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 conversation also had its weaknesses: unless written down, it was quickly forgotten (or misremembered) and was necessarily confined to the people in the room or on the street corner where it occurred. Conversation made naturalists anxious: it was ephemeral, all too easily dissolving into empty talk, and it could persuade by rhetorical tricks rather than truth. They addressed these concerns by creating structures to capture conversation in writing and divert it into the stream of knowledge-making: the Royal Society was one such structure. At its inception, founding fellows instituted procedures for recording, archiving, and disseminating the fruits of conversations held at weekly meetings. As members of an exclusive society, they also controlled who could participate in those conversations. Though the criteria for participation were a subject of some controversy in the society’s early years, in general they valorized gentlemanly, polite discussion that centered on “matters of fact” and that could, in principle, be witnessed by all (one might contrast here the more raucous, free-wheeling conversations of the London coffeehouses). Conversation was thus more fully incorporated into the production of natural knowledge: it was converted into paperwork.
Writing and conversation had a complex, back-and-forth relationship. The Royal Society did not always originate conversation; rather the fellows frequently used writing as fodder for conversation by reading those letters and discussing them and then turned that conversation back into writing in the form of meeting minutes and further correspondence. This system reflected the reality that naturalists and antiquaries were distributed across Britain, and indeed around the world, as well as, in the case of topography, the field’s intellectual requirement of geographical distribution. In integrating conversation into an ongoing system of written communication and record keeping, the fellows of the Royal Society instantiated their Baconian vision of the creation of natural knowledge as an iterative, open-ended process. But they did something surprising as well: they turned conversation into a source of credible knowledge, even to the point where it was the conversation itself that gave written and printed texts, including the articles that appeared in the early Philosophical Transactions, their credibility.
Chapters 4 and 5 take on manuscript and print as modes for creating, exchanging, recording, and disseminating natural historical and antiquarian knowledge. Chapter 4 looks in more detail at a particular episode of scribal exchange. I explore the connections between early modern natural history and the media in which it was disseminated through a fine-grained examination of John Aubrey’s Naturall Historie of Wiltshire, which Aubrey assembled and circulated to readers between 1665 and his death in 1697. Aubrey produced two copies of the text: the original, a rough working copy, now in the Bodleian Library; and a fair copy, now in the Royal Society Library. The major claims of this book are illustrated by Aubrey’s manuscript, particularly through the ways in which it was studied, annotated, and excerpted by its readers. A close analysis of the two copies, and the history of how Aubrey assembled, used, and shared them, reveals that early modern naturalists worked through scribal exchange because papers could more easily be repeatedly revised and expanded as well as shared only among limited coteries of readers for comments and additions. The history of Aubrey’s writings shows that fixity and standardization were not necessarily naturalists’ primary textual or epistemic goals. It also illustrates how the particular affordances of manuscript made possible the characteristic early modern approach to natural and human history, in which new knowledge was continuously accreted through correspondence, conversation, observation, and reading.
Yet Aubrey’s story also illustrates the limits of manuscript and the importance that naturalists placed on print as a mode for distributing knowledge, albeit from within the context of correspondence. Aubrey’s Naturall Historie was read in the seventeenth century only in its manuscript form; it was never printed. This was not Aubrey’s choice but was a strategy forced on him by his circumstances. Aubrey, born a gentleman, was ruined financially at midlife and forced to sell his estates. For a time he frequently changed addresses in order to evade debt collectors. All this to-ing and fro-ing impeded his abilities to complete projects; he wrote The Naturall Historie over decades. As he entered his seventh decade, completing this and others of his works took on greater and greater urgency, and he devoted increasing amounts of time to filling in the gaps in his manuscripts and sharing them with readers. Yet Aubrey was unable to convince a bookseller to take a risk on one of his works; nor could he assemble the capital to finance printing them himself, with the exception of Miscellanies (1696), a collection of notices of seemingly supernatural events. In the case of The Naturall Historie, Aubrey—and his contemporaries, including John Ray—thought that circulating the manuscript should have been preparatory to printing. Knowledge was constructed through scribal exchange rooted in correspondence, but print was increasingly regarded as the proper output of that construction process. Aubrey saw his failure to print primarily as a failure to make his scientific contributions visible to posterity; his friends and readers saw it as a failure to make his contributions available to his contemporaries. Their attitudes suggest a certain emphasis on print as an organ for the dissemination and preservation of knowledge.
With these insights in mind, in Chapter 5 I consider print as a product of correspondence-based exchange, looking at scholars’ use of subscription to finance publication and build readerships for their books. With subscription, authors and booksellers financed printing by signing up readers who paid a portion of the purchase price of the book in advance, with the rest to come at delivery. They assembled these readerships through their correspondence. Naturalists and antiquaries initially turned to subscription because their books were expensive to produce (engravings, in particular, came at a high cost) and drew limited audiences. Booksellers could be reluctant to take on such projects unless they were guaranteed in advance of selling copies and turning a profit. However, in the hands of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century naturalists and antiquaries and their readers, subscription publication was about more than financial contracts. In successful subscription publications, authors worked through their correspondence, developing their audience by building on existing personal contacts and inviting readercorrespondents to participate in shaping the content and material form of the books.
In Chapter 5 I focus in particular on the Welsh naturalist Edward Lhuyd’s use of subscription to fund two projects,
