characteristic fashion for Wallis, the missive – written to Henry Oldenburg in April 1674 and read aloud at the Royal Society – concerns lofty topics, including Robert Hooke’s efforts to measure stellar parallax and thus to provide incontrovertible proof of the motion of the Earth. However, at the end of the letter, we find a rather more tragic story on a very human scale.

Wallis relates the tale of two young Danish scholars, the brothers Peter and Martin Rosenstand, who had resided in Oxford since late 1672 in the lodging house of a Mrs Mumford near the Sheldonian Theatre (Peter, incidentally, was the letter’s bearer). The pair rapidly gained a reputation throughout the city for combining impeccable scholarship, good manners, and sparkling wit; they were ‘civil persons, studious and good scholars’, according to Wallis, whose ‘commendable and ingenuous conversation’ had won them ‘acquaintance with persons of the best quality’. However, these halcyon days were not to last, for Wallis reports an ‘astonishing accident’ which took place the previous Candlemas Day (2 February). Martin, the elder brother at age twenty, ‘was found in the House of office, some distance from the house… he lay in, dead’, with severe contusions to the neck. Although his injuries were consistent with hanging, Wallis could not believe that such a dazzling young man could commit such a heinous act as ending his own life – suicide was a serious crime in early modern England – and so floated the theory to Oldenburg that Martin had ‘in his sleep, or dream, hanged himself… it is not accountable how it should be otherwise’. This consoling explanation was apparently widely shared by seventeenth-century Oxford’s great and good as news of the ignoble death of a rising star sent shockwaves through the quads: ‘It hath occasioned many discourses… and many stories of strange things done in sleep’.

The Sheldonian Theatre, in the vicinity of which the Rosenstands lodged

The yard of St Mary Magdalen parish church in St Giles

This ‘favourable’ view (in Wallis’s terms) was not, however, subscribed to by the Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood, who provided a graphic account of the incident in his memoirs, the Life and Times (Volume II, pp. 280-1). While confirming Wallis’s claim that the siblings were ‘both the civilest men that ever came into that house [Mrs Mumford’s]’ (adding that Martin Rosenstand was ‘apt to blush’), for Wood the latter’s untimely passing was not a tragic misadventure but a willful act of self-destruction: ‘He rose up about four, struck fier, put off his shirt, went down naked (with his cote, loynings, hose and shoes in his armes), and so with the candle in his hand to the privy house, where (though I myself can just stand up in it) [he] hanged himself with his cravet, which came across his neck twice, upon a little rafter that went cross the house’. Moreover, in Wood’s version of events, Peter Rosenstand meddled with the scene in order to conceal his older brother’s actions: ‘His brother rising… went down to the privy house, and found him [Martin] stark naked hanging, tooke him downe and covered his privities with his coat, strived to conceal his death viz reporting that he died at his business’. This intervention notwithstanding, a surgeon ‘found that by his neck he had hanged himself’.

Whether Martin Rosenstand’s self-inflicted demise in a lavatory on a cold February morning in 1674 was deliberate or not, University coroner William Hopkins and his attending jury agreed with Wallis and the rest of Oxford’s learned community: the young Scandinavian had ‘hanged himself in his sleep… he dreamed of it, and so hanged himself’ (a verdict Wood deemed ‘doubtfull’). With the accidental nature of the death officially confirmed, Martin’s corpse was interred in the graveyard of St Mary Magdalen parish church at the southern end of St Giles at ten o’clock the following night, ‘close under the wall next to the stile or passage’ (church burials were denied to victims of suicide). Perhaps tellingly, ‘nobody [was] present but the carriers and clerk of the parish’…

Podcasts on the conference page!

In commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the death of Martin Lister, and in another collaboration between Cultures of Knowledge and The Royal Society, our indefatigable Lister Research Fellow Anna Marie Roos organized a conference on History Comes to Life: Seventeenth-Century Natural History, Medicine, and the New Science at the Society’s London premises on 27 April 2012.

Generously sponsored by the project, The Royal Society, The Wellcome Trust, the John Fell Fund, and the BSHS, sixty-three delegates attended the day-long event, which featured papers from eleven international authorities on early modern science. Speakers discussed everything from the views of French naturalists about the differences between dromedaries and camels, to the chequered history of the publication of the cabinet of natural curiosities of Albertus Seba, to the ornithology of Francis Willughby and John Ray and the scientific representation of frogs and toads.

Helen Watt, our Lhwyd researcher.

Perusing the exhibition.

Anna Marie talks to Jill Lewis.

Early modern ornithologies.

There was a concomitant exhibition in the Royal Society’s Marble Hall, also curated by Anna Marie, featuring a display of relevant books from the Society’s collections; highlights were a bear paw clam displayed alongside its illustration by Lister’s daughters in his Historiae Conchyliorum (1692-97), and John Ray’s Historia Plantarum, in which Ray deployed the terms ‘petal’ and ‘pollen’ for the first time. In a further exciting output, Anna Marie will guest edit a special conference issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society (December 2012) dedicated to the complex interplay between seventeenth-century medicine and natural history. Dovetailing out from Lister’s own contributions, the special issue will consider to what extent practices and technologies of natural history changed between the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, and will explore how the acquisition of knowledge concerning the natural world and new taxonomies affected the perception and treatment of beasts for medical and experimental use.

Update: see write-up, photos, and podcasts

A seventeenth-century rendering of a little horn (or screech) owl.

A day conference on History Comes to Life: Seventeenth-Century Natural History, Medicine and the New Science‚ will be held on Friday 27 April 2012 from 9am to 5.30pm at The Royal Society in London. Organised by our industrious Martin Lister (1639-1712) Research Fellow Anna Marie Roos, and held to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Lister – Royal Physician and the first arachnologist and conchologist  –  the event will explore the often neglected relationship between medicine and natural history in the seventeenth-century. Featuring an exciting line-up of ten international authorities on early modern science, the meeting will dovetail out from Lister’s work to consider to what extent practices and technologies of natural history changed between the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. It will also explore how the acquisition of natural history knowledge and new schemes of taxonomy influenced the perception and treatment of animals for medical and experimental use. As well as support from Cultures of Knowledge, the conference is sponsored by The John Fell Fund, The British Society for the History of Science, The Royal Society, and the Wellcome Trust. The conference fee is a bargain at £40 (full price) or £30 (student/unwaged). For further details and to register online, please visit the conference webpage. Please address queries to felicity.henderson(at)royalsociety.org.

The cause for celebrations.

AMR and the befitting baked goods.

A closer look at the felicitous fancies.

The launch in full swing.

The biography of Martin Lister recently published by our Research Fellow Anna Marie Roos was officially launched this Tuesday at a small but perfectly formed reception in the splendid environs of the Royal Society Library in London. Around thirty guests gathered to mark the appearance of Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639-1712), the First Arachnologist (Brill, 2011) and, during the course of the evening, they were treated to selected readings from Anna Marie, wines from French vineyards visited by Lister (sourced by Anna Marie while researching Lister’s medical journal), and some thematically congruous cupcakes bearing illustrations from Lister’s arachnological and conchological masterworks. Many thanks to Anna Marie for suggesting the idea, to Brill for their generous financial support, and to all at the Royal Society (with special shout-outs to Felicity Henderson and Keith Moore) for allowing us the use of their wondeful venue, for hosting us so graciously, and for all of their assistance with preparations. For more information about the book and to purchase copies, please visit Brill’s website or download the flyer (pdf).

Update: see photos of the launch

We are delighted to announce the publication of a monograph by our Martin Lister Research Fellow Dr Anna Marie Roos. Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639-1712), the First Arachnologist (Brill, 2011) is the first and only full-length biography of the prominent naturalist and physician. Drawing on rich archival sources (including over 1,100 surviving letters, which Roos is also editing under the auspices of the Project), Roos provides a detailed picture of what it meant to be a virtuoso in the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters. Lister, described by Robert Boyle as a researcher of ‘piercing sagacity’, discovered ballooning spiders, while his work on molluscs was standard for 200 years. However, he also invented the histogram, provided Sir Isaac Newton with chemical procedures and alloys for his telescopic mirrors, demonstrated that York’s walls were Roman, received the first reports of Chinese smallpox vaccination, donated the first significant natural history collections to the Ashmolean Museum, and was involved in the day-to-day administration of the Royal Society in its formative years. His study of natural history represents a conceptual bridge between the work of Renaissance naturalists and those of the Enlightenment, while the impact of his research extended into Jamaica, America, Barbados, France, Italy, the Netherlands, China, as well as his native England. Roos also disentangles the significant webs of knowledge, patronage, familial, and gender relationships that shaped Lister’s life as a natural philosopher, presenting a humanistic and holistic view of early science. For more information about the book, please visit the publisher website or download the flyer (pdf).

Kneller's 1699 portrait of Wallis in situ.

A telling epistolary detail.

In the eighth and final paper of our second seminar series on Thursday 23 June, our very own Dr Philip Beeley (University of Oxford) brought proceedings to a strong finish with a paper entitled ‘Oxford Science and the Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Networks of John Wallis’. Drawing on his intensive research on Wallis’s letters – two hard-copy editions of which he is preparing for publication with the support of the Project – Beeley argued that, in the absence of direct patronage, Wallis’s 246 individual correspondences enabled the mathematician, cryptographer, and (from 1649) Savilian Professor of Geometry to establish a name for himself within the broader European Republic of Letters. Indeed, the importance of epistolarity to Wallis is iconographically symbolised by the prominence of an opened letter in Kneller’s 1699 portrait of him (pictured), which now hangs in the University’s Examination Schools. Focussing on case studies, Philip used Wallis’s harmonious communications with the Danzig astronomer Johannes Hevelius to show how epistolary exchanges between distant friends could facilitate the kind of productive intellectual commerce and collaboration idealized by Comenius, Hartlib, and (in the context of the early Royal Society) Henry Oldenburg. However, switching his focus to Wallis’s more turbulent astronomical entanglements with the Dutch mathematicians Christiaan Huygens and Frans van Schooten, Beeley reminded us that the Republic of Letters was far from a gentleman’s club, and that interpersonal rivalries, methodological disuputes, accusations of plagiarism, and the quest for success and status remained powerful influences on scientific discussion throughout the second half of the seventeenth century. Questions focused on letters, mathematical pedagogy, and disciplinary formation; the importance of the patronage of Mary Vere during the first part of Wallis’s career; and unwritten codes of conduct and behaviour within the Republic of Letters. For past lectures in the series, please see the seminar webpage; details of the 2011 series will be available shortly.

Podcast now available on the seminar page!