HIS How Early Modern Naturalists Invented The Archive

With Slips and Scraps
How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive

Elizabeth Yale
Seventeenth-century English natural historians and antiquaries lived in a world that did not much care for manuscripts. Writing a thought down and expecting it to be preserved was something of a desperate act: the possibility of loss or destruction was always present, and anything other than accidental preservation (the child of neglect) required vast resources of social, nancial, and institutional capital. Sometimes the destruction of a manuscript was a deliberate response to its content, as was the case with religiously motivated book-burning. More commonly, however, manuscripts were destroyed through reuse or recycling, as naturalist and antiquary John Aubrey recalled in some detail: Anno 1633. I entred into my Grammar at the Latin-Schoole at Yatton-Keynel, in the Church: where the Curate Mr Hart taught the eldest Boyes, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero &c. The fashion then was to save the Forules of their Bookes with a false cover of Parchment sc{ilicet} old Manuscript. Which I was too young to understand; But I was pleased with the Elegancy of the Writing, and the coloured initiall Letters. I remember the Rector here [Mr: Wm. Stump], great gr{and} Son of St{ump} the Cloathier of Malmesbury had severall Manuscripts of the Abbey: He was a proper Man, and a good Fellow, and when He brewed a barrel of speciall Ale, his use was to stop the bung-hole (under the Clay) with a sheet of Manuscript: He sayd nothing did it so well which me thought did grieve me then to see. Afterwards I went to Schoole to a Mr. Latimer at Leigh-Delamer (the next Parish) where was the like use of covering of Bookes. In
Many thanks to Mario Biagioli, Ann Blair, Peter Buck, Steven Shapin, and Daniel Margocsy for their perceptive readings of earlier drafts of this essay. I am grateful to Roxana Popescu for assistance with editing and proofreading. Special thanks to Book History editor Jonathan Rose and the anonymous Book History reviewers for their astute critical readings, which provided welcome guidance for revising and improving this essay. This essay was researched and written with the support of a Richard Maass Memorial Research Grant from the Manuscript Society.
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my grandfathers dayes, the Manuscripts ew about like Butteries: All Musick bookes, Account bookes, Copie bookes &c. were covered with old Manuscripts, as wee cover them now with blew Paper, or Marbled Paper. And the Glovers at Malmesbury made great Havock of them, and Gloves were wrapt up no doubt in many good pieces of Antiquity. Before the late warres a World of rare Manuscripts perished here about: for within half a dozen Miles of this place, were the Abbey of Malmesbury, where it may be presumed the Library was as well furnished with choice Copies, as most Libraries of England: and perhaps in this Library we might have found a correct Plinys Naturall History, which Canutus a Monk here did abridge for King Henry the second . . . Anno 1638. I was transplanted to Blandford-Schoole in Dorset to Mr William Sutton. Here also was the use of covering of Bookes with old Parchments, sc{ilicet} Leases &c. but I never saw any thing of a Manuscript there. Here about were no Abbeys or Convents for Men. One may also perceive by the binding of old Bookes, how the old Manuscripts went to wrack in those dayes. About 1647. I went to Parson Stump out of curiosity to see his Manuscripts, whereof I had seen some in my Childhood, but by that time they were lost, and disperst: His sonns were Gunners, & Soldiers, and scoured their Gunnes with them.1 Aubrey mentioned four of the many uses of old manuscript, none of which involved reading: covering books, wrapping gloves, cleaning guns, and stopping up the bungholes of kegs of beer. Aubrey linked this destruction to the dissolution of the monasteries and the consequent emptying of their libraries under Henry VIII. Manuscripts were everywhere, yet they were being cut up, torn to pieces, and worn out by use until soon they could be found nowhere. The matter of manuscriptparchment and paperwas much more useful to most people than any text that might be written on it.2 And who could tell what had been lost in the process? Aubrey mourned the loss of a correct copy of Pliny the Elders Natural History, but one of the untold thousands of texts dispersed and destroyed in the dissolution of the monasteries. In this essay I argue that early modern English naturalists and antiquaries searched out and attempted to preserve not only manuscripts, but also the increasingly large volume of handwritten papers they produced in the course of their work. They established archives as institutions where papers could be deposited and made publicly accessible down through history. Antiquaries concerned themselves with the survival of manuscripts because their research depended on these materials, many of which dated back centuries,
deep into the middle age, as early moderns had begun to refer to the time between the Fall of Rome and the Reformation.3 Their preservationist instincts were sharpened by the historical memory of the dissolution of the monasteries, and the dispersal of their libraries, under Henry VIII.4 As Aubreys Digression shows, the dispersal of the monastic libraries haunted antiquaries well into the seventeenth century, encouraging them to redouble their efforts to save what time and chance had left them. Because naturalists were also often antiquaries, and followed similar methods, they shared their interest in preserving manuscripts.5 But the concern with papers and manuscripts came not only from the antiquarian branch of the family. Naturalists were concerned with preserving papers because they generated a wealth of them in the course of their work. Inspired by the philosopher Francis Bacon, naturalists viewed their papers not as the byproduct of producing printed knowledge, but as the fundamental stuff of knowledge, repositories of facts and observations for future generations of naturalists.6 The Baconian sensibility shared by these naturalists foregrounded incremental fact gathering, generally by groups of interested people, as a method of constructing accounts of nature and antiquities.7 A special afnity grew up between Baconian facts and manuscript as the material means of collecting, recording, organizing, and sharing them within these elds.8 For a growing number of naturalists, preserving papers was thus an imperative. One way to do this was to transfer the papers to printwitness seventeenth- and eighteenth-century projects to print the correspondence and unprinted works of such luminaries as Galileo, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Jeremiah Horrocks, Rene Descartes, and Robert Hooke.9 The other way was to get the papers into a public repository. Seventeenthcentury naturalists and antiquaries created new institutionsmost prominently, the libraries of the Ashmolean Museum and the Royal Societyto protect and preserve their books and papers. In inspecting their efforts to invent the archive, this essay reveals not only the connection between the development of a historical consciousness in Stuart England and the material culture of scientic communication. It also suggests ways in which modern archives might be transformed by the massive, ongoing shift of paper records to digital and online media.
What Is a Manuscript?
Most historians assume they know the answer to this question: a handwritten piece of paper or parchment in an archive. We would surely include
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papers in the archives of seventeenth-century naturalists within the compass of our understanding of manuscript. But what would seventeenth-century naturalists and antiquaries have made of our denition? Their answer is revealing of both the place of manuscripts within their own lives and work and the shifting relationship between science and history over the course of the century. Handwritten texts only became manuscripts in contrast to printed books and papers. Manuscript was thus a late coinage in the history of the book, arising in the second half of the sixteenth century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, although any handwritten text could be a manuscript, many of the early uses of the word suggest that it frequently (though not exclusively) referred to a subset of handwritten texts: those written on parchment or vellum before the advent of printing. Seventeenth-century naturalists and antiquaries concurred: they usually referred to the products of their own pens as papers rather than manuscripts. Papers typically included loose sheets, notes from experiments and observations, commonplace books, correspondence, and drafts of treatises.10 Papers belonged in the gentlemanly or scholarly library, but were housed separately from bound printed books. They could be classed or stored with pamphlets, unbound books, and other loose printed material. Papers could also refer to bound (though not printed) books. In his instructions to his grandson and heir concerning the disposition of his library, diarist John Evelyn listed together his Writings & papers, as Copys of Letters Common-place-Books, and several unpolished draughts, collected at severall times, & confusdly packd up or bound without any order, altogether Imperfect & most of them Impertinent.11 These various kinds of handwritten material were united primarily by their disorder and by the fact that they were written by Evelyn (or Richard Hoare, his scribe and secretary) in the course of his work. Similarly, in his diary, Robert Hooke often used books and papers to refer to Royal Society account books, letter books, and loose letters and treatises, rarely if ever using manuscript in this context.12 In contrast, the term manuscript was usually applied to older bound handwritten books. For example, naturalist Edward Lhwyds Parochial Queries in Order to a Geographical Dictionary, A Natural History, &c. of Wales included the question Manuscripts: Of what Subject and Language; In whose Hands; Whether Ancient or Late Copies?13 In the course of his research into Celtic natural history, antiquities, and languages, Lhwyd consulted, transcribed, and (whenever possible) obtained the originals of Welsh, Cornish, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and Breton manuscripts in private and public libraries scattered across Britain and France. Evelyn wrote an
entire treatise on the history of manuscripts, largely for the education of those interested in collecting them. In this work, he used manuscript exclusively to refer to ancient and medieval texts, whether of papyrus, parchment, or paper.14 Evelyn instructed his readers not only in the material history of the manufacture, ornamentation, and storage of manuscripts, but also where to search for them and how to read the unfamiliar scripts and languages in which they were written.15 Throughout, Evelyn abbreviated manuscripts MSS. The very ubiquity of this abbreviation among naturalists and antiquaries is a mark of the frequency with which they dealt in and discussed manuscripts. In his evocative description of the various ways of recycling parchment, quoted above, John Aubrey clearly marked the differences between papers and paper books and the manuscripts of the middle age. Musick bookes, Account bookes, Copie bookes, all seventeenth-century scribal books, were not manuscripts. First and foremost, then, manuscripts were old. But not just old: in this passage, manuscript refers specically to sheets with elegant writing and coloured initiall Letters, those exquisite products of an earlier monastic manuscript culture. Manuscripts were different from old parchments, sc{ilicet} Leases, which were much plainer utilitarian legal and economic documents. In Dorset, lacking a richly stocked monastic library, schoolboys covered their books with drab uncolored parchment sheets. In Wiltshire, where the Abbey of Malmesbury was but one of many local sources of manuscript, they covered them in pages bright with coloured initiall Letters.16 Manuscripts were produced by monks before the English Reformation and were objects worthy of preservation and study. Musick bookes, Account bookes, Copie bookes, though handwritten, were not manuscripts, but paper books. Their pages were lled with church music for singing the daily services (church music was often copied by hand in Aubreys day), household and business accounts, and school childrens copy texts.17 These sorts of books were ordinary objects, tools for daily work and worship. Manuscripts, on the other hand, were products of the past, meant to be admired, studied, and used in the construction of historical accounts. Only by some kind of horrid mistake were manuscripts part of everyday life, ripped apart to make the coverings and bindings of scribal and printed paper books. Although the rough distinction between papers and manuscripts held through much of the seventeenth century, in the end manuscript was too useful a term to reserve for medieval writings. Aubrey began calling his papers manuscripts as he reached the end of his life, when he became occu-
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pied with efforts to secure their preservation, primarily through donating them to the Ashmolean Museum.18 As part of this process, he cleaned up and reordered his papers, retranscribed sections that were difcult to read, and bound into books loose papers that related to one another, such as his correspondence.19 Edward Lhwyd, who as Keeper of the Ashmolean received Aubreys donation, asked him for a list of Tracts . . . as well the printed as M.SS. to assist him in cataloging the collection.20 The two naturalists agreed: copied, bound, and transferred to the archive, Aubreys papers were no longer the loosely led, disorganized products of daily work, but useful collections out of which future generations of naturalists might draw new knowledge.21 Conscious of their historical status as a body of documents in an archive, Aubrey called his papers manuscripts in somewhat the same way that a modern historian might.22 Astrologer, antiquary, and museum-founder Elias Ashmole blurred the distinctions between books, papers, and manuscripts in other ways. In the course of collecting and transcribing the writings of the Elizabethan mathematician and natural philosopher John Dee, Ashmole used a variety of terms to refer to the materials he handled. In August 1672 he received a parcell of Doctor Dees Manuscripts, all written with his owne hand. This parcel, discovered in the secret compartment of a secondhand chest purchased from a London furniture maker, consisted of two bound volumes of mixed handwritten and printed material.23 Elsewhere, Ashmole referred to this same collection as Doctor Dees originall Bookes & Papers, divers Bookes in Manuscript, & Papers, and severall things in MS.24 Other collections of Dees writings were labeled simply Manuscripts and papers.25 It may be that Ashmoles separation of this trove of Dees writings into Manuscripts or Bookes in Manuscript and loose Papers developed out of the ways in which they were physically separated in his library. In the well-ordered gentlemans library, the rough working division between manuscripts (medieval, monkish, illuminated) and papers (contemporary handwritten materials, bound or loose) did not quite hold. The division instead fell between bound books and loose sheets, as these required different kinds of storage. In his Instructions Concerning Erecting a Library, Gabriel Naude advised shelving bound manuscript books as one would printed books and gathering loose papers up into bundles and parcels according to their subjects.26 Some manuscripts required special treatment, but only because of their nancial value: manuscripts of great consequence were to be placed away from prying eyes, on the highest shelves and without any exteriour Title.27 Similarly, in his will, Ashmole divided the written
material that he wished to bequeath to his museumwhich included medieval records as well as the more recent papers of John Dee and Ashmoles friend and contemporary, the astrologer William Lillyinto Manuscript bookes and other Manuscript papers not yet sorted nor bound up.28 In Ashmoles library, books and papers were organized by format rather than time period. In his extensive correspondence with both naturalists and religious reformers, intelligencer Samuel Hartlib referred to the papers of both the living and the dead as manuscripts.29 Hartlibs more general use of the word might be explained by the fact that, as a Prussian immigrant with little interest in antiquarian studies, he was not immersed in the cultural memory of the Dissolution, nor involved in the latter-day search for monastic manuscripts.30 Compared to Aubrey, he had much less reason to distinguish between illuminated parchments and inky papers. Yet Hartlibs usage, like Aubreys, indicated a connection between the end of a naturalists life and the understanding of his papers as a nished (though not complete) body of work. Only after a naturalists death did Hartlib become interested in locating and collecting the entire corpus of his unprinted work, including notes toward future treatises, commonplace books, letters, and other fragments.31 While a naturalist was alive, his papers were his working materials, his to share as he wishedthough Hartlib, always a persistent correspondent, would pressure him to share as much as possible. After a naturalist passed away, his papers were a nished (by the at of death, if nothing else) body of manuscripts from which other, living naturalists might glean insights that they could develop in their own work. The naturalists death transformed scattered papers into a manuscript collection, the pieces of which had to be identied, tracked down, and gathered into one place.32 Hartlib and his successors did not approach the papers with the sensibility of a professional twenty-rst-century historian (a point to which I will return below). Nonetheless, the death of the author did, as it does now, constitute the manuscript collection as a historical object.
Lost History: The Dispersal of the Monastic Libraries

Naturalists and antiquaries interest in manuscripts, as well as the distinctions they drew between papers and manuscripts, grew out of their experience with the dispersal of medieval libraries that accompanied the
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dissolution of the English monasteries. The greatest damage was done between 1536, when Parliament passed the rst act for the suppression of the monasteries, and 1558, when Elizabeth I came to the throne. The monastic libraries were emptied. The destruction visited the college and university libraries of Cambridge and Oxford as well, though not as consistently. The books were destroyed, recycled, sent abroad, and taken into private libraries.33 Meanwhile a few antiquaries, like John Leland and John Bale, attempted to salvage monastic manuscripts as they traveled around the country. However, their efforts met with limited success, in part because the country now lacked secure long-term repositories for books. By the beginning of Elizabeths reign, churchmen, scholars, and the queens leading ministers began to realize the value of what had been lost. In response, they went on collecting sprees. Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker built a library that included more than ve hundred manuscripts, collected in part because they could be mined for evidence that established the historical foundation of the Anglican Churchs independence from Rome. Elizabeths minister William Cecil, Baron Burghley, sought manuscript records to provide historical evidence to support English nationalism and bolster Elizabeths claims to the throne.34 John Dee proposed during the reign of Queen Mary that dispersed manuscripts be sought out and collected for the Royal Library, evidence that Tudor naturalists were as interested in medieval manuscripts as their seventeenth-century counterparts.35 Despite these efforts at preservation, much had already been lost in the 1530s and 1540s. Writing to Matthew Parker in 1560, Bale vividly described the places to which manuscripts had been dispersed. While traveling in Ireland, he found manuscript books in places where one might expect to nd them, such as stacyoners and bokebyndeers store howses. But they also lay hidden in grosers, sope sellers, taylers, and other occupiers shoppes, some in shyppes ready to be carried over the sea into Flaunders to be soldefor in those uncircumspecte and carelesse dayes, there was no quiyckar merchaundyce than library bookes.36 Tradesmen hoarded and sold vellum and parchment because it could be put to many uses: not only plugging up the bung holes in barrels of beer (as we have seen) but also stopping guns, lining pie shells, cleaning boots, and polishing candlesticks.37 Ironically, parchment was also a key ingredient in the manufacture of paper. After forming and drying the sheets, the papermakers dipped them in size, water boiled with shavings of parchment or vellum, and dried them again. This sealed the paper, making it usable for writing and printing.38 Flushed out of the monastic libraries, manuscript books were ubiquitous. Available
everywhere in seemingly endless supply, their very ubiquity doomed them to destruction through casual use. Over the next hundred years, through the English Civil War, the rubbishing of manuscripts continued, and the dispersal of the monastic libraries still haunted antiquaries and naturalists.39 In the Digression quoted above, Aubrey mixed his centuries, referring in one breath to the destruction wrought by the violence of both the Civil War during the 1640s and the Reformation of his grandfathers day, when the Manuscripts ew about like Butteries. These were wars and tumults of religion, but because the destruction was motivated by economic necessity and ignorance as well as ideology, natural philosophical, mathematical, and natural historical manuscripts were destroyed along with theological ones. Aubrey suspected that, at the very least, a more perfect copy of Plinys Natural History had been lost in the destruction of Malmesbury Abbey.40 In this light, John Dees early interest in collecting old manuscripts makes perfect sense. Although most manuscripts were trashed through re-use as glove wrappers, bung-hole stoppers, and the like, the learned still blamed ignorance and animosity rooted in confessional conicts. One of the respondents to Edward Lhwyds Parochial Queries noted that during the Civil War, Cromwellian agitators destroyed a large British Manuscript History once held in his parish. The Roundheads of Pembrokeshire, in great ignorance, judged All Books and papers they did not understand to be Popery, and cast them into a great bonre.41 Although this storyrepeated to Lhwyd some fty years after the factmay have been more of a local legend than an accurate historical account, its telling indicates a popular linkage between religious violence and the destruction of historical records.42 Catholics as well as Protestants were accused of destroying manuscripts. In the early eighteenth century Lhwyd corresponded with William Baxter about the ancient (possibly Celtic, or British, as Lhwyd called them) inhabitants of Spain. Some manuscripts that might have provided useful evidence, Lhwyd believed, had been destroyed by zealous religious reformers. He wrote to Baxter that it is not to be questioned but several of the Primitive Christians had mistaken zeal as well as our reformers; and twas but 50 years ago that the Jesuit, Julian Manoir, being a missionair in Basbretaign, obtained an order from his superiors to burn what British manuscripts & other books he should meet with, excepting such as tended to devotion and were approvd of.43 Although Manoirs book burning was inspired by theological zeal, it indiscriminately destroyed religious and secular books alike. Lhwyd realized that the ght against heresy was not solely to blame for the destruction of manuscripts: often enough, he wrote to Baxter, the simple misman-
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agement of posterity did the trick, though rarely with Manoirs fervor and thoroughness.44 But the result was the same: a world impoverished of its own historical and scientic records.
What Did Naturalists Do with Papers?

Antiquaries were interested in manuscripts for an obvious reason: they were used to construct histories. Some were more polemical (such as Matthew Parkers and William Cecils accounts of the English church and state) and some less so, though in a country troubled by ongoing religious tensions, political and theological history always spoke in some way to present divisions. Whence came, however, the naturalist qua naturalists interest in papers? How was a concern with preserving records of the medieval past transferred to the reams of paper, copiously scribbled, crossed, and annotated, that naturalists produced in the seventeenth-century present? Naturalists and antiquaries wrote much more than they could ever hope to print. The invention of print, as well as the development of a reliable postal system, may have spurred this explosion of manuscript.45 Yet these papers, often (though not always) the product of activity directed toward producing print publications, were not necessarily wastepaper. Whether in the form of letters; fragmentary notes; drawings; diagrams; tables; commonplace books noting observations taken from travel, conversation, reading, and experiment; or complete nished treatises, papers could be mined for insights and observations that contributed to the advancement of natural and technical knowledge. Because the Baconian sensibility encouraged the collection and organization of myriad, often disparate, pieces of information into more or less coherent accounts of nature, a commonplace book or an alchemical receipt book could provide a wealth of raw material for the construction of natural knowledge. The connection between manuscripts and papers was in the use value of the papers: it made them worthy of preservation, not as historical documents, but as storehouses of scientic and technical information. In An Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen, John Aubrey illustrated the different kinds of material found in naturalists papers.46 In this private essay Aubrey put forth a plan for a reformed school for the sons of the nobility and gentry. The curriculum he designed emphasized mathematics and other practical subjects, and was meant to prepare students for positions of leadership in government and society. In the course of their studies,
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Aubrey recommended that his students consult papers and paper books as well as printed ones. The best mathematical textbook then in print would only do the business if used in conjunction with John Collinss manuscript augmentation of it.47 For the study of politics and economics, he recommended two treatises by William Petty, one in print and one then circulating only in manuscript.48 In addition to suggesting handwritten texts as educational resources, Aubrey drew on them for evidence in support of his pedagogical innovations. In justifying his method for teaching law, he quoted a quarto manuscript written by the early seventeenth-century lawyer John Selden.49 He also assembled a small book of tracts on educational reform and related subjects, a kind of supplement to the Idea itself. In this book, Aubrey bound together handwritten sheets, printed tables, and short printed pamphlets. Israel Tonges Epitome of Grammar, the rst item in the book, consists of a set of Latin grammar lists and tables, of which two are hand-drawn and three printed. The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Hartlib for the Advancement of Learning (1648), item eight, is a small printed pamphlet that Aubrey annotated, identifying (for example) W. P. as William Petty.50 Aubrey included samples of relevant handwritten texts within his Idea, interleaving them at appropriate pages. He tipped a table summarizing various aspects of the law into the section on legal education. As he recorded on the sheet itself, Aubrey had taken the table from Seth Wards study after he died: Seth Ward the Bishop of Salisbury studied the Common-Lawe and I found this paper [which is his owne hand-writing] amongst his scatterd papers.51 Despite this emphasis on Wards owne hand-writing, Aubrey was not an early modern autograph hunter. His interest in preserving manuscript texts, at least in the context of An Idea of Education, was entirely utilitarian. He did not save papers and manuscripts for the sake of an aura that attached to them as the unique material products of learned pens.52 Rather, he was concerned with content and the uses he could make of that content, whether it was carried by a printed or a handwritten text. An example of this attitude may be found in Aubreys discussion of John Collinss augmentation of the recommended Latin mathematical text. Aubrey traced the history of the paper on which Collinss notes were written. He feared that the augmentation had been lost: the mathematician told him that Sir Jonas Moore, mathematician and founder of the Greenwich Observatory, had borrowed it. Aubrey searched Moores papers shortly after his death, but did not nd it among them. It is thought Mr. Flamsteed has got it but he denies it, wrote Aubrey, continuing, It is thought to be stied and lost,
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which would be a great pity. Still, no matter: Mr. Paget of Christchurch Hospital or some other ingenious young mathematician may make such another.53 One almost sees the shrug of the shoulder when Aubrey settled it that Mr. Paget, an instructor at the Royal Mathematical School, could produce a text like enough to Collinss to be sufcient to the purpose. It was not the particular piece of paper with John Collinss handwriting on it that Aubrey cared about: he valued the content of the annotations, and any ingenious young mathematician could make similar, and similarly useful, notes. One might compare seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editors habit of destroying scientic papers (correspondence, for example) after an edition replicating the handwritten material had been printed.54 While Aubrey did not perceive an aura around papers or manuscripts, he was convinced of the potential usefulness of every piece of paper, even seemingly inconsequential slips and scraps. Who knew what might contribute to the study of nature and antiquities in coming centuries? In November 1692 he wrote to Anthony a ` Wood, his friend and constant collaborator, asking him to nd his Verses of the Robin-red-breast to insert and pin it to my Villa. I should be very sorry to have it lost: and I see one is sure of nothing that is not in ones owne Custodieand when one is dead, all is lost that is not deposited in some public Repository.55
The Search for Papers and Manuscripts

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century papers, as well as medieval manuscripts, were regarded as hoards of information that could yield advances in natural philosophy, natural history, mathematics, and husbandry. Yet they lay scattered across the country, squirreled away in private libraries and the studies of the recently deceased. Thus naturalists searched for papers just as they hunted down curious or obscure species of plants and animals, odd stones, or descriptions of extreme weather and faraway places. From the 1630s until his death in 1662 Samuel Hartlib pursued both religious and scientic manuscripts as a key part of his work as an intelligencer.56 Working through his correspondence among the learned of England and Europe, he hunted for manuscripts and papers.57 In his Ephemerides, or diary, he recorded who had seen or heard of caches of letters, unprinted treatises, even notes and fragments. Although Hartlib collected and disseminated treatises and letters written by living naturalists, he seems to have turned to collecting entire manuscript corpuses only after their au-
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thors deaths. He sought the papers of recently deceased contemporaries as well as those of naturalists of previous generations, including George Starkey, Francis Bacon, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Joachim Jungius, the mathematician Peter Cruger, and members of the Northumberland circle, especially Thomas Harriot and Walter Warner.58 When he obtained papers, Hartlib copied and redistributed them to those whom he thought would best use them to generate new knowledge for the public good. If he obtained, for example, the fragmentary remains of Francis Bacons papers, he planned to disseminate them among his correspondence: the only and best use of such fragments, he wrote, is to improve them by way of correspondency as a bate to obtain the like from others.59 As we shall see, this practice stood in strong contrast to that of the next generation of English naturalists, who tended to deposit papers in public repositories rather than disseminate them. The early fellows of the Royal Society, following on Hartlibs work, enthusiastically searched out manuscripts. They proposed to use their powers as licensers of the press to print treatises by Roger Bacon and the stellar catalog of the fteenth-century Persian astronomer Ulugh Beg (both from manuscript material in the Bodleian).60 Soon after the society was founded, mathematician John Pell, who had worked with Hartlib to locate papers produced by the Northumberland circle, led the effort to collect and print Harriots writings.61 The papers of astronomer Lawrence Rooke and physician William Harvey were similarly sought after.62 For the most part, as Adrian Johns has observed, these plans failed once fellows realized how expensive and onerous collecting and printing manuscripts was.63 But their interest, and a sense of the usefulness of old manuscripts to natural history and antiquarian projects, persisted. Edward Lhwyds 1696 Parochial Queries specically asked respondents to identify any manuscripts extant in their neighborhoods, including their authors, transcribers, subjects, languages, and dates.64 Lhwyd also invited respondents to send him originals or copies of any Letters, Papers, or Manuscripts they thought might be relevant to his investigation.65 The Royal Society asked the Duke of Norfolk, Charles IIs ambassador to the Emperor of Morocco, to keep an eye out for any Antient Manuscripts that may possibly have been translated out of the Antient Greeks, either in Geometry, Astronomy, Physick, or Chymistry in Moroccan libraries.66 In 1673, before he composed his career-making natural histories and became keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Robert Plot proposed traveling through England and Wales for the Promotion of Learning and Trade.67 Modeling himself on John Leland, who traveled Britain cataloging and col-
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lecting books for the Royal Library in the 1530s and 1540s, Plot made gathering up dispersed pre-Dissolution manuscripts central to his plan. If Oxford University and the Crown would provide the funding, he proposed to purchase as many manuscripts as private owners would relinquish and copy the rest. If owners proved immune to his money and his charms, he would at the very least produce a thorough catalog of manuscripts in private hands.68 Despite Lelands successes in building the Royal Library from dispersed manuscripts, Plot believed that many English manuscripts were still lost to the World, lying secretly in Corners and in private Hands, no Man knowing either what MSS. there be, or where to nd them.69 A wealth of secret knowledge rested with private owners who often had no idea of the value of what they held. When rediscovered by the right researchers, these manuscripts could be used to build new natural histories of Britain (the metaphor of building is Plots).70 Naturalists and antiquaries increasingly sought to make manuscripts public and accessible to scholars like themselves. Plot desired a catalog in which the learned could easily locate copies of manuscript texts. Lhwyd reserved dark words for private collectors who refused to share what they owned or permit copying. Regarding some religious charters he wished to borrow, he complained to a Welsh correspondent, I suppose no Gentleman thats any thing a scholar would scruple to lend them; but for those that are in other hands we are not to expect them.71 According to naturalists, manuscripts were meant to be in public hands; or at least in hands willing to grant access to scholars, for the public good. But in what did the public good consist? Naturalists did not seek to make manuscripts and papers accessible to a public that included all English subjects. Instead, their efforts signaled a growing faith in the power of public institutions to preserve cultural patrimony and memory through changes of time, war, government, and religion. In modern-day usage, one of the more common meanings of the word public, according to the OED, is that of a mass, loosely organized audience for cultural and political productionssomething like Ju rgen Habermass public sphere.72 In the seventeenth century, however, learned naturalists and antiquaries tended to use the word as an adjective: they saw their work as a public service, something they did for the public benet and the public good. This kind of rhetoric was in many ways pioneered during the Interregnum by Hartlib, who employed it in pamphlets describing his Ofce of Address, a clearinghouse for scientic, agricultural, and other technical information for which he sought parliamentary funding.73 Because Hartlib believed that scientic advancement would necessarily stimulate economic and spiritual improve-
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ment, the public benet would encompass all British subjects, from the lowliest eld hand to Oliver Cromwell himself. Naturalists continued to employ the rhetoric of public benet and public service after the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. It was especially prominent in their appeals to government and private individuals to provide nancial support for their work.74 Their sense of public, however, was considerably more restricted than Hartlibs, and their rhetoric did not signal that they intended their work, or the papers, manuscripts, and other relics upon which it was constructed, to be accessible or benecial to a broad public composed of all His Majestys subjects.75 The public library in which Plot sought to collect British manuscripts, the Bodleian, was open to the university community and to scholars from foreign universities, but not much beyond that.76 It was public in comparison to the private libraries housed in the colleges, access to which was generally restricted to members of those colleges. For naturalists, gathering papers and manuscripts into public hands meant concentrating them in sites at which they would always be accessible to themselves and other scholars. Their interest and efforts in this direction signal a new and rising trust in public institutions like the Bodleian. Not that long ago (the mid-sixteenth century) Oxfords public library was emptied of its books, and even the bookcases were sold off.77 Yet by the end of the seventeenth centuryas shown by Plots proposal to deposit in the Bodleian the manuscripts found in his travelsnaturalists looked on the library to preserve in perpetuity the manuscripts, papers, and books that were the foundation of their work. In founding the Ashmolean Museum to house his collection of books, papers, pamphlets, and natural and articial curiosities, Elias Ashmole emerged as a key representative of the nascent faith in public institutions. The Ashmolean was designed as much to house its benefactors collection of papers, manuscripts, pamphlets, and books as the more famous Tradescant rarities.78 If they had not been willed to the museum, such papers would likely have been sold at auction, carried off piecemeal by former associates and competitors, or otherwise trashed. Ashmole understood that an institution offered some measure of protection, but he also recognized the limits of institutional protection: unless the universitys commitment to preserve the material was reinforced by the terms of the gift, it was likely to weaken over time. Thus, he required as a condition of his bequest that the university build a special museum to house the collections and hire a keeper to curate them.79 He donated not only his books and papers, but also the locked chests in which to store them.80 Ashmole further approved strict statutes, in
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Book History
place in 1688, requiring that manuscripts be kept in a separate closet within the library. Although anyone paying the admissions fee could enter the museum, the Curious, & such others as are desirous were allowed to read or transcribe the librarys manuscripts only with the approval of the Keeper.81 A building enacted a permanent commitment to preserve the material and permanently celebrate Ashmoles name. Without a building, the collections would most likely have been dispersed through the university, intermingling with other libraries and collections. Without a keeper to maintain and catalog the material, it could also have disappeared into private hands (those of greedy fellows and grubby undergraduates alike) without anyone so much as noticing.82 Though now standard features of museums, the permanent curator and single-purpose buildingas opposed to rooms rearranged and curators hired and red according to the whims of a collections royal or noble ownerwere relatively uncommon at the time.83 Ashmoles insistence on them thus implies not simply a growing faith in the ability of public institutions to secure the survival of books, papers, and natural curiosities, but also a commitment to forming public institutions as secure repositories. The cultural and physical form of the museum did not drop ready-made from the sky: Ashmole purposefully fashioned his museum as a secure repository of cultural and scientic patrimony, in response to an era marked by the mass dispersal and destruction of valuable manuscripts. As for Plot and his proposed catalog, ultimately he did not undertake his ambitious plan. Instead he focused on more doable projects that he had a hope of nishing, such as his county histories. However, the scope of his design indicates the importance that natural historians and antiquaries placed on manuscripts. Everywhere they went, they sought them out: recovering them was felt to be the key to constructing regional histories of antiquities, nature, and human arts and inventions, as well as promoting learning and trade through the publication of such histories. And later in the century, a plan not unlike Plots did produce a catalog of English and Irish manuscripts in public and private hands: Oxford scholar Edward Bernard published his Catalogi manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in 1697.84 In contrast to Plots aborted catalog, which largely depended on the laborious efforts of one man, Bernard instigated a large-scale collaboration by advertising his project, and inviting correspondents to assist him, in the London newspapers.85 According to a note in the preface of the catalog, such advertisements in London Mercuries were part of a concerted strategy to pull in manuscripts outside the academic, collegiate, and clerical orbit.86 The project was also advertised independently via a Latin broadside, printed in
17
Oxfordpresumably in large enough numbers for distribution to booksellers in Oxford, Cambridge, and London. This advertisement listed the libraries to be surveyed for the catalog (including the university and college libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, cathedral libraries, and notable private libraries such as those of Plot and Samuel Pepys) and repeated the call for patrons of literature to assist in the program.87 Bernards ability to engage correspondents as collaborators, and the success of his project, illustrate the value that the learned, including antiquaries and naturalists, placed on such resources.88 Furthermore, his broad appeal for information and assistance is a sign that, as in Bales day, naturalists and antiquaries thought that manuscripts were still almost as likely to be found on a grocers or soapsellers premises as in a cathedral library.
Saving Papers: Aubrey in the Ashmolean

Once they began to believe in the value of their contemporaries papers, many naturalists and antiquaries became concerned with the posthumous survival of their own. But what kind of effort was involved in securing ones papers? What were the practical steps one could take? John Aubrey was particularly dogged in his pursuit of a public resting place for his archive. His story suggests that it was by no means easy to protect ones papers, but that with persistence and the right connections, it was possible. It also reveals that civil and religious unrest continued to be felt as threats to the material continuity of history. Aubreys strenuous efforts to secure the survival of his manuscripts stemmed in part from his failure to print the books he had spent his life writingthese included An Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen and Monumenta Britannica, to name just two.89 As Kate Bennett has shown, however, Aubrey did not view print and archival preservation as interchangeable.90 His papers were troves of facts and empirical observations that he hoped future scholars would mine for the raw materials of their own accounts of nature and history.91 Printed, they would no longer be able to fulll this function. The biographical compendium Brief Lives, for example, included personal details that were not printable by polite standards. And it might be difcult to print An Idea of Education with its supporting materials, the small volumes of mixed manuscript and printed material Aubrey had pieced together from various books and authors.92 Yet the Idea could only be fully understood in the context of this assemblage of texts.93 The best way to preserve the full content of papers like these was not to print
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Book History
them, but to archive them. With this in mind, Aubrey deposited his papers in the library of the Ashmolean Museum rather than the Bodleian Library then and now the more conventional repository for manuscriptsfor two reasons.94 The rst was that he feared that John Wallis, the Savilian Professor of Geometry and Keeper of the Archives, might selectively suppress or destroy papers under his control in the Bodleian. Aubrey, having written in his Brief Lives that the mathematician was a plagiarist, did not wish to entrust to his care either that manuscript or any other. Secondly, the Ashmolean had been founded as a collection of natural and articial objects, manuscripts, and experimental apparatus for the study of nature and antiquities, making it the perfect repository for a collection of papers that Aubrey thought of as raw materials, or instruments, of Baconian science. Transferring the papers to Oxford, either by private carrier, with a friend, or by carrying them himself (Aubrey used all three methods), was an inherently risky business. Once out of his direct control, his papers could easily fall into unfriendly hands. Someone might attempt to print his work, destroy or deny the originals, and take credit for his labors. More prosaically, papers could be lost in transit. Poorly secured in the carriers cart, they could easily fall into the road.95 Or a carrier, not knowing the name of the recipient, might hold onto the package. Unless the sender wrote a letter under separate cover to the recipient, notifying him of the delivery, he would never know to claim it.96 But if Aubrey died without securing the survival of his papers, heand the work to which he had dedicated his lifewere equally damned to historical obscurity. In the end, he feared the loss of his legacy even more than he feared the specters of plagiarism, theft, and loss. In the late 1680s Aubrey started sending boxes of papers to his friend Anthony a ` Woodat the time, one of the few men he felt he could trustfor him to peruse and then deposit in the Ashmolean.97 But even if friends could be trusted, external events could still imperil papers, much as in centuries past. Aubreys faith in Woods ability to preserve his papers uctuated with the rise and fall of political and religious unrest. In the fall of 1688, as the Roman Catholic James II struggled to maintain his grip on the throne, only to cede it to the Dutch Protestant William of Orange in December, even suspicions of Catholic sympathies were enough to draw the inquisitive eye of ofcials and the popular anger of the mob. Wood was a potential target of any anti-Catholic action. Though he always denied having converted, his friends and patrons included known Catholics. At the time of the Popish Plot in 1679, his rooms opposite Merton College were searched by the vice-chancellor of Oxford.98 Nine years later these suspicions were enough to fuel not only Aubreys
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fears for his papers safety, but also Ashmoles. On 23 October 1688 Aubrey wrote angrily to Wood, transmitting his patrons message that certain sensitive papers should immediately be moved to the Museum for safekeeping: Mr Ashmole is much vext at my managem{en}t of this business. . . . I told Mr Ashmole in May, before I came to Oxo{n}, that you should have the perusal of all, in the rst place: I expected (you know) the receipt of the Things when I was there: and now he tells me the reason: Sc{ilicet} because You are lookt upon as a P and in these tumultuous Turns your papers will be searcht, which is like enough, for people grow mad by changes ofand so of leaving of any thing in your hands, it would be a means to have them lost; wherefore (in passion) he desires that those papers that I conceive tt to be kept secret, should be all sealed-up (after you have donne with them) and putt in the Museum; not to be opened till after my death: and I thinke his advise is very solid and sedate.99 Aubrey repeated these concerns again in a letter to Wood dated 22 December 1688. By then Aubrey was furious (as was Ashmole) that Wood had still not transferred the boxes of papers to the Ashmolean. He described a thrilling sickbed scene, witnessed by himself and an unnamed Oxford scholar, a kinsman of Ashmoles: Mr Wood! Last Tuesday I went to see Mr Ashmole (whom I found ill) He lately received a letter from Dr Plott about the things that I sent to Oxford He desired you to send to the Musaeum, but you denied it: and would not let himSee the Catalogue, that I sent. Mr Ashmole desired to speake with me about it: and is most outrageously angry: and charged me to write to you, as soon as I could, and to order you to put the Box in the Musaeum: for he looks upon you as a P. and sayeth, so does the whole University, and there was present at this angry tt of his, an Oxford scholar (I thinke his kinsman) who owned what, Mr Ashmole sayd. Mr Ashmole saies that now there is such care and good method taken, that the Bookes in the Musaeum, are more safe, than those in the Libraries, or Archives: and he says, he expects to heare of your being plundered, and papers burnt, as at the Sp{anish} ambassadors at Wild-house, where were burnt MSS and Antiquities invaluable: such as are not left in the world and he further bids me tell you, that if you shall refuse to deliver the things sent downe by me, to Oxford, that he will never looke on you as a Friend: and will never give a farthing more to the University of Oxford.100
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Book History
Anti-Catholic tensions ran high, and Aubrey feared more than the ordinary sorts of loss and destructionpapers being cut up for pie-liners and glove wrappers. The anti-Papist mobile, or mob, was abroad.101 They had burnt down the Spanish ambassadors house in London; might not similar mobs coalesce in Oxford around rumors of a scholars Catholic sympathies? It had happened before: there were stories of both Catholics and radical Protestants alike burning books and manuscripts thought to be heretical, and of books getting caught up in general waves of destruction. In these troubled times, not just any institutional repository would do. As described above, Ashmole had made stringent efforts to establish his museum as a secure public archive. Such care and good method guaranteed that Aubreys papers were much safer in the museum than in the Bodleian or any of the college libraries, much less Woods attic rooms in Merton Street. Aubreys letters to Wood reveal how he mobilized friends, patrons, and acquaintances to assist him in moving his books and papers into the museum. In his second letter to Wood, Aubrey mentioned ve persons: himself, Ashmole, Wood, Plot, and an anonymous Oxford scholar, Ashmoles kinsman. Hiding in the background were the package and letter carriers and servants participating in the chain of transmission. A carrier transported the box of papers from London to Oxford, either by wagon or riverboat, while the post took Plot, Aubrey, and Woods letters on horseback from Oxford to London and back. Meanwhile, in London, a friend or servant of Ashmolepossibly the kinsman and Oxford scholarfetched Aubrey to the sick mans bedside so that he could communicate his displeasure with Wood. The disposal of Aubreys papers concerned not just Aubrey and Wood, or Aubrey and the keeper of the Ashmolean, but a swathe of their correspondence. The large number of people involved in this transaction, and the resulting confusion over where the papers should have been, was typical for Aubrey. For a man so deeply concerned with the survival of his papers, he was curiously eager to disperse them among his correspondents. Rather than transfer his papers directly to the museum, Aubrey involved many friends with similar interests in antiquities and natural history by sending them papers with instructions to send them on to the Ashmolean after perusing them. Sometimes it was unclear to Lhwyd, in charge of receiving the donation, whether Aubrey meant to give a manuscript to the museum or use the Ashmolean as a centrally located pick-up and drop-off point for his Oxford readers. The peregrinations of Aubreys Monumenta Britannica, his treatise on British antiquities, are representative. In the fall of 1693 Aubrey sent the Monumenta Britannica manuscript to Lhwyd to add to his growing archive
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at the museum.102 On 4 March 1694, after receiving another delivery, Lhwyd wrote to Aubrey, Mr. Kent has sent me your Books; in your next {be} pleased to acquaint me whether you give them now to the Museum or onely deposit them for the present in my custody. Mr. Tanner brought me the key of your Box; and I have delivered him your Monumenta Brit{annica}. But no other papers for he desired no more.103 While in Lhwyds keeping, the manuscript circulated to other readers as well, most likely at Aubreys request (given Lhwyds sensitivity to Aubreys wishes, it seems unlikely he would share the manuscript without permission). In a letter dated 29 May 1694 Lhwyd wrote to Aubrey that Dr. Edwards I know is very sensible of the true worth of your labours, as he was pleased to declare upon perusal of your Monumenta Britannica. Lhwyd had shared Monumenta with Edwards before returning it to Tanner. When Lhwyd nally did return the manuscript to Tanner in March 1694, it was so that Tanner could send the manuscript back to Aubrey, probably because he hoped to have it printed by subscription.104 At the time of Aubreys death, London bookseller Awnsham Churchill owned the copy, having purchased it from Aubrey in the (false) hope of turning a prot on its print publication. Finally, in 1836, Churchills heirs donated the manuscript to the Bodleian Library.105 Monumenta Britannica traced a circuitous path from its author, to Lhwyd, to Tanner, to Edwards, back to Lhwyd, back to Tanner, back to the author, and then on to a bookseller, before nally, and posthumously, coming to rest in a public repository. Although Aubrey dispersed his papers widely, seemingly encouraging these complicated exchanges, he did not always look favorably on requests to use or peruse his papers. Lhwyd, at work on his contribution to the new Oxford edition of Elizabethan antiquary William Camdens Britannia, once requested to check Monumenta Britannica for information on Welsh antiquities, including Caerphilly castle near Cardiff. In October 1693 he wrote to Aubrey in polite terms, asking permission to study the relevant papers: Pray let me hear from you at your leisure; & let me know whether you permit me to open your box for my own private use. What Mr. Gibson has of yours I would also beg the perusal of, when he has done. Although Lhwyd promised Aubrey that he would be carefull to doe you right, and rob you of any part of that honour and thanks that is due to you from the curious and ingenious, Aubrey responded rather touchily, denying him access.106 In November Lhwyd wrote apologetically to Aubrey that he could not in the least blame your Caution in communicateing your Monumenta Britannica and retreated from his requests to peruse the manuscripts.107 Aubrey recoiled when Lhwyd touched on his old sensitivities to other
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Book History
people using (and misusing) his work in print without crediting him. Although one of the earliest and most enthusiastic donors of material to the Ashmolean, Aubrey struggled to believe that his papers would be safe there. The physical structure of the archive may have been in place, but the concomitant mental and cultural structure, an understanding that an archive was a secure location whose personnel could be trusted as custodians of ones papers, was not yet fully established.
Conclusion
In some ways, the situation facing seventeenth-century naturalists and antiquaries was not unlike that faced now by archivists, librarians, historians, and scientists. New forms of information, and ways of communicating it, proliferate. The development of preprint servers; massive electronic databases; online journals, magazines, and papers; Wikipedia and other communally authored reference sources; blogs; email; and instant messaging tax the capabilities of public archives designed for paper media. The preservation of information communicated through these mediaas well as the paper records that they supersedeis in question. The historical interests guiding the development of new mediaand ultimately our decisions about how and what to preservemay differ, but some of the issues at play are similar, and the seventeenth-century experience may inform our own. Two different seventeenth-century models for interacting with papers and manuscripts have been described in this essay. Samuel Hartlib collected the manuscripts of naturalists in order to prime further advancement and discovery by redistributing them among his correspondence. John Aubrey, Elias Ashmole, and Robert Plot, on the other hand, focused on collecting written material in order to deposit it in central public archives. Of the two approaches, the future-oriented looks to us more successful. Hartlib made no provision for the survival of his papers after his death. As he neared the end of his life, part of his archive was destroyed by a house re. The remainder was further depleted by untrustworthy friends who took what they would from the ill and aging Hartlib. After Hartlibs death in 1662, William Brereton, a friend and natural philosopher, purchased the remainder of the collection. At Breretons Cheshire country house, cleric John Worthington cataloged and ordered the papers, all the while allowing others, including mathematician John Ward and possibly John Milton, to remove or burn items in the collection that cast their involvement in the affairs of the Commonwealth and Protectorate in not quite the uncommit-
23
ted light that they hoped to put abroad post facto, as Mark Greengrass has put it.108 The collection was broken up, and some of the papers emerged later in the British Library and Yale University Library. In 1933 George Osborn, professor of education at Shefeld University, rediscovered and obtained for his university a large portion of the original archive: this material has since been made available electronically through the Hartlib Papers Project.109 Aubrey deposited his papers in the Ashmolean precisely in order to avoid the posthumous mutilation that Hartlibs collection suffered. The papers Aubrey and Ashmole gave to the museum have largely survived intact to the present day (with some exceptionsthe second book of Aubreys Wiltshire Antiquities was lost, for example, when his brother permanently borrowed it from the library in 1703).110 But although Aubrey, Plot, and Ashmole showed more of a concern with the preservation of written records, they agreed with Hartlib as to whom were the intended beneciaries of their activities. Much as Hartlib sought to further the progress of natural knowledge through the circulation of papers and manuscripts, Aubrey, Plot, and Ashmole sought to further it through their preservation. Their targets were not historians, but future naturalists. Similarly, in their capacity as antiquaries, they preserved papers and manuscripts in order to contribute to the construction of the history of the places in which they lived, not in order to answer the metaquestion a twenty-rst-century historian might ask: what were the historical attitudes of seventeenth-century English men and women?111 Naturalists and antiquaries efforts to preserve their papers in public archives marked a transitional moment in the evolution of a historical consciousness. They developed an interest in the preservation of their papers and manuscripts, and even begun acting on it, founding archives and libraries and contributing materials to them. Yet they did not view these papers as historical documents, that is, as primary sources that would be studied and interpreted by historians whose aims and understanding were not fundamentally continuous with their own. The disjunction between past and present approaches to history is perhaps best represented by the different ways seventeenth-century and twenty-rst-century historians treat archival documents. Early moderns did not regard the physical medium, the paper itself, as having an intrinsic historical valuerecall Aubreys indifference to whether mathematical demonstrations were written in the hand of well-known mathematician Seth Ward or that of a lowly mathematics instructor at Christ Church Hospital. Value inhered in the information, not in the paper or the handwriting in which it was stored. Likewise, seventeenthcentury antiquaries happily annotated and otherwise added to, rebound,
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Book History
and mixed together manuscripts and papers of both recent and medieval vintage.112 No twenty-rst-century historian would write her own thoughts in the margin of a fteenth-century historical chronicle. How might the development of new technologies for storing, accessing, and processing historical information be shaking up our ideas about the proper use of archives? Although Aubrey and his colleagues saw their audience as future naturalists, the paper-based archive has solidied in the cultural consciousness as a site where historians learn about and process the past for the rest of the public, rather than as a site of active scientic research. Science, in turn, has become increasingly present-minded, as the scientic community has grown and the pace at which it creates new information accelerated. Science and history have largely parted ways. However, it seems possible that the explosion of digital and internet-based communications media may change this. As current and historical scientic information goes online and increasingly powerful methods for searching and processing massive amounts of data are developed, it may be that scientists will engage with it in new ways, no longer leaving it solely to the historians.113 With the advent of technologies for communicating, storing, processing, and searching massive amounts of information, we may be entering a new Baconian age. Returning to the seventeenth centurys transitional moment, if Aubreys story displays a prophetic enthusiasm for the public repository, it reveals a certain ambivalence as well. Reluctant to exchange disseminating his work in the present for its secure preservation after his death, he sent material to Lhwyd only to ask for it back or allow friends to take it out of the archive. And once his papers were in a public repository, it troubled him that he could no longer control who read them and how they used themrecall his peremptory requests that Lhwyd not consult Monumenta Britannica. He could not guarantee that future naturalists using his work would properly attribute credit to him (a constant worry throughout his life) or that future generations would remember him in a way he would recognize.114 Sealing his remains in the archive thus entailed both a preservation of self and a giving up of that same self. And yet, placing his faith in the future, he deposited as full a record as possible, preserving every page, every scrap, every note that he could.115 Notes
1. John Aubrey, Memoires of Naturall Remarques in the County of Wilts, Royal Society MS 92, 221 (hereafter RS MS 92). A marginal note at the line beginning Dorset reads: In
25
Mr. Wm. Gardners time, it was the most eminent Schoole for the Education of Gentle Men in the West of England. Note that in this and all subsequent transcriptions from early modern texts, the following conventions are observed: familiar abbreviations (Dr., Mr., etc.) have been left as is while most abbreviations of names and words not now commonly abbreviated have been expanded in braces. Common abbreviations like wch, ye, yt, however, have been silently expanded to which, the, and that. All superscripts have been lowered. Text crossed out by an author, where legible, is shown with a line through it. Authorial insertions to the text are presented in angle brackets. Editorial comments and insertions are enclosed by braces. Braces are used because early modern authors quoted in this essay, including John Aubrey, employed square brackets, leaving them unavailable for use as editorial tools. Where dates are conjectural (as in dating of correspondence), they are also enclosed by braces. These practices largely follow the recommendations of Michael Hunter, as described in How to Edit a Seventeenth-Century Manuscript: Principles and Practice, Seventeenth Century 10 (1995): 277310; and Editing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). The reader will note that I cite Memoires of Naturall Remarques (RS MS 92), the copy of The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire (Bodleian Library, MS Aubrey 1, 2) that Aubrey made in 1690 91 at the request of the Royal Society (hereafter Bodleian manuscripts abbreviated Bod MS). I do this because the passage cited above is present only in the Royal Society copy of the manuscript. 2. Compare Ernst Gerhardt, No Quyckar Merchandyce than Library Bokes: John Bales Commodication of Manuscript Culture, Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 42122. There were a few exceptions to the general rule of destruction. Charters, wills, monastic registers and other documents that pertained to legal rights and land tenure were often carefully protected. See Adam Fox, Custom, Memory and the Authority of Writing, in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Grifths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (New York: St. Martins Press, 1996), 89 116; Jan Broadway, No Historie So Meete: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 12126. 3. In the decades after the dispersal of the monastic libraries, those turning to this kind of labor included Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker, the historian John Stow, and Robert Cotton, the founder of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries. On Stow, see Ian Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie, eds., John Stow (15251605) and the Making of the English Past (London: British Library, 2004), in particular Gillespie, Stows Owlde Manuscripts of London Chronicles, 57 67. On Parker, see C. E. Wright, The Dispersal of the Libraries in the Sixteenth Century, in The English Library Before 1700: Studies in Its History, ed. Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright (London: University of London, the Athlone Press, 1958), 156 57, 170. On Cotton, see C. J. Wright, ed., Sir Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays on an Early Stuart Collector and His Legacy (London: British Library, 1997). 4. See Margaret Aston, English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 23155. 5. County natural historiessuch as those compiled by Robert Plot and Aubreywere built in part out of the diligent study of manuscript records scattered in private homes, cathedral and church buildings, and the public libraries of Oxford and Cambridge. On the connection between John Aubreys studies of natural history and antiquities, see Michael Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), 191202. 6. On Bacon and Baconian method in seventeenth-century natural history, see Lorraine Daston, Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe, Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 93124; Stephan Clucas, In Search of The True Logick: Methodological Eclecticism Among the Baconian Reformers, in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 5174; Daston and Katharine Park,
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Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150 1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), especially Strange Facts, 21553; Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550 1720 (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2000), especially 63 85 and 10538; and William T. Lynch, Solomons Child: Method in the Early Royal Society of London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), especially 133. 7. Lesley B. Cormack, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Geography as Self-Denition in Early Modern England, Isis 82 (1991): 639 61 (quote on 656). Though not its sole originator, Francis Bacon was one of the earliest formal proponents of such a method. Deborah Harkness argues that Bacons science was not a new creation, but a version of Elizabethan London science, a practical mix of theory, experience and experimentation, invention, and mechanical ingenuity going on every day in London streets, alleyways, gardens, and workshops. Bacons innovations were, in fact, to describe this unruly activity in terms of learned philosophical method and express a desire to bring it under the control of a central authority (Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientic Revolution [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007], 214 16, 24153). While I agree with Harkness as to the origins of Baconian science, I continue to use the term for two reasons. One, late seventeenthcentury naturalists, especially those afliated with the Royal Society, explicitly took their inspiration from Bacons writings. Two, Baconian science is convenient shorthand for a method that grew organically from the practices and writings not only of London experimentalists and artisans, but of surveyors, antiquaries, natural historians, alchemists, physicians, humanist scholars, gentleladies, gardeners, and many others in England and abroad. For example, the Baconian method also had its roots in the work of inuential Elizabethan chorographer William Camden, who based his best-selling survey of Britain, Britannia, on facts and observations gathered from personal experience (both his own and others). See Cormack, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, 658 60. 8. Compare Ann Blair, Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book, Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 54151. 9. Michael Hunter, introduction to Archives of the Scientic Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth Century Europe, ed. Michael Hunter (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 6 11. Aubrey also regarded this as a viable option for certain kinds of works (Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 66 67). 10. Naturalists also used the word archives to refer to this collection of material. See Hunter, introduction, 11. Hunter argues that papers and archive are conceptually identical for naturalists of the Scientic Revolution because papers were shaped through a lifetime of selection and editing. The nal culling of the papers in preparation for transfer to the archive was simply a culmination of this process. 11. Evelyn, Memoires for my Grandson, British Library MS ADD 78515, 32r (British Library hereafter BL). Evelyn, conscious of his legacy, and not wanting it to be marred by posthumous revelations of imperfect, impertinent, or unpolished work, asked his grandson to burn or otherways dispose of these materials. Luckily for historians, Evelyns heir disregarded these instructions. Evelyns attitude was very different from Aubreys, who regarded such materials as the raw stuff of scholarship, out of which future naturalists and antiquaries might construct new studies. On Evelyns fear of humiliation or embarrassment, see Frances Harris, Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 42 and in passim. 12. Robert Hooke, The Diary of Robert Hooke, MA, MD, FRS, 1672 1680, ed. Henry W. Robinson and Walter Adams (London: Taylor and Francis, 1935), entries of 21 September 1677, 314; 19 November 1677, 329; 28 November 1677, 330; 26 December 1677, 336; 28 December 1677, 337; 31 December 1677, 33738; 1 January 1677/78, 338; 4 January 1677/ 78, 338; 12 January 1677/78, 340. These passages, which are largely concerned with Hookes efforts to survey and sort the books and papers left in Royal Society secretary Henry Olden-
27
burgs lodgings after his death, are rich with references to books and papers, but never one manuscript. 13. Edward Lhwyd, Parochial Queries (Oxford, 1696), Bod MS Ashmole 1820, 74v. At least three of the forty-four queries returned to Lhwyd have substantive answers to this question (MS Ashmole 1820, 121v, 133v, 143r). 14. Evelyn, Of Manuscripts: An Unnished Treatise, in Memoirs Illustrative of the Life and Writings of John Evelyn, Esq. FRS, ed. William Bray (London: Henry Colburn, Conduit Street, 1818), 2.1:333 48. The manuscript copy of the treatise is no longer extant. 15. Evelyn, Of Manuscripts, 339 48. 16. Manuscript was so abundant in Wiltshire because the county had once been wellpopulated with Abbeys or Convents for Men: in addition to Malmesbury, Aubrey noted that the ruins of Broadstock Priory and the abbeys of Stanley, Farleigh, Bath, and Cyrencester were all within twelve miles of the parish of Leigh-Delamer, where Aubrey attended school (Aubrey, RS MS 92, 221). 17. On the scribal publication of music, see Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 18. See Aubrey to Anthony a ` Wood, {11 March 1690}, Bod MS Wood F.39, 400r: Mr Wood, I know you me & I take you to be my faithfull friend: I am in a dilemma, & know not well what to doe as to securing my MSS. Mr Ashmole &c: advise me by all meanes to secure them in the Musea{m} which (I grant) would be safe; but many parts want a little transcribing: and if I dye before they are printed my Will and intention & desire is, that you might have the Benet of them as well as care. But if they are deposited in the Museam Dr Plott, or &c: will and must have the benet: and (no doubt) would have the Credit too: which I verily believe you would not doe You are not very young, & a mortall man, & when you dye, then your Nephew stoppes Gunnes with them, or are putt under Pies. What should I doe in this Case? When I come to Oxo{n} I will make a short Will as to these MSS to give you title to them. See also Aubrey to Wood, 24 April 1690, Bod MS Wood F.39, 403r; Aubrey to Wood, 5 July 1690 and 10 July 1690, Bod MS Wood F.39, 405v. 19. Aubrey regularly updated his friend Wood on the progress of these efforts. See, e.g., Aubrey to Wood, 24 April 1690, Bod MS Wood F.39, 402r 403r, and other letters in that volume. Lhwyd assisted Aubrey in these efforts: as receiver of Aubreys collections, he had the loose pamphlets bound together, and offered to do the same with the letters once they were in his care (Lhwyd to Aubrey, 2 March 1692/3, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 241r). Aubrey, however, beat him to it. In a 1689 letter to Wood, Aubrey wrote that he had taken 3 dayes paines to make a Collection of all my learned & Philos: Letters, which now make a fair Volume. Viz. from 1643, to this yeare (Aubrey to Wood, 24 April 1690, Bod MS Wood F.39, 403r). That this was a physical, rather than a metaphorical volume, Aubrey made clear in a second letter to Wood, noting that he sent to Oxford by Robert Plot a thick folio of Letters (Aubrey to Wood, 5 July 1690, Bod MS Wood F.39, 405v). 20. Lhwyd to Aubrey, 3 April {1693}, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 243r; see also Lhwyd to Aubrey, 16 November 1693, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 250r; Lhwyd to Aubrey, 9 January 1693/94, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 251r; Lhwyd to Aubrey, 29 May 1694, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 257r. In a letter of 4 March 1693/94, as well as one letter for which no year is available, but which was likely written about the same time, Lhwyd refers to Aubreys papers, slipping from his standard use of MSS in this series of letters (Lhwyd to Aubrey, 4 March 1693/4, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 252r; Lhwyd to Aubrey, 27 February {1693/94}, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 260r). 21. This is clear in the way in which Aubrey differentiated between museum-ready manuscripts and unnished papers. Writing to Wood in 1690, Aubrey noted that he had planned to send to Oxford 4 volumnes of MSS of my owne, but had held them back because the Royal Society rst desired transcriptions of them. In the same letter, Aubrey wrote, I long to be at Oxford to nish my papers there. Papers were rougher notes, not yet possessed of
28
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historical status, while manuscriptsnished paperswere ready to take up their permanent home in the Ashmolean, and bear the scrutiny of future generations (Aubrey to Wood, 5 July 1690, Bod MS Wood F.39, 405v). 22. Compare the account given in Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 75 92. Hunter discusses there Aubreys efforts, primarily in the last twenty years of his life, to organize, circulate, and preserve his notes on natural history, biography, antiquarian studies, and miscellaneous topics. As quoted by Hunter, Aubrey used various words for his written materials, including papers and manuscripts or MSS. Instances of papers date to 1679 85, before Aubrey transferred his collections to the Ashmolean (Hunter, 79, 80, 82). In quotations from 1692 94, Aubrey exclusively used manuscripts or MSS (Hunter, 85, 87 can be securely dated; a third use of manuscript on 83, taken from Monumenta Britannica, probably, but not certainly, dates from sometime after Aubrey began donating his manuscripts to the Ashmolean). 23. Elias Ashmole, 20 August 1672, BL MS Sloane 3188, 2r2v and Ashmole, 10 September 1672, BL MS Sloane 3188, 2v3 in Elias Ashmole, 16171692: His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, His Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to His Life and Work, ed. C. H. Josten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 3:1264 65, 1270 71 (hereafter Autobiographical and Historical Notes). 24. Ashmole, 20 August 1672, Bod MS Ashmole 1136, 47v; Ashmole, 10 September 1672, BL MS Sloane 3188, 2v3; and Ashmole to Wood, 20 December 1672, Bod MS Wood F. 39, 59; in Autobiographical and Historical Notes, 3:1264, 1271, 1289. 25. Ashmole, 29 January 1672, Bod MS Ashmole 1788, 158, in Autobiographical and Historical Notes, 3:1242 43. 26. Gabriel Naude , Instructions Concerning Erecting a Library, trans. John Evelyn (London: Printed for G. Bedle, T. Collins . . . and J. Crook, 1661), 80 82 (quote on 81). David McKitterick argues that a sense of separation between manuscript and print was forced in the early seventeenth century, and completed by the end of the century, by librarians and catalogers seeking to impose order on their collections (McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450 1830 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 1215). Naude , writing midcentury, practiced a partial, pragmatic version of this division, shelving costly manuscripts separately from printed books, but otherwise classing bound manuscripts with bound printed books. The separation of print and manuscript was by no means a given: through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, readers frequently combined manuscript and print by marking, dismembering, and resewing their printed books in more or less invasive ways with little regard for supposedly divergent categories of print and manuscript. See William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), especially 710. 27. Naude , Instructions, 81. Loose manuscript sheets were not to be left out on the library table. These especially were daily obnoxious to being stolen, borrowed, and copied: as with manuscripts of consequence, only the librarian should know where to nd them (Naude , Instructions, 81 82 [quote on 81]). 28. Ashmole, Copy of Elias Ashmoles Will from the Registry of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Bod MS Ashmole 1834, 62r. Ashmoles library reected his interests in the history of the English Order of the Garter as well as alchemy and astrology. In his library, one could nd records of the Garter dating back to its founding by Edward III in 1348 (Josten, in Autobiographical and Historical Notes, 2:671; 3:111718, 1240). More recent papers and manuscripts included not only those of Dee and Lilly, but also those of the Elizabethan astrologer-physician Simon Forman and the Stuart astrologer-physicians Richard Napier and his nephew Sir Richard Napier. On Ashmoles acquisition of the Napier and Forman papers, see Josten, Biographical Introduction, in Autobiographical and Historical Notes, 1:209 10; for Dee, see references in n.22 above. Ashmole inherited Lillys papers as his patron and friend; for a sense of the range of material encompassed in this collection, see Ann Geneva, Astrology
29
and the Seventeenth-Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). On Forman, see Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman: Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 29. Stephen Clucas, Samuel Hartlibs Ephemerides, 163559, and the Pursuit of Scientic and Philosophical Manuscripts: The Religious Ethos of an Intelligencer, Seventeenth Century 6 (1991): 3355. In 1634, as he formulated his plan for advancing the progress of natural knowledge and the Protestant cause, Hartlib noted that searching out and disseminating the papers of living naturalists was necessary because there are Few good English bookes . . . the best things are kept in mens studies in Manuscripts (Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1634, Hartlib Papers, Shefeld University Library, 50H, 29/2/53B54A; quoted in Clucas, Samuel Hartlibs Ephemerides, 36). 30. That cultural memory, and the material signs the Dissolution had left in the landscape, could play a key role in directing, or creating, an interest in antiquities. Monastic ruins, and stories of England before the Reformation, inspired a love of antiquities in the young Aubrey. In his Brief Lives, he noted that he had a strong and early impulse to antiquitie and was alwayes enquiring of my grandfather of the old time, the rood-loft, etc., ceremonies, of the priory, etc. (Aubrey, Brief Lives Chiey of Contemporaries, Set Down by John Aubrey, Between the Years 1669 and 1696, ed. Andrew Clark [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898], 36 37). 31. See, for example, his interest in the papers of Peter Cruger, who died in 1639. Although Hartlib recorded in his Ephemerides a one-volume collection of Crugers writings in 1635, it was only in 1639 that he became concerned with locating and obtaining, if possible, all the mathematicians papers (Clucas, Samuel Hartlibs Ephemerides, 46). 32. See, for example, Hartlibs catalog of Francis Bacons extant manuscripts, compiled in 1639 (transcribed in Clucas, Samuel Hartlibs Ephemerides, 50 51). 33. Some of the books were gathered into the Royal Library (which Henry VIII began collecting before the dissolution of 1536 in part as a search for historical evidence to support his case for a divorce from both Rome and Catherine of Aragon), but possibly dispersed again after his death because the Crown had neither the space nor the nancial resources to hold onto them (Gerhardt, No quyckar merchandyce than library bokes, 413). 34. Wright, The Dispersal of the Libraries in the Sixteenth Century, 170. 35. Ibid., 175. 36. John Bale, quoted in ibid., 15354. No citation given by Wright, but see John Bale to Matthew Parker, 30 July 1560, in The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker, ed. Timothy Graham and Andrew G. Watson (Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1998), 17; quoted in Gerhardt, No Quyckar Merchandyce than Library Bokes, 409. 37. The use of manuscript in pies may require some explanation: the sheets were used to line the crust during blind baking. Weights, such as dried beans or peas, were poured into the paper-lined crust, which was then pre-baked; the weights prevented air bubbles from forming in the crust. Once the crust was done, the paper and beans were lifted out, the lling added, and the pie cooked again as necessary. Bale also described the use of manuscript (generally parchment, in his case), in bookbinding, candlestick scouring, and boot cleaning (John Bale and John Leland, The Laboryouse Journey and Serche of Johan Leland [London: S. Mierdman for J. Bale, 1549], Giiir; quoted in Gerhardt, No Quyckar Merchandyce than Library Bokes, 421). Elias Ashmole told the story of John Dees papers being used to line pies before they came into his hands: they were discovered by a London confectioner and his wife, in a secret compartment in a chest they purchased at second hand in the early 1640s. Ashmole wrote in his diary, they made no great matter of these Bookes &c: because they understood them not; which occasioned their Servant Maide to wast about one halfe of them under Pyes & other like uses, which when discovered, they kept the rest more safe. Fortunately, the papers,
30
Book History
though not the chest, were saved from the Great Fire in 1666, and the ladys second husband, a warder in the Tower of London, knew of Ashmole and his interests, and thought he might like to see them (Autobiographical and Historical Notes, 1:184 86 and 3:1270 71; quote on 1271). The waste of manuscript (both papers and medieval parchment) to stop and scour guns and line pies haunted Aubrey: recall his complaints, quoted above, that Parson Stumps sons had cleaned their guns with manuscript (Aubrey, RS MS 92, 221). After Bishop Seth Wards death, Aubrey also rescued from his study papers that were destined with many other good papers and letters, to be put under pies (Aubrey, An Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen (1683/84), Bod MS Aubrey 10, 65r). 38. See John Houghton, A Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (London: n.p., 16921703), 13.356 59 (19 May 9 June 1699) for a description of paper manufacture. The issue of 9 June 1699 includes the method for boiling parchment and vellum to make size to seal the paper. 39. Appropriately, given naturalists obsession with once-monastic manuscripts, chorography, one of the strands feeding into seventeenth-century natural history, had monastic origins, at least in Britainmedieval English chorographers were associated almost exclusively with monasteries (Stan A. E. Mendyk, Speculum Britanniae: Regional Study, Antiquarianism and Science in Britain to 1700 [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989], 40 42). 40. Aubrey, RS MS 92, 221. 41. Lhwyd, Parochial Queries, Bod MS Ashmole 1820, 143r. 42. On the history of more and less organized book-burning, as well as other methods of book destruction, and the meaning of stories about book burning, see Lucien X. Polastron, Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries Throughout History, trans. Jon E. Graham (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2007). 43. Lhwyd to Baxter, 7 September 1708, in Early Sciences in Oxford, ed. R. T. Gunther (Oxford: Printed for the subscribers, 1920 45), 14:545 (hereafter ESIO). 44. Ibid. 45. Both print and the postal system gave naturalists more opportunities to share their work with correspondents and readers beyond their immediate localities, creating an incentive to produce more papers as products of researching and writing printed works and as texts to be circulated and read in their own right. On the relationship between the invention of printing and the increase in the production of handwritten documents, see Peter Stallybrass, Printing for Manuscript (Rosenbach Lectures, University of Pennsylvania, February 2006). 46. Aubrey, Idea of Education. An edition of the manuscript was prepared by J. E. Stephens as Aubrey on Education: A Hitherto Unpublished Manuscript by the Author of Brief Lives, ed. J. E. Stephens (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). Michael Hunter also summarizes the content of the manuscript in John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 50 55. Stephenss edition is not without its defects. His transcriptions were sometimes haphazard, and he rearranged some of Aubreys material in what he felt to be a more coherent manner, combining what were in fact two separate treatises on education, Aubreys Idea of 1683/84 and Idea Filioli seu Educatio Pueri of 1669, a small handwritten pamphlet that has been stored inside MS Aubrey 10 in the last century (see Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 50n.11). Stephenss justication was, as he thought, Aubreys own wishes for an Aristarchus, or editor, to prepare the manuscript for publication. In a letter to his friend Anthony Henley inserted at the beginning of the manuscript, Aubrey wrote, Some things {notions written above things} are downe twice: they should be but once: but I desire an Aristarchus, (that is, your kind selfe) to consider in which place it would stand best (Aubrey, Idea of Education, 2r). In what follows, I make use of both the original manuscript and the printed edition. The defects of Stephenss edition, while serious, do not detract from the thrust of my argument in this section, which is that Aubrey used manuscript materials both as educational texts and as sources for his own arguments. For a more detailed consideration of Stephenss
31
edition, see Michael Hunters review in Journal of Educational Administration and History 6, no. 2 (1974): 61 and Hunter, How to Edit a Seventeenth-Century Manuscript, 286. 47. Aubrey, Aubrey on Education, 97. Similarly, those clear demonstrations of Dr. John Pell which are done on one side of a sheet of paper most curiously, fty years since, would teach his students to comprehend the second book of Euclids Elements (Aubrey, Aubrey on Education, 109). Aubrey further directed that the students should be taught mechanics in part from two sheets in French (a manuscript) of the ve mechanical powers (Aubrey, Aubrey on Education, 111). 48. Aubrey, Aubrey on Education, 129. 49. Ibid., 12526. See also Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 52. When Aubrey read it, Seldens manuscript was in the possession of the Earl of Abingdon. Aubrey quoted Selden approvingly as saying that studying the Reports alone, teach not a man Lawe. He was familiar with the earls library because of the time he spent on his estate as a house guest. 50. Aubrey, Collection of Grammaticall learning, Bod MS Aubrey 22, items 1 and 8. 51. Aubrey, Idea of Education, 64 65. Brackets are original. As demonstrated here, Aubreys mania for collecting and preserving papers extended far beyond his own unprinted works. Aubrey haunted dead mens studies. In 1680/81 he wrote to Wood, I suppose you heare that Dr Tong is dead, he hath left 2 Vol: MSS in Alkymy (which was his Talent) I shall retrieve a Catal{ogue} of all his Writings (Aubrey to Wood, 13 {January?} 1680/81, Bod MS Wood F.39, 351v). Dr. Tong was cleric Israel Tonge, an informant on the Popish Plot of 1678 whose interests included alchemy and gardening. His alchemical papers have not survived. For more on Aubreys enthusiasms for others papers, see Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 64 70. 52. For the classic statement on the aura in the history of art, see Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 21752. 53. Aubrey, Aubrey on Education, 97. 54. Hunter, introduction, 7. 55. Aubrey to Wood, 8 November 1692, Bod MS Wood F. 39, 437; quoted in Anthony Powell, John Aubrey and His Friends (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), 219 20. 56. Clucas, Samuel Hartlibs Ephemerides, 3355. 57. Like seventeenth-century intelligencers, I use the word correspondence to refer to the sum of a naturalists contacts, those with whom he shared information by letters and personal conversations, often passing material received from one correspondent into communications with others. See Elizabeth Yale, Manuscript Technologies: Correspondence, Collaboration, and the Construction of Natural Knowledge in Early Modern Britain (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2008), 61 64. 58. Hartlibs work also encouraged others. In 1650 Robert Childe wrote from New England to tell Hartlib that one of the primary missions of the chemical club he was forming would be collecting and publishing chemical manuscripts (Clucas, Samuel Hartlibs Ephemerides, 40). 59. Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1639, Hartlib Papers, 30/4/27B; quoted in Clucas, Samuel Hartlibs Ephemerides, 42. This habit of disseminating papers furthered an advancement in botany: in his 1660 Catalogus Cantabrigium, a catalog of plants found in and about Cambridge, John Ray classied plants using terminology that Jungius developed in his Isagoge Phytoscopica, a manuscript treatise Hartlib forwarded to Ray through John Worthington. Carolus Linnaeus adapted Jungiuss system, which he learned through Rays Historiae Plantarum (1682), which also used it (Clucas, Samuel Hartlibs Ephemerides, 48 49). 60. Aubrey wrote to Wood to request a list of Bacon manuscripts in the Bodleian: The R. Societie have a wonderfull Esteeme of Friar Roger Bacon, and desire you to send me [for them] the names of all the Treatises he wrote. They wish the University would print them
32
Book History
(Aubrey to Wood, n.d, MS Wood F.39, 318r). According to Aubrey, Hooke was also involved in this effort: he was enlisted to review the manuscripts to determine whether they were suitable for printing. Unfortunately, the Royal Societys esteem did not translate into a willingness to spend the money required to put Bacon into print. On the attempts to search out and print the works of Bacon and Beg, see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 496 97. 61. This undertaking foundered upon the fellows inability to locate any of his manuscripts, though some turned up in the eighteenth century (Clucas, Samuel Hartlibs Ephemerides, 45). 62. Johns, Nature of the Book, 495. 63. Ibid., 495 96. 64. Lhwyd, Bod MS Ashmole 1820, 78v. 65. Ibid., 77v. 66. Inquires for Barbary Recommended by the R. Society to the Favour and Care of His Excellency the Lord Henry Howard, his Majesties Ambassadour Extraordinary to the Emperour of Marocco, Royal Society Library, Register Book of the Royal Society 4 (1668 75): 53. 67. Plot to Fell, c.1673, ESIO, 12:336. 68. Ibid. John Leland (c. 150352) was one of the rst English topographers. In 1533 Leland received a warrant from Henry VIII to search out and catalog the books in English monasteries and colleges. After the dissolution of the monasteries, he continued to travel in England and Wales, making at least ve journeys in the 1540s during which he recorded many details of local history, antiquities, and topography. Lelands Itineraries describing these journeys remained in manuscript until Thomas Hearne brought an edition to print in 1710 12 (The Itinerary of John Leland the Antiquary [Oxford: Thomas Hearne, 1710 12]). Prior to this edition, however, the manuscript original of The Itinerary was well known in antiquarian circles. Seven of the eight manuscript volumes were donated to the Bodleian by William Burton, author of The Description of Leicestershire (1622), in the rst half of the seventeenth century. The eighth volume, which had been borrowed by a friend of Burtons, resurfaced in the latter half of the century and was donated to the Bodleian by Charles King in or around 1677. See James P. Carley, Leland, John (c.15031552), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 8); hereafter ODNB. A number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquaries read and copied material from the Leland manuscripts, including John Stow, William Harrison, William Camden, William Lambarde, and William Dugdale (Mendyk, Speculum Britanniae, 45 46). 69. Plot to Fell, c.1673, ESIO, 12:337. 70. In his letter to Fell, Plot described Lelands efforts as the Foundation, upon which chorographer William Camden built the superstructure of his Britannia (rst published in Latin in 1586). His own projected efforts Plot described as a fair new Building erected (altogether as much to the Honour of the Nation) out of Materials they [Leland and Camden] made little or no use of (Plot to Fell, c. 1673, ESIO, 12:33536). 71. Lhwyd to Lloyd, 23 November 1707, ESIO, 14: 536. See also Lhwyd to Thomas Tanner, {spring 1698}, ESIO, 14: 370 and Lhwyd to Thomas Tonkin, 16 March 1702/3, ESIO, 14: 485. In the rst letter, Lhwyd complained that a gentleman who had promised him access to his study in order to view and transcribe ancient Welsh manuscripts, was pleasd neverthelesse afterwards to refuse when I sent a purpose messenger twice to him. In the second, Lhwyd described how he was refused access to the two studies where a number of manuscript British Elegies were preserved. 72. See Ju rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). On historians use of the public sphere as an analytical category, see Harold Mah, Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of the Historians, Journal of Modern History 72 (2000):153 82; Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stu-
33
art Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 48 53; Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 256. 73. See Hartlib and Gabriel Plattes, A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (London: Francis Constable, 1641); Hartlib, Considerations Tending to the Happy Accomplishment of Englands Reformation in Church and State (London: n.p., 1647); Hartlib, A Further Discovery of the Ofce of Publick Address for Accomodations (London: n.p., 1648). 74. Such rhetoric was, for example, common in subscription proposals for scientic books. See Yale, Manuscript Technologies, 196 235. 75. See Charles Webster, The Great Instauration (London: Duckworth, 1975); and James R. Jacob and Margaret C. Jacob, The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution, Isis 71 (1980): 251 67. 76. See Ian Philip, The Bodleian Library in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 20 21, 34 37. The statutes governing access to the Bodleian admitted Oxford bachelors of arts and all other persons being undergraduates, senior scholars (including fellows and professors), and students from abroad. Special sanctions, however, limited the privileges of undergraduates and foreign scholars. When in the library, undergraduates were enjoined not to stray from the area where faculty of arts books were located (Arts End in the Duke Humfreys Library). They were to show due observance and deference to the seniors by giving place to them the moment they see them approaching the bench or bookcase where they are, or else by passing to them, if the case require it, the book which they were previously using (this and previous quotation from Oxford University Statutes, trans. G. R. M. Ward [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1845], 264; quoted in Philip, The Bodleian Library, 34). Foreign students were not bound by these rules. However, if theyor others who were not members of the universitywished to consult manuscripts, they were required to bring a Master of Arts or Bachelor of Laws to watch them while they read (Philip, The Bodleian Library, 34 37). 77. For a brief account, see Philip, The Bodleian Library, 5 6. 78. Ashmoles library, donated to the museum after his death, numbered 1,758 volumes, 620 of which were manuscripts (Josten, Biographical Introduction, in Autobiographical and Historical Notes, 1:301). 79. See Martin Welch, The Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, in Tradescants Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum in 1683, with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections, ed. Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 40 58. See also Elias Ashmole, Statutes, Orders, & Rules for the Ashmolean Museum in the University of Oxon, Bod MS Ashmole 1820, 296r297v. These are dated 24 June 1686 and signed by Ashmole. 80. Ashmole willed that his manuscript books and papers not yet sorted nor bound up . . . bee preserved in the Musaeum Ashmoleanum in Presses with locks and keys to bee provided for them (Ashmole, Copy of Elias Ashmoles Will, 62rv). 81. Ashmole, Statutes, Orders, & Rules, 296r. 82. Even with the building and keeper, this has happened over time. As the Ashmolean has expanded its collections and rened its priorities over the years, items from its collections have been transferred to Oxfords Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the Bodleian (Ashmolean Museum of Art and Architecture, The Historical Development of the Ashmolean Museum, http://www.ashmolean.org/about/historyandfuture/ [accessed 8 September 2008]). Still, at the very least, a building and a keeper forestalled such losses to points in time at which they did not threaten the survival of the museum. 83. Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), especially 16 54; Ashmolean Museum of Art and Architecture, The Historical Development.
34
Book History
84. Edward Bernard, Catalogi manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae, 2 vols. (Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1697). 85. Bernard announced his plans for a catalog in 1694 in an advertisement that appeared in John Houghtons Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade. He requested all lovers of Learning and Antiquity . . . to communicate a List of such Manuscripts as they are possessed of, in order to be inserted in the said general Catalogue (Houghton, Collection, 5.105, 3 August 1694). 86. Bernard, De ratione & utilitate hujus catalogi epistola, in Catalogi manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae, vol. 1. 87. Edward Bernard, Librorum manuscriptorum academiarum Oxoniensis & Cantabrigiensis & celebrium per Angliam Hiberniamque Bibliothecarum Catalogus cum Indice Alphabetico (Oxford: n.p., 1694). 88. The importance of the assistance of the learned to the completion of the catalog was emphasized again in the preface (Bernard, Catalogi manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae, 1:3). 89. Aubreys Miscellanies was published only in 1696, at the very end of his life. When he began transferring papers to the Ashmolean in the late 1680s, he did so with none of his books in print. 90. Kate Bennett, Materials Towards a Critical Edition of John Aubreys Brief Lives (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1993), 23, 25. 91. To Aubreys way of thinking, the fragmentary nature of these materials was not a deciency. Following Bacons famous denition of antiquities in The Advancement of Learning, he regarded the knowledge collected in his papers as spars from a shipwreck: Antiquities, or remnants of histories, are (as was said) like the spars of a shipwreck; when, though the memory of things be decayed and almost lost, yet acute and industrious persons, by a certain persevering and scrupulous diligence, contrive out of genealogies, annals, titles, monuments, coins, proper names and styles, etymologies of words, proverbs, traditions, archives and instruments as well public as private, fragments of histories scattered about in books not historical, contrive, I say, from all these things or some of them, to recover somewhat from the deluge of time: a work laborious indeed, but agreeable to men, and joined with a kind of reverence. . . . In these kinds of Imperfect History I think no deciency is to be assigned; for they are things, as it were, imperfectly compounded, and therefore any deciency in them is but their nature (Bacon, Works, ed. James Spedding [Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1864], 8:42324). See also Bennett, Materials Towards a Critical Edition of John Aubreys Brief Lives, 10, 25. 92. On the yleaf of this volume, Aubrey wrote, This Collection of Grammaticall learning, and another in 8o. is in relation to my Idea of the Education of the Noblesse (Bod MS Aubrey 22, 1). 93. Fully conceived, the Idea was not simply a one-volume treatise, but a collection of printed books, pamphlets, and manuscript texts supporting Aubreys case for educational reform. It included a small library of books in addition to the Collection of Grammatical Learning. The Idea served as an emissary to readers and a prospectus of the plan, inviting them to read further orAubreys great hopeoffer material support to help him establish his reformed school (Aubrey, Idea of Education, 2r). When John Evelyn borrowed the manuscript, Aubrey instructed him that In case I should happen to die before I call for this Idea; I desire you, then, to leave it with Dr Hooke at Gresham college, to be putt into my chest marked Idea: which is full of Books for this Designe (Aubrey to Evelyn, 10 May 1692, Idea of Education, 1ar). 94. See Kate Bennett, John Aubreys Collections and the Early Modern Museum, Bodleian Library Record, 17 (2001): 213 45. Bennett writes that Aubrey has traditionally been treated dismissively for failing to print his writings. Yet we may see the choice to place his manuscripts in a public repository as a publication of them in terms of the ideals to which the Ashmolean was a monument. The Ashmolean was a container of raw materials for experi-
35
mentation, a starting-point for scientic discovery (218). Aubrey thought of his papers as the raw materials out of which natural histories and other works could be constructed. Bennetts thesis is supported by the fact that Aubrey chose different repositories for different kinds of materials. He donated, for instance, twenty-nine printed books to the Royal Society. See John Buchanan-Brown, The Books Presented to the Royal Society by John Aubrey, FRS, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 28 (1974):167 93, especially 173 83. 95. Aubrey feared that this was the case after his manuscript Naturall Historie of Wiltshire, mailed to botanist John Ray for comments, did not return on schedule (Ray to Aubrey, 18 November 1691, Bod MS Aubrey 13, 175r). 96. See Lhwyd to Aubrey, 12 February {1690/91}, ESIO, 14:133, for an example. Lhwyd thanked Aubrey for writing to him to let him know about a package: for the generality of the people at Oxford doe not yet know, what the Musaeum is; for they call the whole Buylding the Labradary or Knackatory & distinguish no farther. That nothing miscarried soe directed to Dr Plot was because the person was known better than the place, but things directed to me or Mr Higgins commonly stayd at the carriers till we fetchd them. Gunthers reading of this letter is slightly amended based on my own partial transcription of the manuscript source. 97. Writing to Wood in 1689, Aubrey conded that he feared he would die before he saw his papers preserved. He determined to send them to you: for fear of Deaths preventing me. For Life is uncertain: and this morning I was anguishi{d} and if I die, before I send them to you all will be lost: there is no trust (hardly) to anybody. He concluded, And I know you are so much a Gentleman, that you will not doe me wrong by putting out anothers Labours under your own name. A thing too common in this world (Aubrey to Wood, 3 August 1689, MS Wood F. 40, 372). 98. Wood was friends with Hugh Cressey and Francis Davenport (the latter was secretly a Catholic priest). Ralph Sheldon, a Catholic gentlemen with whom he shared antiquarian interests, was a patron and friend (Graham Parry, Wood, Anthony a ` (16321695), ODNB). Friendly relations with known Catholics easily aroused the suspicions of ones neighbors. Since the Reformation, Protestant and Catholic antiquaries had gone their separate ways, as their families were increasingly less likely to intermarry and move in the same social circles (see Broadway, No Historie so Meete, 95100). Hence, the ties of friendship with which men voluntarily bound themselves looked all the more suspicious. Aubrey once thought himself at risk of censure or injury for having expressed friendship with the Church of Rome in at letter to Wood in the mid-1670s. He soon repented of his kind words: in 1676 he wrote to his friend, If you die; or, one knows not some time or other as the World runs madding, your papers may be sifted & examined. Therefore ex abundanti consela, I would entreat you to burne (or blott out) a passage in a letter of mine, about 1674, or 5, wherein I expressed my friendship to the Ch: of R. God blesse us, from another Rebellion (Aubrey to Wood, 11 September 1676, Bod MS Woof F.39, 302r). Aubrey wrote this note on a separate piece of paper, and sent it enclosed in another lettereven this slip was intended to be burnt. 99. Aubrey to Wood, 23 October 1688, Bod MS Tanner 456a, 34r. Some time after receiving the letter, Wood lled out the blank P as Papist. The second blank, in the phrase changes of may likely be lled by religion. 100. Aubrey to Wood, 22 December 1688, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 2r. As in the previous letter, P is short for Papist. 101. Later in the same letter, Aubrey wrote, I doe desire and appoint you to send my Box forthwith (you may keep the Key) for feare that all my MSS etc: should be ried by the Mobile (which God forbid but Mr E. Ashm{ole} doe much feare) . . . I am mighty troubled and concerned for you, for feare of your writings being confounded by the Mobile (Aubrey to Wood, 22 December 1688, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 2rv). On mobs and crowds in early modern Britain, see Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
36
Book History
102. Lhwyd rst mentions having Monumenta Britannica in his custody in a letter of 14 October 1693 (Bod MS Aubrey 12, 248r). 103. Lhwyd to Aubrey, 4 March 1693/4, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 252v253r. 104. Lhwyd to Aubrey, 29 May 1694, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 257r. 105. Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 91. 106. Lhwyd to Aubrey, 13 October 1693, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 248r. 107. Lhwyd to Aubrey, 16 November 1693, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 250r. See also Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 84 85. 108. Mark Greengrass, Archive Refractions: Hartlibs Papers and the Workings of an Intelligencer, in Archives of the Scientic Revolution, 35 47 (quote on 42). 109. Greengrass, Archive Refractions, 42. Somewhat similarly, John Evelyns papers were preserved only by the accidents of history, one of which was his heirs inattention to his wish that they be destroyed. John Evelyns famous Kalendarium (his diary) lay dormant in a cabinet at the Evelyn home in Surrey until William Bray, lawyer and antiquary, along with the autograph collector and antiquary William Upcott, rediscovered it in the 1810s while cataloging the Evelyn family library. See Theodore Hofmann, Joan Winterkorn, Frances Harris, and Hilton Kelliher, John Evelyns Archive at the British Library, Book Collector 44 (1995):148; Michael Hunter and Frances Harris, introduction to John Evelyn and His Milieu: Essays, ed. Harris and Hunter (London: British Library, 2003), 2; Janet Ing Freeman, Upcott, William (1779 1845), ODNB; Julian Pooley, William Bray, 1735/6 1832, ODNB. 110. Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 241 42. 111. In the broadest sense, the emergence of scholarly interest in the metaquestion of a cultures historical consciousness, rather than the political, religious, or natural history of a group of people or a geographical area, may be a consequence of the development of history as a selfreective profession. Attempts to understand the early modern British historical sensibility include Fred Jacob Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967); Daniel Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and The Light of Truth from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Mendyk, Speculum Britanniae; Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500 1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Broadway, No historie so Meete. None of these studies reconstruct history as a series of political, religious, or economic events or as accounts of exemplary lives and deeds (categories early modern naturalists might have recognized). Rather, they make use of records compiled by antiquaries and naturalists to understand the ways in which they thought about history. 112. Gillespie, Stows Owlde Manuscripts of London Chronicles, 58 64; Broadway, No Historie so meete, 102; and David J. Crankshaw and Alexandra Gillespie, Parker, Matthew (1504 1575), ODNB. 113. Perhaps a harbinger of this is the use of historical weather recordssome dating back to the seventeenth centuryto inform long-term climate models. See, for example, Jonathan Leake, Captains Logs Yield Climate Cues: Records Kept by Cook and Nelson Are Shedding Light on Climate Change, Sunday Times, 3 August 2008, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ news/environment/article4449527. ece (accessed 11 August 2008). I am indebted to Jan Golinski for telling me about the use of early modern weather diaries by modern climate scientists. 114. Indeed, perhaps Aubreys worst fears are realized in the common image of him as a gullible gossip, promoted by unsympathetic readings of The Miscellanies, his one printed work, and editor Andrew Clarks sour presentation of Aubrey in his 1898 edition of Brief Lives. 115. Aubreys efforts were not in vain. His papers were consulted in the archive, and some were even printed by later naturalists and antiquarians, including The Natural History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey (London: W. Mears and J. Hooke, 1723). I plan to address the ways in which eighteenth-century naturalists and antiquaries used his and others papers, and what this says about the evolution of both a historical consciousness and the role of manuscripts in the construction of natural knowledge in a subsequent essay, the sequel to this one.

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