In her influential article published in 2016, Alexandra Walsham, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, coined the metaphor that ‘Archives are the factories and laboratories of the historian’. Traditionally viewed as neutral storehouses of official records passively awaiting historians’ scrutiny, conceptions of archives have expanded in recent decades. Archives are now understood as complex social and cultural entities that actively participate in shaping understandings of the past. This paper examines shifting perspectives on the nature and functions of (...) archives through a critical analysis of key debates. Specifically, this paper adopts a hermeneutic lens to critically engage Walsham’s metaphor and move beyond its potential limitations through situated analysis and interpretation. This paper explores how archives are actively implicated in knowledge construction through their contents, organisational frameworks, and interactions with historians. Recognising archives as fragmented, culturally contingent remnants that mediate engagement with the past, the paper calls for collaborative, reflective approaches between archivists and historians. The paper also acknowledges historians’ subjective interpretive roles while advocating consultation of archivists’ contextual expertise. Ultimately, it advances methodological discussions on writing history through a nuanced appreciation of archives as dynamic mediators within historical research, not transparent conduits neutrally supplying facts. (shrink)

The philosophy of Francis Bacon was interpreted in various ways in the seventeenth century. In England, his utopian project and natural history became the basis for the projects of religious pacification, pedagogical reformation, and scientific cooperation of Hartlib, Comenius and Charleton. In the hands of Evelyn, Wilkins, and Wren, moreover, Bacon’s ideal of cooperative science engendered the birth of the Royal Society, and his natural history guided the experimental activities of Boyle and Hooke. In France and the Netherlands, attention was (...) paid to Bacon’s natural history especially within the circle of friends of Descartes. In the second half of the seventeenth century, though Bacon’s historical approach was gradually supplanted by mechanical-mathematical science in Europe, Baconianism still served as a source of arguments in the Dutch Cartesian context, as to his theory of error and as a source of criticisms to Aristotelianism. (shrink)

The main aim of Samuel Hartlib was to provide an advancement of learning finalized to the amelioration of the material conditions of men and the pursuit of a religious peace, i.e., the unification of the Protestants. To this aim, inspired by Comenius, he devoted his efforts or gathering knowledge by the creation of a society or office of learned men (in technical fields, philosophy, and theology), and by the establishment of a network of correspondents (the Hartlib Circle). The method of (...) discovery underlying his program of advancement of learning was inspired by Bacon’s Novum Organum and by Jacopo Aconcio’s method of analysis, while the categorization and transmission of knowledge had to be based on commonplace books and artificial languages. His plan of economic improvement, to be fulfilled mainly through the amelioration of husbandry, was motivated by the Puritan Millenarianism to which he adhered. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

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)

ABSTRACTThis article claims that today’s reading of Francis Bacon’s Essayes as a solely literary text turns upon philosophers’ having largely lost access to the renaissance culture which Bacon inherited, and the renaissance debates about the role of rhetoric in philosophy in which Bacon participated. The article has two parts. Building upon Ronald Cranes’ seminal contribution on the place of the Essayes in Bacon’s ‘great instauration’, Part 1 examines how the subjects of Bacon’s Essayes need to be understood as Baconian contributions (...) to ‘morrall philosophye’ and ‘civile knowledge’, rather than rhetorical or poetic exercises. In Part 2, contesting the interpretations of Crane, Fish, Ferrari and others, I will argue that the Essayes’ striking rhetorical form needs to be conceptualized in light of Bacon’s renaissance account of the ‘duty and office’ of rhetoric in any moral and civil philosophy that would look to actively cure mental afflictions and cultivate the virtuous or canny conduct it extols. Bacon’s Essayes, in this light, are best understood as a legatee and transformation of the popular early modern genre of books of apothegms and maxims designed to guide conduct. (shrink)

This article offers a brief overview of recent studies on note taking and paperwork in histories of early modern science. Showcasing the wide variety of note-taking practices performed by a range of historical actors across diverse sites and knowledge practices, it argues that a focus on note taking and “paper technologies” enables us to put in conversation a number of linked epistemic practices from reading and writing to making and doing to observing and surveying to classifying and categorizing. By viewing (...) these practices as a continuum rather than as distinct parts, we are able to further understand early modern knowledge production. (shrink)

The hitherto neglected Pandechion epistemonicon, Ulisse Aldrovandi’s extant manuscript encyclopaedia, indicates that Renaissance naturalists did not necessarily apply the humanist jack-of-all-trades, the commonplace book, in their own field without considerably altering its form. Over many years the Italian natural historian tested and recombined different techniques to arrive at the form of paper technology that he considered to be the most fit for his purposes. Not all of these techniques were taught at school or university. Rather, Aldrovandi drew on administrative practices (...) as well as on the bookkeeping practices of early modern merchants that he knew first-hand. Reconstructing the formation and use of the Pandechion this article contributes to the historiography of learned reading and information management in Renaissance Europe. (shrink)

The measure of what can be considered “new” is what is already known. What is “new” – be it a (technical) invention, a new method, or a newly discovered natural phenomenon – must distinguish itself...

Andreas Hesselius and Pehr Kalm both spent time in eastern North America during the first half of the 18th century. Both came with an ardent desire to observe and learn about the natural environment and inhabitants of the region. Both produced writings, in the form of journals that have proved immensely useful to subsequent scholars. Yet their writings also display differences that illuminate the epistemological and sociological underpinnings of their observations, and which had consequences for their encounters with foreign environments. (...) Hesselius, who served as pastor to the Swedish congregation in Philadelphia from 1712 to 1724, described his experiences and observations with what we might call a historical awareness, while Kalm, known as the first of Linnaeus’s students to travel to the New World, primarily offered dehistoricized and denarrativized taxonomic ethnographic descriptions. At first glance, Hesselius and Kalm appear to illustrate perfectly Michel Foucault’s description of the difference between Renaissance and classical epistemologies. Kalm’s disembodied and decontextualized representations fit well with Foucault’s description of natural history in the classical age as consisting ‘of undertaking a meticulous examination of things themselves…and then of transcribing what it has gathered in smooth, neutralized, and faithful words’. This article, however, points out that while Hesselius and Kalm arrive at similar descriptions of plants and other-than-human beings by employing different methodologies, when it comes to describing indigenous peoples their respective methodologies lead to radically different approaches, with Hesselius writing them into history, while Kalm relegates them to ethnology in the sense of savage ‘peoples without histories’. (shrink)

"The aim of the present paper is to situate the recent attempts to study the phenomena of knowledge management in a larger epistemological context. More precisely, I intend to look at it from the perspective of the philosophy of the humanities. This involves understanding it as an endeavor concerned with the search for regularities. As a result, key notions figuring in the repertoire of this kind of undertaking, primarily those of notes and notebooks, are scrutinized for the purpose of revealing (...) their theoretical function. This points towards some ontological issues, such as the idea of taking notes as cultural kinds, namely something analogous to the idea of natural kinds. Keywords: notes, notebooks, cultural kind, cultural artefact, pattern, commonplace-book". (shrink)