Sociable Knowledge. Elizabeth Yale
Introduction
“A Whole and Perfect Bodie and Book”: Constructing the Human and Natural History of Britain
In early modern Britain, the study of natural history and antiquities was founded on writing. Writing was naturalists’ and antiquaries’ primary means for creating, assembling, and sharing knowledge. Working with the technologies of pen and paper (and occasionally scissors and glue), naturalists wrote, revised, and recombined their words, sometimes for many years, before fixing them in “final” printed forms. They further built up their stocks of “papers”—and bodies of knowledge—by sharing this material through postal and carrier networks.1 Their papers, which included letters, loose notes, drawings and plans, commonplace books, and lengthy treatises, were everexpanding repositories of knowledge about nature and history as it accumulated through reading, observation, correspondence, and conversation. These textual collections accreted alongside cabinets of naturalia, antiquarian objects, and other curiosities—for example, insects pinned in boxes, leaves and flowers pressed in books, rocks and fossils, dried bird skins, ancient coins, fragments of Roman mosaics and urns, and shards chipped from ancient stone monuments. The end result of all this writing and collecting was, to echo the Elizabethan antiquary William Lambarde, to “compact a whole and perfect bodie and Booke” of the natural and human history of Britain.2
In their writing and collecting, especially their correspondence, naturalists and antiquaries collaboratively constructed their visions of a “topographical Britain,” and through their printed works, they communicated these visions to a wider public. The seventeenth-century British press was flooded with topographical, chorographical, antiquarian, and natural historical works, many with “Britain” or “Britannia” in the title. These studies combined a fine-grained attention to the material descriptions of localities with a wideangle vision of a national whole in which these localities were embedded. William Camden’s Britannia, first published in Latin in 1586 and reprinted in English translation through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (it was serialized in a British newspaper as late as 1733), was the genre’s ur-text.3 Camden and those who followed him sought to frame a land-based vision of Britain that could serve as a foundation for political and cultural unity.4 They did so amid the intense political upheaval that marked British history in the century before England’s formal political union with Scotland in 1707. From the mid-sixteenth century they found ready support for their project among Tudor and later Stuart royalty and nobility. Creating Britain as a topographical object was a way of forging it as a political object.5
Natural history and antiquarian studies as produced by joining local studies together under a national vision offered an image of nation and nature as one. To paraphrase the naturalist Joshua Childrey, writing in Britannia Baconica (1660), topographical studies were mirrors that showed Britons themselves.6 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars thus promoted new ways of thinking about localities and local identities as enmeshed within the nation and national identities. In effect they recast the national as the local.
Yet although many naturalists, antiquaries, and topographers agreed that “Britain” was their proper object of study, no two works defined “Britain” in the same way. There was much disagreement about where to set the topographical boundaries of the nation. Some books included within the orbit of Britannia only England and Wales; others included England, Scotland, and Wales; some included Ireland; and still others excluded England. Within these books further divisions were drawn, and it was made clearer on what terms constituents of the topographical Britain might be included as members of the political and cultural Britain. In the English translation of his Britannia, for example, published during the reign of James I, Camden adopted a position of equal fellowship with the Scots and deference to their knowledge about their land, surely more detailed and correct than his own. At the same time he held up Ireland as fit only for English colonization and domination. As Camden’s treatment of Ireland implies, the significance of the landscape was hotly contested along religious lines.7 Of course some authors were entirely unconcerned with putting the topographical pieces together into a British whole, each preferring to focus on his individual kingdom or some little corner of it. If an image of “Britain” emerged from topographical writing, it was a fractured and fragmented one, as riven by conflict as the British people themselves.
The Correspondence
Printed topographical writing, with its mix of natural and antiquarian particulars and national visions, required collaborations carried out over long distances. Although they could not agree on a single vision of Britain as a topographical and political object, naturalists and antiquaries increasingly joined together to construct and share their visions in a community distributed across the landscape and connected by correspondence. Correspondence was central to natural history and antiquarian studies, so much so that investigators often referred to the community in which they conducted their work as their “correspondence,” sometimes with the definite or indefinite article. “The correspondence”—the sum of personal contacts between those engaged in scientific activity—was the foundation for the construction of natural historical and antiquarian knowledge. Through their correspondence, scholars scattered across Britain poured their stocks of local knowledge into a shared pot. The contacts that naturalists formed allowed them access to a perspective in which their own localities could be enmeshed with, and partially submerged in, an image of “Britain,” however fractured or in dispute that image might be.
As intellectual fields, natural history and antiquarian studies were deeply and materially shaped by the possibilities (and constraints) of long-distance collaboration. Correspondence-based exchange encouraged scholars to think of their work as never fixed and never finished. Instability and incompleteness came to mark the production and consumption of natural knowledge in both print and manuscript. In their published works, naturalists and antiquaries sought to communicate to a broader audience the habits of thought and association that they had learned through working together in the medium of correspondence. Yet they were often speaking first and foremost to each other: when they entered into print, naturalists and antiquaries often did so through their correspondence, relying on their contacts to provide content and fund publication via subscription. Print also participated in the cycle of expanding and perpetuating their correspondence, with authors using the publication process as an opportunity to collect more correspondents. At the other end of the communications spectrum, naturalists and antiquaries increasingly sought to incorporate conversation into the written stream of knowledge. Whole systems of record keeping and paperwork, such as those of the early Royal Society, were established to impress permanence upon conversation and expand its reach through written channels. In integrating writing and conversation, these systems eased naturalists’ anxieties about conversation as a source of credible knowledge. They also grafted the social and intellectual functions of face-to-face meetings, which were key for establishing the authority and credibility of natural knowledge, onto those of writing and correspondence, which allowed for individual investigators to be distributed across the landscape, a key requirement for topographical study.
The habits and forms of correspondence were even inscribed into the early modern archive. As they faced death, the Restoration-era generation of naturalists and antiquaries envisioned the papers they had amassed over the course of their lives as potential resources for those who continued their projects into the future. They established archives housing their papers and collections as means of fostering their preservation and continued use. These institutions instantiated a view of knowledge-making as an ongoing collaborative writing process.
Local Particulars, National Visions
Early modern naturalists and antiquaries united a boundless enthusiasm for local particularities—a hyperlocalism—with a desire to understand and represent Britain as a unified historical and geographical space, though they disagreed on the boundaries and configuration of that space. Topographical studies were often organized around counties or regions and were