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

Our good friends and colleagues from Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (CKCC) at Huygens ING in The Hague have a shiny new website. Most excitingly, the revamped site contains a link and extensive supporting documentation for a closed beta (or prototype) of the much-anticipated Epistolarium, a virtual research environment in which users can explore and analyze metadata and full texts of c.20,000 scholarly Dutch letters from the period 1594-1707; see the video above for a rapid-fire introduction. As a long-standing collaborator of CKCC, we’ve been fortunate enough to get a sneak preview of this exciting new resource and will be providing feedback in advance of a full public release (and a resulting edited collection) in 2013. Congratulations to Charles, Guido, Walter, Wijnand, and the rest of the CKCC team!

If you would also like access to the Epistolarium beta, please contact charles.van.den.heuvel(at)huygens.knaw.nl.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.