valued a dead man’s papers for their intellectual content, these papers were unlikely to survive his death intact. Occasionally a collection of papers might be passed down through a family or to a friend who carried on the scholar’s work.39 If a family was well established and possessed an estate, papers stashed in the library might survive, whether through neglect or more active care and curation. More likely, though, a widow or a son, facing straitened financial circumstances, would recognize that a few pounds could be received for a collection, or a few treatises in it that were ready for the press, and sell it (or them) to a bookseller. Even if the bookseller purchased the whole collection, he was likely to break it up, auctioning off some pieces, publishing others, and junking the rest. In other cases former associates helped break up a collection, raiding it for materials that were either useful to them or potentially damaging to their reputations.
These were, from the dead man’s perspective, the best-case scenarios. In fact, for many relatives and friends not engaged in scholarly activities (and even for some who were), the value of parchment and paper lay in the uses of the material itself, not the content. Used paper was recycled in any number of ways: sheets could be used to line pies during baking or be made into dress patterns, for example. Beyond these more mundane threats, scholars also had to consider Britain’s recent history as an inhospitable home for books, manuscripts, and papers of all kinds. During the Reformation the monastic and university libraries had been destroyed or practically emptied of their books, and untold texts had been dispersed. Through the seventeenth century, numerous religious and civil disturbances, including a civil war, the Popish Plot, and the revolution of 1688–1689, continued to threaten the security of books and papers in both private and public hands.
British naturalists and antiquaries thus lived in a world profoundly hostile to the survival of their intellectual patrimony. To remedy this, they established and stocked with materials institutions that, as part of their mission of promoting experimental philosophy and natural knowledge, preserved books, manuscripts, and personal papers. In the seventeenth century these included the Ashmolean Museum and the Royal Society. This movement continued in the eighteenth century with the physician Hans Sloane’s collecting activities and the founding of the British Museum.40 Naturalists’ and antiquaries’ efforts to preserve their papers within these institutions tell us much about their understanding of science as a cultural enterprise and their own hopes and expectations regarding their place in history. In establishing these archives within institutions devoted to scientific research, they signaled their hope that future scholars would use their materials to continue building Baconian accounts of natural history and antiquities. They were determined to exert ongoing influence over future scientists by making it possible for them to appreciate and make use of their forbears’ contributions as authors, collectors, and investigators. Their efforts also suggest a presumption that scientific activity would continue to be a cumulative endeavor and that they were future scholars’ collaborators. In inventing the archive, naturalists and antiquaries attempted to build correspondence-based methods of scribal exchange into the foundations of the new science.
This book plaits together strands in the history of science, the history of the book, and the history of Britain. It deconstructs the interrelated systems of writing, print, and conversation that naturalists and antiquaries built as they sought to develop knowledge of natural and human history in Britain along Baconian lines. These chapters show how writing and correspondence, as open-ended, iterative modes of communication, drove those systems. Brought to the fore are the relationships between correspondence and the intellectual and political project in which naturalists and antiquaries were engaged. This shows how complicated and often vexed topographical images of Britain emerged out of naturalists’ and antiquaries’ correspondence, shedding light on their roles in the formation of a shared national culture within Britain as well as on the development of “Britain” as an idea. Ultimately, this book not only demonstrates new ways of reading the intertwined development of science and nation in early modern Britain but also serves as a model for grounding our understanding of the construction of scientific knowledge and the formation of scientific communities in the material and social realities of communication, which, taken together, constitute “sociable knowledge.”
Chapter 1
“This Book Doth Not Shew You a Telescope, but a Mirror”: The Topographical Britain in Print
What sort of thing was Britain? This is a difficult enough question to answer in the here and now, when Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England, though for the present still bound together in the United Kingdom, are being driven apart by regional desires for self-governance. In September 2014 another referendum on Scottish independence seemed so likely to pass that in the week before the vote, a jittery Westminster promised the Scots maximum devolution of powers if they rejected independence.1 Though independence was voted down, as of this writing (October 2014) it remains to be seen whether, and how, those promises will be carried out. The trend is certainly toward a looser union rather than a closer one. In this context, what makes for “Britain” as a nation, a geographical object, a historical entity, a people?
The question of what Britain was was difficult to answer in the seventeenth century, as well. Political, cultural, religious, and linguistic differences divided the peoples of the North Atlantic islands that now comprise Ireland and the United Kingdom. Wales had come under English domination in the early fifteenth century, but the Welsh long maintained a distinctive culture and language. In 1603 Scotland came to share a sovereign with England and Wales, but this did not lead immediately to a more thoroughgoing union of either cultures or political and administrative structures. Throughout the century Ireland remained partially occupied, though neither completely controlled by the English nor integrated into Britain. Tensions between England, Scotland, and Ireland were one of the causes of the British civil war. In 1707, with the union of Scotland and England, it became proper to speak of “Great Britain” existing as a political entity. However, in many ways—not the least of which was the continuing subordinate status of Ireland—this process of union was incomplete, at best.
Before political union became even a partial reality, topographical writers wrestled with the question of exactly what sort of thing Britain was. In his 1675 Britannia, the first British road atlas, John Ogilby listed the various methods according to which the “geographers” organized their books: some followed “the Natural Traduction of Rivers and Mountains, Others the Distinction of People and Inhabitants, Others again more frequently, the Politique Division of Princes.” There was, additionally, the “Itinerary Way,” which Ogilby followed, arranging his survey along the principal roads of England and Wales.2 Though topographers recognized the books produced through these diverse methods as kin to each other, part of the same family of inquiry, each book generated a different “Britain.”
Many topographers took the route of defining Britain by geographical contiguity. This included England, Wales, and Scotland but excluded Ireland. Additionally this definition tended to suggest that England, Wales, and Scotland were more unified, both politically and culturally, than they were. Works that followed this path, such as Joshua Childrey’s Britannia Baconica, displayed an ever-present tension between conceiving of individual regions, or kingdoms, as separate objects of study (as attested by numerous internal references to England, Wales, and Scotland) versus envisioning Britain as a whole. They were perhaps most successful at the latter when viewing Britain from an “oceanic” perspective, that is, as an island. This perspective suggests the deep continuities between the topographers’ project and the formation of the British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which bore intimate discursive and ideological connections to this image of Britain as an island and seafaring nation.
Was it defined by shared language? This too was unwieldy: by the seventeenth century, English was the dominant language in England and Cornwall and among portions of the Irish, Scots, and Welsh elites, but Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish Gaelic were still spoken by majorities in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In the West Country a few even still spoke Cornish. Looked at through the prism of language, Britain might also include the French territory of Brittany, where the residents spoke Breton, a Celtic language. The diversity of English dialects and accents spoken even within England was a barrier to the formation