Marginalia, commonplaces, and correspondence: Scribal exchange in early modern science

Abstract

In recent years, historians of science have increasingly turned their attention to the “print culture” of early modern science. These studies have revealed that printing, as both a technology and a social and economic system, structured the forms and meanings of natural knowledge. Yet in early modern Europe, naturalists, including John Aubrey, John Evelyn, and John Ray, whose work is discussed in this paper, often shared and read scientific texts in manuscript either before or in lieu of printing. Scribal exchange, exemplified in the circulation of writings like commonplace books, marginalia, manuscript treatises, and correspondence, was the primary means by which communities of naturalists constructed scientific knowledge. Print and manuscript were necessary partners. Manuscript fostered close collaboration, and could be circulated relatively cheaply; but, unlike print, it could not reliably secure priority or survival for posterity. Naturalists approached scribal and print communication strategically, choosing the medium that best suited their goals at any given moment. As a result, print and scribal modes of disseminating information, constructing natural knowledge, and organizing communities developed in tandem. Practices typically associated with print culture manifested themselves in scribal texts and exchanges, and vice versa. “Print culture” cannot be hived off from “scribal culture.” Rather, in their daily jottings and exchanges, naturalists inhabited, and produced, one common culture of communication.

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.