Manuscript technologies

correspondence, collaboration, and the construction of natural knowledge in early modern Britain

Edición de la obra Manuscript technologies

This dissertation examines scientific communication and collaboration in seventeenth-century Britain. More precisely, it analyzes the ways in which these activities were carried out through the production and exchange of scribal texts by individuals active in the allied (and often overlapping) fields of natural history and antiquarian studies. In these fields, manuscript exchange was naturalists' primary means of constructing knowledge. Textual practices--such as reading, writing, annotating and sending letters--were as vital to the creation of scientific knowledge as observing, calculating, and experimenting. Although printed books were often the end products of research in these fields, these books grew out of long processes of exchange and collaboration. Scribal exchange occurred within what natural historians and antiquarians referred to as their "correspondence," the sum of the social, material, and intellectual links between naturalists and antiquarians. Through the correspondence, naturalists pursued ambitious goals, such as surveys of all known plants and animals and detailed local histories of nature and antiquities. They exchanged not only scribal texts, such as letters, notes, marginalia, and manuscript books, but also natural specimens (plants, insects, stones) and printed books. These exchanges had many permutations; the "value" of a given natural specimen, fact, or book was determined by what another naturalist voluntarily exchanged for it. At times, the voluntary nature of manuscript exchange thwarted collaborative efforts, frustrating, for example, large-scale projects like the production of encyclopedic natural histories of every county in Britain. Naturalists developed a "manuscript sensibility," one that encouraged endless revision, addition, and accretion even in the writing of texts destined for print. This sensibility was the product of both naturalists' working methods--the accumulation and exchange of "facts" through the correspondence--and naturalists' epistemological priorities, inspired by the natural philosopher Francis Bacon, which generated the preference for facts. These two factors, the one material, the other abstract and philosophical, were two sides of the same coin. Scientific priorities conditioned naturalists' use of available means of communication, but the potentialities of these various means also determined the realization of scientific priorities. Rather than one being the product of the other, the two were mutually co-constructed.