Marginalia, commonplaces, and correspondence: Scribal exchange in early modern science
Introduction
In the mid-1680s, naturalist and Fellow of the Royal Society John Aubrey started his two-volume manuscript The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire, product of thirty years’ observing and collecting in his home county, on a journey to at least six different readers.1 Over the next ten years, the manuscript traveled from reader to reader. On occasion, he traveled with it. Those times he did not, sometimes it passed back through his hands in between stops, sometimes not. In horse-drawn carts it jounced along rough country roads, arriving at one reader’s house in Somersetshire with the wooden box it traveled in “all broken to Splinters.”2 In the fall of 1691, Aubrey and John Ray exchanged frantic letters when it appeared that the manuscript had fallen off the back of the cart and been lost forever while in transit to London from Ray’s home in Essex.3 Late in life, Aubrey dropped it off with a carrier who waited weekly at the Saracen’s Head, a London public house, to be taken to Oxford, where it would join the rest of Aubrey’s papers in the library of the newly-founded Ashmolean Museum.4
Why did Aubrey devote so much time and trouble to superintending his manuscript’s travels from reader to reader? In this essay, I argue that the pains that Aubrey took were commensurate with the role of manuscripts in the production of early modern scientific knowledge. The story of The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire reveals structural connections between the properties of the manuscript as a technology for storing and communicating information, the intellectual goals and methods of Aubrey and his circle of readers, and ways in which they organized themselves socially in order to pursue collective goals.5 Although historians of science have tended to emphasize the role of print in the creation of early modern natural knowledge, it was as much a product of pen and paper as of the printing press. Scribal practices, including writing, reading, copying, circulating, exchanging, and archiving papers, were vital to the construction of natural knowledge.6
I consider in depth two episodes in the circulation of The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire. Each example reveals the ways in which natural knowledge was constructed through the production, exchange, and circulation of “papers” (the collective term that naturalists most often used to refer to their loose notes, drafts, bound notebooks, and correspondence—these became the “manuscripts” of the modern archive).7 Yet the examples also display the limitations of scribal exchange, and suggest how it functioned in comparison to printed and face-to-face communication. In the first instance, I explore Aubrey’s deep fear of plagiarism, expressed through accusations leveled at naturalist John Ray, who read several of Aubrey’s treatises in manuscript. Fears of plagiarism were endemic to scribal exchange, and represent the reverse of the personal trust upon which this particular form of intellectual intercourse depended. Next, I explore how virtuoso and diarist John Evelyn commonplaced The Naturall Historie. Evelyn’s use of The Naturall Historie—he altered the text as he transcribed it—shows how naturalists built knowledge through writing, re-writing, augmenting, copying, and re-copying each others’ papers. Both examples demonstrate that scribal technologies (pen and paper) fostered a collaborative approach to natural history in which knowledge was always incomplete, never finished or final. They further suggest that print practices—or print culture—cannot be hived off from scribal practices or scribal culture. Rather, in their daily jottings and exchanges, naturalists inhabited, and produced, one common culture of communication.
Section snippets
Scribal practices in early modern science
In recent years, historians of the book have identified and begun to explore the scribal practices of early modern writers and readers, particularly in the genres of poetry, news, and theological and spiritual reflection.8 In these genres, as Harold Love has argued, manuscript was a medium in
Collaborative authorship: John Aubrey’s Naturall Historie of Wiltshire and scribal exchange
In both content and form, John Aubrey’s Naturall Historie of Wiltshire, a two volume encyclopedic survey of the natural, social, and economic history of Aubrey’s home county, was a product of the Baconian scribal culture. In this manuscript, produced in an edition of two copies, Aubrey mixed natural historical, chorographical and antiquarian topics, including chapters on topics like “The History of Cloathing & Cloathiers of Wiltshire” and “Faires & Markets, their Rise & decay” as well as on
Credit where it was due: Scribal exchange and the fear of plagiarism
If scribal texts offered sites for productive collaboration, they also threatened its opposite. Fears of misuse and plagiarism—what Aubrey called the “wrong” of “putting out anothers Labours under your own name”—bedeviled early modern naturalists.41 Institutional manuscripts offered one possible solution to this problem: the Royal Society’s register book, for example, was
Making alterations: The convergence of print and scribal cultures
In the early 1690s, Aubrey sent Evelyn The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire. Aubrey, who esteemed Evelyn as a particular friend, eagerly awaited the diarist’s comments. Evelyn did not disappoint. When he returned the text, it was scattered with penciled annotations that expanded the manuscript as a repository of natural historical knowledge and stood (for Aubrey) as a testament to Evelyn’s friendship. Aubrey, keenly valuing the annotations for both these reasons, painstakingly copied them over in
Conclusion
In Evelyn’s commonplacing of Aubrey, we begin to see that scribal and print cultures were not independent of one another. Practices that historians have associated with print culture are evident not only in the presentation of natural knowledge in print. They are also manifest in scribal texts.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Mario Biagioli, Ann Blair, Peter Buck, Steven Shapin, Daniel Margocsy, Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, and the anonymous reviewers for the journal for their perceptive comments on earlier versions of this essay. Portions of this material were presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (2008), the History of the Book Reading Group at Harvard University (2008), the Workshop in the History of Material Texts at the University of Pennsylvania (2010),
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