Participación de los Círculos Científico Estudiantiles.

One area which has been excluded from study by the vast majority of historians of science is antiquarianism-94 _{long derided as useless. As Nietzsche describes:}

‘The man envelops himself in a mouldy smell… and takes pleasure in gobbling up even the dust of biographical rubbish… Antiquarian history knows only how to preserve life, not how to generate it.’95 _{Indeed. Preservation, rather than}

generation, was the aim of antiquarianism and of county natural history in the late seventeenth-century; rather than a focus on the generation of change (progress, or whatever) the focus was on the meaning of what was already there, and preserving it for future contemplation.

For the seventeenth-century antiquarian, we could explain the mouldy smell, to extend the satirical analogy, by the fact that they ‘love[d] all things (as

93 _{John Morton, The Natural History of Northampton-shire, with Some Accounts of the} Antiquities (London, 1712), p. 476.

94 _{Exceptions include Hunter, John Aubrey; Ashworth, 'Natural History and the}

Emblematic World View'; Stan A. E. Mendyk, 'Speculum Britanniae': Regional Study, Antiquarianism, and Science in Britain to 1700 (London, 1989). And soon-to-come: Vittoria Feola, Elias Ashmole and the Uses of Antiquity (Paris, forthcoming 2013); Vittoria Feola (ed.), Antiquariansim and science in urban networks, ca 1580-1700 (Paris, forthcoming 2012).

95 _{Friedrich Nietzsche, 'On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Translated by Ian}

Johnston', Johnstonia, 2010. (1st March). We can only speculate as to whether Nietzsche read Aubrey: ‘It is said of antiquaries, they wipe off the mouldiness they dig, and remove the rubbish.’ John Aubrey, Wiltshire: the topographical collections of John Aubrey. Edited by J. E. Jackson (London, 1862), ’preface’.

Dutchmen doe Cheese) the better for being mouldy and worme-eaten’96_{, being}

acquisitive to the point of being a ‘glutton-feeder of the appetite’97_{. However, as}

Angus Vine has shown in his 2010 book In Defiance of Time, early modern satire of antiquarians should not be over-emphasised; indeed, satire of scientific virtuosi was every bit as aggressive.98 _{The seventeenth-century antiquarian was}

far more respected than his twenty-first century counterpart, as Vine demonstrates for the period up to 1660.

These county natural histories were part of a wider project of county history (both antiquarian and chorographic) which began in the sixteenth century and persists to this day. Inspiration and source material was particularly taken from William Lambarde’s (1536-1601) A Perambulation of Kent (1576), and Carew’s (1555-1620) Survey of Cornwall (1602), and the wider concept of county identity has been examined by historians, with a particular focus upon gentry culture and antiquarian pursuits.99 _{Works such as this defined the geographical}

scope of English natural history in the seventeenth century- the county. This unit of study has continued, with the Victoria County Histories being particularly emblematic of the format; though the scope of county study has constantly

96 _{John Earle and Edward Blount, Micro-cosmographie. Or, A peece of the world} discouered in essayes and characters (London, 1628), pp. 1-2.

97 _{Thomas Palmer and Theodor Zwinger, An essay of the meanes hovv to make our} trauailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable (London, 1606), pp. 43-44.

98 _{Al Coppola, 'Retraining the Virtuoso's Gaze: Behn's Emperor of the Moon, The Royal}

Society, and the Spectacles of Science and Politics', Eighteenth-Century Studies 41 no. 4 (2008).

99 _{Jan Broadway, William Dugdale and the significance of county history in early Stuart} England (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1999); Broadway, 'No historie so meete'.

changed through time. Earlier works focused upon topography or gentry studies, with the natural world playing a secondary role, or covered in separate works which generally did not use the county as a unit for study, their focus being upon philosophical theory or anecdotes which prove a theory.100 _{Later works, and}

particularly those which are ongoing today, have become more focused and specialised; as even a cursory google search for "local natural history" will show, there are ornithologists in Stafford, geologists in Sedgwick.

In the mid-to-late seventeenth century, local study also acted for specific socio-cultural reasons which will be discussed at length in Chapter One, and which dissipated as the eighteenth century progressed. The most notable of which was the glorification of local patrons, hence the dedication, for instance, of two chapters of Aubrey’s of Wiltshire to his main patron: ‘The grandure of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke, Wilton House and Garden’ and ‘Learned Men who received Pensions from the Earles of Pembroke’: ‘Tis certain that the Earles of Pembroke were the most popular peers in the West of England; but one might boldly say, in the whole kingdom’. The description of their locale was important due to its naturalisation of landed identity, and in particular its location of the landed gentry in time and in place; they saw their authority as deriving both from

100 _{See for example Ralph Austen and Francis Bacon, Observations upon some part of Sr} Francis Bacon's Naturall history as it concernes fruit-trees, fruits, and flowers especially the fifth, sixth, and seaventh centuries, improving the experiments mentioned, to the best advantage (Oxford, 1658).

historical support and the landscape itself, as is explored by Marjorie Swann in Curiosities and Texts.101

The genre amply demonstrates that historical sensibilities were applied to far more than subjects within formal historiography. Daniel Woolf uses the term “historical culture” to refer to the wide range of interest in the past in early modern England. He especially points, in The Social Circulation of the Past, to those subjects which fall outside ‘formal historiography’, including both other published genres and the extensive reference to the past in private diaries and correspondence.102 _{Woolf defines a historical culture as consisting of:}

habits of thought, languages, and media of communication, and patterns of social convention… expressed both in texts and in commonplace forms of behavior… [T]he notions of the past developed within any historical culture are… part of the mental and verbal specie of the society that uses them. 103

I prefer the term ‘historical sensibility’ to ‘historical culture’ because of the linkage of the latter term, used by Woolf, to the tendency in his work, at least in its theoretical discussions, to attempt to identify (my addition) ‘a [singular] discernible historical culture within which various aspects of the past were identified and circulated by contemporaries’.104 _{As discussed above, my}

vision of late seventeenth century England is more pluralistic, encompassing

101 _{Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern} England (Philadelphia, 2001), esp. pp. 78-99.

102 _{His meaning of historical culture is spelt out at more length in D. R. Woolf, 'A High}

road to the archives? Rewriting the History of Early Modern English Historical Culture',

Storia della storiografia 32 (1997).

103 _{Woolf, The social circulation of the past, pp. 9-10.} 104 _{Ibid., p. 9.}

multiple approaches to the past of which the county natural historians shared only one. Thus, I utilize the term “historical sensibility” as a group-based, or potentially even individual, analytic tool which enables a more fine-grained analysis of attitudes to the past.

Alex Walsham, in her recent Reformation of the Landscape, suggests that ‘early modern people from all rungs on the social ladder had the capacity to inhabit several mental worlds simultaneously’, an ostensibly novel and short- lasting ability which Michael Hunter termed the ‘rise of schizophrenia’.105 _As

Hunter’s light-hearted pathologisation implies, though, this is situated strictly as something of the past, as a historical feature. One consequence of thinking about “sensibilities” rather than “culture(s)” is that the multiple becomes analytically easier to account for. To give a modern example, a trained geologist who is also an amateur poet can have two simultaneous and non-contradictory (though also impossible to unify) sensory responses to a sedimentary rock formation: (s)he sees both a series of layers laid down over millions of years and a wondrous, beautiful feature. This thesis partially rests upon the reader accepting that county natural historians could think in entirely different ways in different contexts, and that they did not feel the need to integrate these different modes of thought.

However, for the county natural historians at least, there were some influences which spanned their modes of thought: for instance, the moral fear

105 _{Walsham, The reformation of the landscape, pp. 374-375; Michael Hunter, Robert} Boyle : (1627 - 91) ; scrupulosity and science (Woodbridge, 2000), p. 244.

that without making an attempt to preserve knowledge it would be lost forever. Recent work by Peter Harrison has traced empirical methodology to an attempt to work with the cognitive damage wrought by original sin, firmly linking religion and science. The pursuit of natural knowledge, in his reading, was not to recover the knowledge of the ancients, nor to move beyond their knowledge of the natural world, but was an attempt to recover the knowledge of God, of Adam, by reading the book of nature.106 _{In this regard, recovery, as well as preservation,}

was at the heart of the county natural historical endeavour, and the religious undertones of this should not be underplayed. As John Aubrey remarked, before the execution of Charles I in 1649 it had been ‘…not fit to be wiser than their fathers and not good manners to be wiser than their neighbors; and a sin to search into the ways of nature.’107

Aubrey and his contemporaries believed in the generation after 1649 that progress in knowledge beyond that of the previous generation, and by implication the ancient world, was possible.108 _{More importantly, curiosity}

regarding nature was no longer a ‘sin’, in Aubrey’s terminology. The wider instantiations of this change have been the subject of a notable amount of work regarding conceptions of curiosity over the past two decades. Curiosity regarding

106 _{Peter Harrison, The fall of man and the foundations of science (Cambridge, 2007).} 107 _{Aubrey, The Natural History of Wiltshire, 'preface', p. 5.}

108 _{The idea of progress itself has a long historiography- see for example: Ernst Cassirer,} The philosophy of the enlightenment (Princeton, 1951); Isser Woloch, Eighteenth-century Europe, tradition and progress, 1715-1789 (New York, 1982); Louis K. Dupré, The Enlightenment and the intellectual foundations of modern culture (New Haven, 2004); Jonathan I. Israel, A revolution of the mind : Radical Enlightenment and the intellectual origins of modern democracy (Princeton, N.J., 2010), pp. 1-36.

the wondrous, the exotic and the unusual has been particularly well explained, indeed in Daston and Park’s seminal study, Wonders and the Order of Nature, as well as in Benedict’s Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry, the distinction between curiosity and wonder is largely elided. Curiosity in these works represents the appetite for finding an ‘unknown’ which will evoke the response of wonder.109 _{This conception of curiosity can be applied, as the}

aforementioned authors do, to those Early Modern intellectuals who were looking outwards. Indeed it can also explain the interest of the county natural historians in such ‘curiosities’ as fossil fragments, double sunsets, and other rare events (despite their domesticity).

However, we also need to account for the curiosity of county natural historians regarding the “run of the mill”, for instance John Aubrey’s inquisitiveness regarding the tradesmen he was ‘continually with’ as a child growing up in the manor house in Easton Pierse, and regarding the soil types along his regular journey through his teenage years from Oxford to Wiltshire. The everyday, as well as the wondrous, were objects of the particular sense of curiosity shared by the county natural historians. One of the reasons that the everyday attracted such attention, for these men, was their use of loosely ‘historical’ narratives around the objects and events encountered. There was an

109 _{Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity : a cultural history of early modern inquiry (Chicago,}

2000). See also Daston and Park, Wonders and the order of nature; Robert John Weston Evans and Alexander Marr (eds.), Curiosity and wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Aldershot, 2006); Kay Dian Kriz, 'Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane's "Natural History of Jamaica"', The William and Mary Quarterly 57 no. 1 (2000); Katie Whitaker, 'The culture of curiosity', in Nicholas Jardine, Emma Spary, and J. A. Secord (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, 1996).

interest both in practices passed down from previous generations; and in remnants of past times, both artificial and natural; hence the stones of Avebury (the lesser-known cousin of Stonehenge) were of immense interest as obviously ancient remnants. However even singular contemporary events were given a narrative, chronological context, as we will see: for instance a sighting of a “mock sun”, a relatively common event in unpolluted skies in which a second or third Sun appears “behind” the Sun itself, is located in time by Robert Plot equally as firmly as it was in place.

This discussion regarding curiosity is illustrative of the wider point which the thesis makes: that the county natural historians were antiquarian naturalists. By this I mean that they shared both the interests and the methodologies of their antiquarian peers, every bit as much as they did their naturalist fellows within the Royal Society. Their predominant concern was certainly not with demarcating disciplinary boundaries, as would become perhaps the predominant concern of naturalism through the eighteenth century. Instead, it was with place, with locality, and with description of the specific. There are significant parallels here with this thesis, which chooses to focus upon one discipline not as emblematic of a wider culture (though I do make conjectures in that direction from time to time), nor as part of an attempt to mould a new sub-sub-discipline within history, but as an attempt to apply a wide range of analytic tools to a particular case study. Thus I draw on unfamiliar bedfellows in the history of antiquarianism and the history of science; and argue that they should become more familiar in future, as regards this period of English history at least.