contact, even integration. Connection and contact—through trade, conquest, intermarriage, or the kind of social and educational mingling that occurred in London and the university towns—only intensified in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Many naturalists and antiquaries were at the forefront of this movement, getting into contact with each other through travel, correspondence, and the reading of each other’s books.
In some ways topographical writers participated in a “colonial” dynamic, in which the non-English British affiliated themselves both with English versions of Britain and their own “native” traditions (while some English writers felt free to pay minimal or no attention to the non-English parts of Britain). Molyneux, Sibbald, and Lhuyd participated in the project of constructing Britain from an English perspective. Yet they also resisted it, or at least maintained strong ties to their own piece of Britain, however they defined it.142 Their national visions—and identities—were neither strictly in concert with English versions of the same nor wholly oppositional. Neither were they consistent across projects, as can be seen particularly in Lhuyd’s career. So too were their identities and practices as scholars hybrid, fluid, and contextual. This can be seen, again, in Lhuyd’s career in his dual use of English and Welsh in his correspondence. One might compare the complex, shifting colonial identities and national visions expressed by Spanish Creole clerics-scholars in New Spain in the eighteenth century, described by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, as they worked to define the history of the New World with and against Enlightenment historians of empire writing in Spain.143
Molyneux’s work as a topographical investigator and as a defender of Anglo-Irish liberties highlights the complexity of “British” identities and loyalties. It also shows how histories of human descent in the British Isles, a familiar concern in topographical writing, could be deployed in attempts to negotiate national relationships in the late seventeenth century. Like Sibbald and Lhuyd, Molyneux collaborated with London-based scholars, making points of contact with England and Englishness and even with Britishness. So too did others in his Anglo-Irish milieu—Dugdale’s catalog of the nobility, advertised on Molyneux’s questionnaire for the English atlas, was, after all, a register of the English, Irish, and Scottish nobility. Yet it was these points of contact, these engagements, that were, for Molyneux, arguments for why Ireland could not be fully ruled by England and subsumed within Britain. The distinctiveness of Ireland as a kingdom within Britain, coequal with England, was rooted, for Molyneux, in Anglo-Irish claims to being fully English. As such, the Anglo-Irish, Molyneux believed, were subjects of the British king but were not bound by a Parliament in which they had no representation.
Both Molyneux and Lhuyd met with resistance to their attempts to graft their parts of the “British” nation into relationship with England and empire. This resistance was symptomatic of the limits, set largely though not entirely by the English, that Welsh, Anglo-Irish, and Scottish naturalists met when they participated in the project of defining Britain. Lhuyd, although he had his supporters in the Royal Society, was mocked when he spent his scholarly energies (and his subscribers’ money) on writing into being a Britain without England.
The failure of Molyneux’s arguments is particularly striking given the overall aims of topographical writing. Molyneux’s statement that shared liberties flowed from common descent foundered in the face of the English Parliament’s insistence on protecting English trade. In their books seventeenth-century naturalists often rhetorically depicted a Britain knit together by trade ties that crisscrossed regional and national boundaries. Many of them set natural history as the chief cornerstone of the improvement of trade—and thus of Britain as a nation and of British identity. Yet when it came down to it, local particulars could not be nationalized quite so easily. Topographical writing was inevitably deployed in the service of particular arguments and political visions that imagined (and enacted) allegiances that included some “Britons” and excluded others. The political equality and economic freedoms that Molyneux sought for the Anglo-Irish depended on the total subordination of the Catholic Irish. There was no master vision of the land that could serve as unified and unifying ground, the basis for an economy that would knit together a Britain in which the local and the national were held in tension to the satisfaction of all. Nor could there be.
Printed topographical works were deeply marked by the scientific correspondence that was the context of their creation. Britons spread across Ireland, England, Wales, and Scotland came in contact with each other through correspondence. They created a shared forum for assembling and debating topographical knowledge, one that, though largely populated by English scholars, was by no means totally dominated by them. Neither was this a shared forum in which individuals were encouraged to abandon their locally rooted perspectives. In fact topography, which presented national visions amalgamated out of local particulars, demanded that individuals maintain their local and regional allegiances, their pride in knowing their land. The tensions in topographical writing—its dream of producing a whole “body and book,” a national vision of Britain, its production in reality of many different, though sometimes overlapping, visions—were present in its necessarily collaborative mode of construction.
Chapter 2
Putting Texts, Things, and People in Motion: Learned Correspondence in Action
The construction of Britain in printed topographical works went hand in hand with the rise of correspondence as the forum for creating knowledge about British nature and antiquities. In promoting new ways of thinking about national identity, topographers, naturalists, and antiquaries communicated habits of thought and being that they had learned by working together via correspondence. Through correspondence, each individual interwove his local knowledge with that possessed by others scattered across Britain. They debated shared questions, though they did not always arrive at shared answers. Travel and letters allowed naturalists to understand the national as the local: to echo Joshua Childrey, mutual correspondence made it possible for each scholar to feel that all of Britain was at his “own door.”
In practice, this correspondence was a complicated dance, the steps of which were the constant movement of letters, books, papers, and specimens by post and carrier and people by horse, foot, carriage, and boat. In a 1692 letter to Anthony à Wood, John Aubrey, describing his travel plans and the locations and destinations of various sets of his papers, summed up these exchanges: “I have here sent II of my volumnes which I intend to print: and desire your perusall, and castigation; as also Mr Collins of Magd{alene} Coll{ege}: to whom pray remember me. {manicule in margin} I desire to heare of your receipt of the my MSS. that they may not miscarry. Tomorrow I goe to Mr Ray {into?} Essex for a weeke. About the middle of Aug: I am for Chalke & Wilton: and thence to Oxford about the beginning of Septemb{er}./ My Surrey is now in Dr Gales hands, before it goes to Mr Ch{arles} Howard & Mr Jo{hn} Evelyn. Pray let me heare from you.”1 Aubrey’s letter illustrates different ways of transporting information, things, and people. First, there was his letter to Wood, probably enclosed with his manuscripts and sent to Oxford via carrier (though letters mailed alone usually traveled by post). Next were the manuscripts. One manuscript had been sent by carrier to Wood; another, Aubrey’s Perambulation of Surrey, went to Thomas Gale, the headmaster of St. Paul’s School in London, with whom Aubrey sometimes lodged. The latter manuscript would make its way, by either carrier or a personal messenger, to Howard and then Evelyn, both of whom had family connections to Surrey. Third, Aubrey himself traveled: first to John Ray, in Essex, and then on to Wiltshire, where he would stop at Broad Chalke, his brother’s farm, and Wilton, the estate of the Earl of Pembroke, until finally he would come to Oxford. At each stop along their paths, letters, manuscripts, and man would be drawn into conversations with both old and new friends and readers. These conversations, in turn, would be reinscribed into new letters as Aubrey and others drew on them as sources for new observations to communicate to correspondents. Through personal travel and the circulation of letters and books, knowledge was collected and inscribed into the books of nature, old friendships maintained, and new ones forged.
The material goods of early modern knowledge making—which included plant
