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. (shrink)

This article aims to challenge the thesis of the craft origins of scientific empiricism by demonstrating how the empirical practices of early experimentalism differed in significant ways from the activities of artisans. Through a phenomenological analysis of instrumental observation and experimental demonstrations, I aim to show how experimentalism privileged modes of experience that were foreign to craft traditions and which facilitated a newfound estrangement of human subjects from the objects of their knowledge. Firstly, we will review concerns surrounding the promotion (...) of optical instruments by early experimentalists to reveal how these technologies were understood not only to amplify the senses but also to obscure contextual and relative qualities available to unaided visual perception. Secondly, we will examine the experimental practices of the early Royal Society, to see how experimental demonstrations were deliberately structured to facilitate experiences of the natural world that were divorced from practical and personal contexts. It is here that the divergence from artisanal epistemology is rendered most apparent. For in contrast to craft practices, which favored forms of experience which were personal and engaged, I will argue that the new scientific practices of the 17th century played a central role in effecting the researcher's transformation into a new kind of epistemological subject – the spectator. (shrink)

In this paper I analyse some resources for the history of manipulative skill and the acquisition of knowledge. I focus on a decade in the life of the ‘ingenious’ Robert Hooke, whose social identity epitomized the mechanically minded individual existing on the interface between gentleman natural philosophers, instrument makers and skilled craftsmen in late seventeenth-century London. The argument here is not concerned with the notion that Hooke had a unique talent for working with material objects, and indeed my purpose is (...) to rethink the ways in which we account for such virtuosity. In this vein, I do not adopt solely a realist or constructivist attitude to skill but seek to show how, in a purposeful way, Hooke drew from the resources of techniques and information made available to him by his social interaction with labourers, servants, craftsmen, gentlemen and noblemen. In Hooke's local culture, intelligence flowed between the sites where these individuals worked and socialized. I examine the practical, social and situational links between the worlds of the coffee house, the workshop and the rooms of the Royal Society at Arundel House and Gresham College. From this perspective, there were no rigid boundaries between the domains of natural philosophy, banausic culture and construction work on which Hooke was engaged, and I argue that we should examine his world in term of a series of networks of capital exchange comprised of finance, social power and mechanical expertise. (shrink)