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London 1600–1800: communities of natural knowledge and artificial practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2019

JIM BENNETT  and
REBEKAH HIGGITT
JIM BENNETT
Affiliation:
Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London. Email: jim.bennett@mhs.ox.ac.uk.
REBEKAH HIGGITT
Affiliation:
School of History, Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NX, UK. Email: r.higgitt@kent.ac.uk.
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Abstract

This essay introduces a special issue of the BJHS on communities of natural knowledge and artificial practice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London. In seeking to understand the rise of a learned and technical culture within a growing and changing city, our approach has been inclusive in terms of the activities, people and places we consider worth exploring but shaped by a sense of the importance of collective activity, training, storage of information and identity. London's knowledge culture was formed by the public, pragmatic and commercial spaces of the city rather than by the academy or the court. In this introduction, we outline the types of group and institution within our view and acknowledge the many locations that might be explored further. Above all, we introduce a particular vision of London's potential as a city of knowledge and practice, arising from its commercial and mercantile activity and fostered within its range of corporations, institutions and associations. This was recognized and promoted by contemporary authors, including natural and experimental philosophers, practical mathematicians, artisans and others, who sought to establish a place for and recognition of their individual and collective skills and knowledge within the metropolis.

Type
Introduction
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 52 , Special Issue 2: London 1600–1800: Communities of Natural Knowledge and Artificial Practice , June 2019 , pp. 183 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2019 

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Footnotes

We would like to thank the contributors to this special issue, the anonymous referees of both the proposal and this introduction, and Charlotte Sleigh and Trish Hatton for their advice throughout the process. We also thank the Science Museum and Centre for the History of the Sciences at the University of Kent for their support of the workshop that led to this collection of papers, and the Leverhulme Trust for their funding of the Metropolitan Science research project. There were many speakers at the workshop whose contributions, although not represented in the published papers, were valuable in shaping this introduction.

References

1 Milanesi, Marcia, Vincenzo Coronelli, Cosmographer (1650–1718), Turnhout: Brepols, 2016, pp. 29, 146, 147, 378Google Scholar. A pair of these globes is in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Dekker, Elly, Globes at Greenwich: A Catalogue of the Globes and Armillary Spheres in the National Maritime Museum Greenwich, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 312–316Google Scholar; an example of the terrestrial globe is recorded at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, at https://lccn.loc.gov/91683588, accessed 3 March 2019.

2 Coronelli, Vincenzo, Viaggi del P. Coronelli (or Viaggio d'Italia in Inghilterra), vol. 2, Venice, 1697, p. 150Google Scholar; Milanesi, op. cit. (1), pp. 258–259.

3 Coronelli, op. cit. (2), p. 150, ‘un gran Magazzino d'huomini’.

4 Coronelli, op. cit. (2), pp. 150–151.

5 Coronelli, op. cit. (2), p. 153, ‘Transattioni Fisicali’, ‘dalle tanto celebre al Mondo Società Reale’.

6 Coronelli, op. cit. (2), p. 154, ‘miei Amici di molto tempo’.

7 The best account with this perspective is still Stewart, Larry, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992Google Scholar.

8 Morton, Alan Q. and Wess, Jane A., Public & Private Science: The King George III Collection, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993Google Scholar; Florence E.H. Grant, ‘The philosophical instruments of George III: a case study in the material culture of experimental philosophy’, PhD thesis, University of London, 2011; Grant, Florence, ‘Mechanical experiments as moral exercise in the education of George III’, BJHS (2015) 48, pp. 195–212CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Millburn, John R., Adams of Fleet Street, Instrument Makers to George III, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000Google Scholar.

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10 Bernoulli, Jean, Lettres Astronomiques, Berlin, 1771, pp. 63–65Google Scholar; Bennett, James A., ‘Shopping for instruments in Paris and London’, in Smith, Pamela H. and Findlen, Paula, Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, New York and London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 370–395, 370–371Google Scholar.

11 Hooke, Robert, Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon, London, 1665CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Preface, sig. g[2]v.

12 Wren, Christopher, Parentalia: or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens, London, 1750, p. 206Google Scholar; for an account of the speech see Bennett, Jim, ‘Christopher Wren's Greshamite history of astronomy and geometry’, in Ames-Lewis, Francis (ed.), Sir Thomas Gresham and Gresham College: Studies in the Intellectual History of London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, pp. 189–197Google Scholar. We return to Mercury as the god of commerce and travel at the end of this essay.

13 Sprat, Thomas, The History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, London, 1667, p. 87Google Scholar.

14 ‘Society’ is mentioned in the founding charter, but the wording refers to the ‘name’ of this ‘Body Corporate and Politic’ as ‘the Master, Wardens and Society of the Art and Mistery of Apothecaries of the City of London’. The body itself was not a ‘society’; rather its name is compounded from a listing of the people who form it, ‘the Master, Wardens and Society’, using the sense ‘a group of people with whom one has companionship or association’ (OED). In most seventeenth-century official documents the term ‘company’ is used, with ‘society’ appearing again only in 1684 and gradually adopted thereafter. Wall, Cecil, Cameron, Charles H. and Underwood, E. Ashworth, A History of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1963, pp. 18–19Google Scholar. We are very grateful to Dr Anna Simmons for this reference and for her help with the names used by and for the society.

15 Sprat, op. cit. (13), pp. 78–79.

16 Sprat, op. cit. (13), p. 86.

17 Stimson, Dorothy, ‘Ballad of Gresham Colledge’, Isis (1932) 18, pp. 103–117, 108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunter, Michael, Science and Society in Restoration England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 171Google Scholar.

18 Sprat, op. cit. (13), p. 88.

19 Sprat, op. cit. (13), p. 72. Sprat had published a similar assessment in 1665, writing of ‘the reall knowledge of mankind, and nature’ that ‘an universal zeal towards the advancement of such designs, has not only overspread our Court and Universities: but the Shops of our Mechanicks, the fields of our Gentlemen, the Cottages of our Farmers, and the Ships of our Merchants’. Sprat, Thomas, Observations on Monsieur de Sorbier's Voyage into England, London, 1665, pp. 291–292Google Scholar.

20 Sprat, op. cit. (13), p. 80.

21 Sprat, op. cit. (13), pp. 400–401.

22 Sprat, op. cit. (13), p. 113.

23 For Coronelli see Milanesi, op. cit. (1).

24 Coronelli, op. cit. (2), p. 155, ‘Si può giustamente dire, che la Città tutta di Londra sia una Università’.

25 Coronelli, op. cit. (2), p. 155, ‘Professori d'ogni Scienza, e di tutte l'Arti liberali’.

26 Mary Margaret Robischon, ‘Scientific instrument makers in London during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1983.

27 In the earlier period see Johnston, Stephen, ‘Mathematical practitioners and instruments in Elizabethan England’, Annals of Science (1991) 48, pp. 319–344CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Harkness, Deborah E., The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007Google Scholar.

28 Some of the documents related to this dispute were published in Atkins, Samuel Elliott and Overall, William Henry, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers of the City of London, London: privately printed, 1881, pp. 138–147Google Scholar.

29 Gee, Brian, Francis Watkins and the Dollond Telescope Patent Controversy (ed. McConnell, Anita and Morrison-Low, A.D.), Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014Google Scholar.

30 London 1600–1800: Communities of Natural Knowledge and Artificial Practice, workshop at the Science Museum, London, 16–17 June 2017, at https://metsci.wordpress.com/2017/05/03/open-workshop-programme, accessed 7 August 2018.

31 See Ratcliff, Jessica, ‘The East India Company, the Company's museum and the political economy of natural history in the early nineteenth century’, Isis (2016) 107, pp. 495–517CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; MacGregor, Arthur, Company Curiosities: Nature, Culture and the East India Company, 1600–1874, London: Reaktion Books, 2018Google Scholar.

32 Examples include James Thornhill's Painted Hall at the Royal Hospital, Greenwich, the decoration of the new East India House of 1729 and James Barry's series of murals, The Progress of Human Knowledge, for the Society of Arts (1777–1801).

33 See Steveson, Christine, ‘Making empire visible at the second Royal Exchange, London’, in Hallett, Mark, Llewellyn, Nigel and Myrone, Martin (eds.), Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735, New Haven, CT and London: Yale Centre for British Art and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies of British Art, 2016, pp. 51–72, 51Google Scholar.

34 Spiridone Roma, The East Offering Its Riches to Britannia, ceiling oval for East India House, 1778, British Library; foundation medal of the Royal Mathematical School, by John and Joseph Roettier, 1673, National Maritime Museum, MEC0878. This owed much of its design to Robert Hooke. See Jones, Clifford, The Sea and the Sky: The History of the Royal Mathematical School of Christ's Hospital, Horsham: Clifford Jones, 2015, pp. 26–27Google Scholar.

35 Portrait of Euclid, with instruments, included in some copies of Dechales, Claude-François Milliet, The Elements of Euclid, Explained and Demonstrated in a New and most easie Method … (tr. Williams, Reeve), London: printed for Phillip Lea, 1685Google Scholar. Wellcome Library, no 2763i (image V1795), is a loose copy. The book was dedicated to the Secretary of the Navy and president of the Royal Society, Samuel Pepys.