of the third edition with additions, changes, and deletions, usually identifying where they should be inserted into the text with asterisks or other symbols.31 The margins were marked with substantive additions every five to ten pages.32 Print did not in this case imply finality. In subjecting the text to further revision, Evelyn treated his printed text more like a scribal collection. The successive revisions instantiated in print the idea that the investigation of nature was never complete. Evelyn was in the lucky position to be able to put such an attitude into practice: Sylva was popular enough that his printer was willing to invest in second, third, and fourth editions.
Readers also participated in appropriating the properties of scribal texts—revisability and expandability—to printed books. As historians of early modern reading have observed, readers rarely maintained their books in the state in which they left the bookseller’s. At the very least they personalized them by binding them, but beyond that they added ownership marks, stray doodles, personal memorandums, and more focused marks of reading, including arrows, manicules, and stars labeling specific passages as well as more extensive reactions to the content.33 To that list could be added annotations and other manipulations, such as interleaving new pages for additions, that reimagined (and reengineered) the print book into a print-manuscript hybrid that could be used to accumulate knowledge according to “scribal” methods. To take one example, the cleric William Turner, in A Compleat History of the most Remarkable Providences, Both of Judgment and Mercy, which have Hapned in this Present Age (a collection of stories and exempla demonstrating God’s judgment and mercy in individual human lives, societies, and in nature), invited readers to treat his book as a framework for their own commonplace books.34 Turner instructed the skillful reader to transform the book into a print-manuscript hybrid, an endlessly expandable collection of providences, by interleaving blank pages and adding new headings. Although it is unlikely that most—or even many—readers turned A Compleat History of the most Remarkable Providences into a commonplace book, his suggestion indicates that readers would be familiar with this way of repurposing certain kinds of printed books, particularly reference compendia, as personalized notebooks.35 Readers also marked up printed books as part of collaborative intellectual projects. The Royal Society’s copy of John Ray and Francis Willughby’s De historia piscium, a catalog of fish species, includes annotations added in various hands through the eighteenth century. Readers treated the library copy as a collective commonplace book for piscine facts and observations.36 As these examples show, for readers, the print book could be a foundation for their own writing. Like its manuscript counterpart, it was understood as customizable, revisable, and reconfigurable.
The Plan of the Book
In this book I argue that the scientific correspondence was the ground on which Britain was constructed as a topographical object. Though conversation, scribal treatises, and print were all vital to this process, in many ways they were channeled and refracted—even given body and substance—through their movement within naturalists’ correspondence. The first chapter thus anchors the book with an exploration of what, precisely, is meant by the phrase “Britain as a topographical object.” The printed topographical studies of Britain that appeared throughout the Stuart era form the basis of this exploration. I show that although these studies engaged in a common project of mapping and describing Britain’s human and natural history, they reflected the political and cultural divisions of the age, with no two works defining Britain in the same way. This chapter explores in particular depth the push-pull relationships between the English (especially as concentrated in London and the university towns), on the one hand, and the Scots, Welsh, Irish, and Cornish, on the other. Perhaps surprisingly, as an intellectual project the creation of a topographical Britain was by no means defined solely from the metropolitan center or even by the English; rather those on the “margins” played significant roles. Figures such as Edward Lhuyd, the Scottish physician Robert Sibbald, and the Anglo-Irish naturalist and political writer William Molyneux participated in projects that defined “Britain” from an English perspective, one that was conditioned by England’s long history of pretensions to and possession of imperial power within Britain.37 However, they also worked to develop their own images of Britain as a topographical object and often prioritized gathering and disseminating topographical knowledge about their own regions of Britain, which they saw as a path toward the economic improvement and political empowerment of those regions. Edward Lhuyd’s invention of a pan-Celtic Britain that excluded the English and England entirely was particularly significant in this regard. Digging deeper into projects such as Lhuyd’s, Chapter 1 builds on a broad historical literature on early modern Britain and Britishness, showing that though individual visions of the “topographical Britain” were contested, they were created within a shared cultural context, making topography a significant avenue for the development of “Britain” and “Britishness” in the seventeenth century.
Chapter 2 dives more deeply into the social and material realities of the scientific correspondence that linked British naturalists and antiquaries. In this chapter I track the movement of letters, objects (including natural specimens, books, and antiquities), and people across Britain, from urban lodgings to college rooms to remote mountaintops. This movement was accomplished via the state-run mails, which carried letters; a network of private carriers who transported larger packages by horse-drawn cart and boat; and the personal travel of individual scholars and their associates, who transmitted all of the above and conveyed personal messages, greetings, and news in their conversations with each other.
The scholarly project of documenting the topography, antiquities, and natural history of Britain developed alongside these networks, which provided the only way to unite far-flung observers in common projects. The Royal Mail was gradually established over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; previously those wishing to correspond with others—both domestically and abroad—had depended on willing merchants or friends traveling in the same direction, or access to diplomatic mail bags. Though civil war disrupted the mails, by the Restoration transporting private and government letters via horseback was a lucrative business. Starting in the late seventeenth century the government started to devote more funds to improving roads and building canals, allowing for speedier, more regular internal communication, transportation, and travel via horseback, cart, carriage, and boat. The topographical disciplines’ reliance on correspondence is illustrated by scholars’ attention to the materiality of correspondence and transport in their writings and published works. Scholars’ letters from throughout the period are dotted with references to the necessity of an “active and large correspondencie” and the mechanics of sending and receiving letters. In A Collection for Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, a bimonthly newsletter published from 1692 to 1703, the apothecary John Houghton published informative essays on practical scientific developments alongside carrier and coaching timetables as well as lists comparing the prices of goods in various market towns.38 Scientific and technical advancement was tightly connected to the practicalities of longdistance communication across Britain.
Each subsequent chapter examines a different aspect of early modern British scientific communication, situating it in relation to the correspondence. Chapter 3 turns to conversation as a medium through which knowledge was created and scientific community sustained. Conversation, like correspondence, was a social activity, undertaken for pleasure as much as for information. Naturalists and antiquaries sought out conversation with each other whenever possible; both scientific travel and the establishment of scientific and antiquarian societies, including the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, were rationalized in terms of the opportunities they provided for conversation. London and the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge were the loci of scholarly conversation; many letters ring with happy remembrances of friendly meetings in these places and expressions of hope that such visits could be arranged again soon. When meeting face-to-face, scholars could also accomplish tasks that were difficult, if not impossible, to carry out through correspondence, such as cowitnessing of observations and experiments, studying the same specimen together, and delving into and resolving difficult questions that were too complicated or detailed to specify in writing.
Yet