Wisdom in the Concourse: Natural Philosophy and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

This thesis explores the printing, publishing and use of learned texts in early modern England. It argues that the importance of these activities to the dynamics of intellectual activity has been both underestimated and misrepresented, especially with respect to the field of natural philosophy. At the same time it suggests important ways in which historians' views of print culture in general must be refined. Chapter One introduces the topic by considering why the history of the book should be central to our appreciation of natural philosophy in general. This section argues that, far from being merely peripheral to the establishment of natural knowledge, conventions of the proper use of books were of central and constitutive importance. They were also bound up in complex ways with wider aspects of early modern culture, and must therefore be seen in appropriately interdisciplinary terms. The second chapter accordingly considers the production of printed materials in early modern London. It describes in some detail the printing trade and its practices. This discussion suggests that its personnel were often interested actors in their own right, whose concerns had to be accommodated if a writer was to succeed in becoming a publicly-recognised author. It also introduces the main problems perceived to be central to the printed book trade - piracy, seditious publishing and textual corruption - and discusses how they were thought to arise. In contests over these issues contemporaries drew on a significant array of argumentative resources, some of which are suggested here. Principal among those resources were the characteristic identities often attributed to booksellers, printers and their trades. Chapter Three therefore looks at the agents of the book trade as a community, incorporated in the Stationers' Company. It shows that arguments over the `propriety' of literary forms often took place in their private court at Stationers' Hall. It then proceeds to trace how important representations of the cultural role of printing arose out of disputes over the legitimacy of these arguments. Perceptions of printing were thus very different from those now current. In interacting with the book trade, authors and readers met a distinct community in which learned works might not be safe. Chapter Four now examines the Royal Society: an institution in which, by contrast, the proper use of written materials was supposedly guaranteed by conventions of gentility. The Society articulated principals of intellectual propriety, the centrality of which to disputes in natural philosophy and technology is made clear. The chapter also shows how its use of print was undermined, in particular by the unauthorised translation and reprinting of its works. The experimental philosophy itself was put at risk by these phenomena. Chapter Five then examines in detail a cataclysmic dispute between Isaac Newton and the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, over the latter's star catalogue. In this conflict all the issues outlined in the preceding chapters reappeared to the full. Moreover, the protagonists embodied in their different texts opposed ideals of the proper role of practical astronomy. Here the construction of even the most fundamental form of knowledge was profoundly affected by the factors described thus far. The case illustrates how our view of the dynamics of early modern learned culture in general needs to be changed in the light of this thesis.