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 aworld that did not much care for manuscripts. Writing a thought down andexpecting it to be preserved was something of a desperate act: the possibilityof loss or destruction was always present, and anything other than acciden-tal preservation (the child of neglect) required vast resources of social, fi-nancial, and institutional capital. Sometimes the destruction of a manuscriptwas a deliberate response to its content, as was the case with religiouslymotivated book-burning. More commonly, however, manuscripts were de-stroyed through reuse or recycling, as naturalist and antiquary John Aubreyrecalled in some detail:

Anno 1633. I entred into my Grammar at the Latin-Schoole at Yat-ton-Keynel, in the Church: where the Curate Mr Hart taught theeldest Boyes, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero &c. The fashion then was to savethe Forules of their Bookes with a false cover of Parchment sc{ilicet}old Manuscript. Which I was too young to understand; But I waspleased with the Elegancy of the Writing, and the coloured initiallLetters. I remember the Rector here [Mr: Wm. Stump], great gr{and}Son of St{ump} the Cloathier of Malmesbury had severall Manu-scripts of the Abbey: He was a proper Man, and a good Fellow, andwhen He brewed a barrel of speciall Ale, his use was to stop thebung-hole (under the Clay) with a sheet of Manuscript: He saydnothing 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 Margocsyfor their perceptive readings of earlier drafts of this essay. I am grateful to Roxana Popescu forassistance with editing and proofreading. Special thanks to Book History editor Jonathan Roseand the anonymous Book History reviewers for their astute critical readings, which providedwelcome guidance for revising and improving this essay. This essay was researched and writtenwith the support of a Richard Maass Memorial Research Grant from the Manuscript Society.

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my grandfathers dayes, the Manuscripts flew about like Butterflies:All Musick bookes, Account bookes, Copie bookes &c. were cov-ered with old Manuscripts, as wee cover them now with blew Paper,or Marbled Paper. And the Glovers at Malmesbury made great Hav-ock of them, and Gloves were wrapt up no doubt in many goodpieces of Antiquity. Before the late warres a World of rare Manu-scripts perished here about: for within half a dozen Miles of thisplace, were the Abbey of Malmesbury, where it may be presumedthe Library was as well furnished with choice Copies, as most Li-braries of England: and perhaps in this Library we might have founda correct Plinys Naturall History, which Canutus a Monk here didabridge for King Henry the second . . . Anno 1638. I was trans-planted to Blandford-Schoole in Dorset to Mr William Sutton. Herealso was the use of covering of Bookes with old Parchments, sc{ilicet}Leases &c. but I never saw any thing of a Manuscript there. Hereabout were no Abbeys or Convents for Men. One may also perceiveby the binding of old Bookes, how the old Manuscripts went towrack in those dayes. About 1647. I went to Parson Stump out ofcuriosity to see his Manuscripts, whereof I had seen some in myChildhood, but by that time they were lost, and disperst: His sonnswere Gunners, & Soldiers, and scoured their Gunnes with them.1

Aubrey mentioned four of the many uses of old manuscript, none of whichinvolved reading: covering books, wrapping gloves, cleaning guns, and stop-ping up the bungholes of kegs of beer. Aubrey linked this destruction to thedissolution of the monasteries and the consequent emptying of their librar-ies under Henry VIII. Manuscripts were everywhere, yet they were being cutup, torn to pieces, and worn out by use until soon they could be foundnowhere. The matter of manuscript—parchment and paper—was muchmore useful to most people than any text that might be written on it.2 Andwho could tell what had been lost in the process? Aubrey mourned the lossof a correct copy of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, but one of the untoldthousands of texts dispersed and destroyed in the dissolution of the monas-teries.

In this essay I argue that early modern English naturalists and antiquariessearched out and attempted to preserve not only manuscripts, but also theincreasingly large volume of handwritten papers they produced in the courseof their work. They established archives as institutions where papers couldbe deposited and made publicly accessible down through history. Antiquar-ies concerned themselves with the survival of manuscripts because their re-search depended on these materials, many of which dated back centuries,

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How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive 3

deep into the ‘‘middle age,’’ as early moderns had begun to refer to thetime between the Fall of Rome and the Reformation.3 Their preservationistinstincts were sharpened by the historical memory of the dissolution of themonasteries, and the dispersal of their libraries, under Henry VIII.4 As Au-brey’s ‘‘Digression’’ shows, the dispersal of the monastic libraries hauntedantiquaries well into the seventeenth century, encouraging them to redoubletheir efforts to save what time and chance had left them. Because naturalistswere also often antiquaries, and followed similar methods, they shared theirinterest in preserving manuscripts.5

But the concern with papers and manuscripts came not only from theantiquarian branch of the family. Naturalists were concerned with preserv-ing papers because they generated a wealth of them in the course of theirwork. Inspired by the philosopher Francis Bacon, naturalists viewed theirpapers not as the byproduct of producing printed knowledge, but as thefundamental stuff of knowledge, repositories of facts and observations forfuture generations of naturalists.6 The Baconian sensibility shared by thesenaturalists foregrounded ‘‘incremental fact gathering,’’ generally by groupsof interested people, as a method of constructing accounts of nature andantiquities.7 A special affinity grew up between Baconian ‘‘facts’’ and manu-script as the material means of collecting, recording, organizing, and sharingthem within these fields.8

For a growing number of naturalists, preserving papers was thus an im-perative. One way to do this was to transfer the papers to print—witnessseventeenth- and eighteenth-century projects to print the correspondenceand unprinted works of such luminaries as Galileo, Robert Boyle, IsaacNewton, Jeremiah Horrocks, Rene Descartes, and Robert Hooke.9 Theother way was to get the papers into a ‘‘public repository.’’ Seventeenth-century naturalists and antiquaries created new institutions—most promi-nently, the libraries of the Ashmolean Museum and the Royal Society—toprotect and preserve their books and papers. In inspecting their efforts toinvent the archive, this essay reveals not only the connection between thedevelopment of a historical consciousness in Stuart England and the mate-rial culture of scientific communication. It also suggests ways in which mod-ern archives might be transformed by the massive, ongoing shift of paperrecords to digital and online media.

What Is a Manuscript?

Most historians assume they know the answer to this question: a handwrit-ten 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 compassof our understanding of ‘‘manuscript.’’ But what would seventeenth-centurynaturalists and antiquaries have made of our definition? Their answer isrevealing of both the place of manuscripts within their own lives and workand the shifting relationship between science and history over the course ofthe century.

Handwritten texts only became manuscripts in contrast to printed booksand 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 OxfordEnglish Dictionary, although any handwritten text could be a manuscript,many of the early uses of the word suggest that it frequently (though notexclusively) referred to a subset of handwritten texts: those written onparchment or vellum before the advent of printing. Seventeenth-century nat-uralists and antiquaries concurred: they usually referred to the products oftheir own pens as ‘‘papers’’ rather than ‘‘manuscripts.’’ Papers typically in-cluded loose sheets, notes from experiments and observations, common-place books, correspondence, and drafts of treatises.10 Papers belonged inthe gentlemanly or scholarly library, but were housed separately frombound printed books. They could be classed or stored with pamphlets, un-bound books, and other loose printed material. ‘‘Papers’’ could also refer tobound (though not printed) books. In his instructions to his grandson andheir concerning the disposition of his library, diarist John Evelyn listed to-gether his ‘‘Writings & papers, as Copys of Letters Common-place-Books,and several unpolished draughts, collected at severall times, & confusdlypackd up or bound without any order, altogether Imperfect & most of themImpertinent.’’11 These various kinds of handwritten material were unitedprimarily 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. Simi-larly, in his diary, Robert Hooke often used ‘‘books’’ and ‘‘papers’’ to referto 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 boundhandwritten books. For example, naturalist Edward Lhwyd’s ‘‘ParochialQueries in Order to a Geographical Dictionary, A Natural History, &c. ofWales’’ included the question ‘‘Manuscripts: Of what Subject and Lan-guage; In whose Hands; Whether Ancient or Late Copies?’’13 In the courseof his research into Celtic natural history, antiquities, and languages, Lhwydconsulted, transcribed, and (whenever possible) obtained the originals ofWelsh, Cornish, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and Breton manuscripts in privateand public libraries scattered across Britain and France. Evelyn wrote an

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entire treatise on the history of manuscripts, largely for the education ofthose interested in collecting them. In this work, he used ‘‘manuscript’’ ex-clusively to refer to ancient and medieval texts, whether of papyrus, parch-ment, or paper.14 Evelyn instructed his readers not only in the materialhistory of the manufacture, ornamentation, and storage of manuscripts, butalso where to search for them and how to read the unfamiliar scripts andlanguages in which they were written.15 Throughout, Evelyn abbreviatedmanuscripts ‘‘MSS.’’ The very ubiquity of this abbreviation among natural-ists and antiquaries is a mark of the frequency with which they dealt in anddiscussed manuscripts.

In his evocative description of the various ways of recycling parchment,quoted above, John Aubrey clearly marked the differences between ‘‘pa-pers’’ and ‘‘paper books’’ and the manuscripts of the middle age. ‘‘Musickbookes, Account bookes, Copie bookes,’’ all seventeenth-century scribalbooks, were not manuscripts. First and foremost, then, manuscripts wereold. But not just old: in this passage, ‘‘manuscript’’ refers specifically tosheets with elegant writing and ‘‘coloured initiall Letters,’’ those exquisiteproducts of an earlier monastic manuscript culture. Manuscripts were dif-ferent from ‘‘old parchments, sc{ilicet} Leases,’’ which were much plainerutilitarian legal and economic documents. In Dorset, lacking a richlystocked monastic library, schoolboys covered their books with drab uncol-ored parchment sheets. In Wiltshire, where the Abbey of Malmesbury wasbut one of many local sources of manuscript, they covered them in pagesbright with ‘‘coloured initiall Letters.’’16

Manuscripts were produced by monks before the English Reformationand were objects worthy of preservation and study. ‘‘Musick bookes, Ac-count bookes, Copie bookes,’’ though handwritten, were not manuscripts,but paper books. Their pages were filled with church music for singing thedaily services (church music was often copied by hand in Aubrey’s day),household and business accounts, and school children’s copy texts.17 Thesesorts of books were ordinary objects, tools for daily work and worship.Manuscripts, on the other hand, were products of the past, meant to beadmired, studied, and used in the construction of historical accounts. Onlyby 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 heldthrough much of the seventeenth century, in the end ‘‘manuscript’’ was toouseful a term to reserve for medieval writings. Aubrey began calling hispapers 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 donatingthem to the Ashmolean Museum.18 As part of this process, he cleaned upand reordered his papers, retranscribed sections that were difficult to read,and bound into books loose papers that related to one another, such as hiscorrespondence.19 Edward Lhwyd, who as Keeper of the Ashmolean re-ceived Aubrey’s donation, asked him for a list of ‘‘Tracts . . . as well theprinted as M.SS.’’ to assist him in cataloging the collection.20 The two natu-ralists agreed: copied, bound, and transferred to the archive, Aubrey’s pa-pers were no longer the loosely filed, disorganized products of daily work,but useful collections out of which future generations of naturalists mightdraw new knowledge.21 Conscious of their historical status as a body ofdocuments in an archive, Aubrey called his papers ‘‘manuscripts’’ in some-what the same way that a modern historian might.22

Astrologer, antiquary, and museum-founder Elias Ashmole blurred thedistinctions between books, papers, and manuscripts in other ways. In thecourse of collecting and transcribing the writings of the Elizabethan mathe-matician and natural philosopher John Dee, Ashmole used a variety ofterms to refer to the materials he handled. In August 1672 he received ‘‘aparcell of Doctor Dee’s Manuscripts, all written with his owne hand.’’ Thisparcel, discovered in the secret compartment of a secondhand chest pur-chased from a London furniture maker, consisted of two bound volumes ofmixed handwritten and printed material.23 Elsewhere, Ashmole referred tothis same collection as ‘‘Doctor Dees originall Bookes & Papers,’’ ‘‘diversBookes in Manuscript, & Papers,’’ and ‘‘severall things in MS.’’24 Othercollections of Dee’s writings were labeled simply ‘‘Manuscripts’’ and ‘‘pa-pers.’’25

It may be that Ashmole’s separation of this trove of Dee’s writings into‘‘Manuscripts’’ or ‘‘Bookes in Manuscript’’ and loose ‘‘Papers’’ developedout of the ways in which they were physically separated in his library. Inthe well-ordered gentleman’s library, the rough working division betweenmanuscripts (medieval, monkish, illuminated) and papers (contemporaryhandwritten materials, bound or loose) did not quite hold. The divisioninstead fell between bound books and loose sheets, as these required differ-ent kinds of storage. In his Instructions Concerning Erecting a Library, Ga-briel Naude advised shelving bound manuscript books as one would printedbooks and gathering loose papers up into ‘‘bundles and parcels accordingto their subjects.’’26 Some manuscripts required special treatment, but onlybecause of their financial value: manuscripts ‘‘of great consequence’’ wereto be placed away from prying eyes, on the highest shelves and ‘‘withoutany exteriour Title.’’27 Similarly, in his will, Ashmole divided the written

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material that he wished to bequeath to his museum—which included medie-val records as well as the more recent papers of John Dee and Ashmole’sfriend and contemporary, the astrologer William Lilly—into ‘‘Manuscriptbookes’’ and ‘‘other Manuscript papers not yet sorted nor bound up.’’28 InAshmole’s library, books and papers were organized by format rather thantime period.

In his extensive correspondence with both naturalists and religious re-formers, ‘‘intelligencer’’ Samuel Hartlib referred to the papers of both theliving and the dead as ‘‘manuscripts.’’29 Hartlib’s more general use of theword might be explained by the fact that, as a Prussian immigrant with littleinterest in antiquarian studies, he was not immersed in the cultural memoryof the Dissolution, nor involved in the latter-day search for monastic manu-scripts.30 Compared to Aubrey, he had much less reason to distinguish be-tween illuminated parchments and inky papers. Yet Hartlib’s usage, likeAubrey’s, indicated a connection between the end of a naturalist’s life andthe understanding of his papers as a finished (though not complete) body ofwork. Only after a naturalist’s death did Hartlib become interested in locat-ing and collecting the entire corpus of his unprinted work, including notestoward future treatises, commonplace books, letters, and other fragments.31

While a naturalist was alive, his papers were his working materials, his toshare as he wished—though Hartlib, always a persistent correspondent,would pressure him to share as much as possible. After a naturalist passedaway, his papers were a finished (by the fiat of death, if nothing else) bodyof manuscripts from which other, living naturalists might glean insights thatthey could develop in their own work. The naturalist’s death transformedscattered papers into a manuscript collection, the pieces of which had to beidentified, tracked down, and gathered into one place.32 Hartlib and hissuccessors did not approach the papers with the sensibility of a professionaltwenty-first-century historian (a point to which I will return below). None-theless, the death of the author did, as it does now, constitute the manu-script collection as a historical object.

Lost History:The Dispersal of the Monastic Libraries

Naturalists’ and antiquaries’ interest in manuscripts, as well as the distinc-tions they drew between papers and manuscripts, grew out of their ex-perience with the dispersal of medieval libraries that accompanied the

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dissolution of the English monasteries. The greatest damage was done be-tween 1536, when Parliament passed the first act for the suppression of themonasteries, and 1558, when Elizabeth I came to the throne. The monasticlibraries were emptied. The destruction visited the college and universitylibraries of Cambridge and Oxford as well, though not as consistently. Thebooks were destroyed, recycled, sent abroad, and taken into private librar-ies.33 Meanwhile a few antiquaries, like John Leland and John Bale, at-tempted to salvage monastic manuscripts as they traveled around thecountry. However, their efforts met with limited success, in part because thecountry now lacked secure long-term repositories for books. By the begin-ning of Elizabeth’s reign, churchmen, scholars, and the queen’s leading min-isters began to realize the value of what had been lost. In response, theywent on collecting sprees. Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker builta library that included more than five hundred manuscripts, collected inpart because they could be mined for evidence that established the historicalfoundation of the Anglican Church’s independence from Rome. Elizabeth’sminister William Cecil, Baron Burghley, sought manuscript records to pro-vide historical evidence to support English nationalism and bolster Eliza-beth’s claims to the throne.34 John Dee proposed during the reign of QueenMary that dispersed manuscripts be sought out and collected for the RoyalLibrary, evidence that Tudor naturalists were as interested in medievalmanuscripts as their seventeenth-century counterparts.35

Despite these efforts at preservation, much had already been lost in the1530s and 1540s. Writing to Matthew Parker in 1560, Bale vividly de-scribed the places to which manuscripts had been dispersed. While travelingin Ireland, he found manuscript books in places where one might expect tofind them, such as ‘‘stacyoners and bokebyndeers store howses.’’ But theyalso lay hidden in ‘‘grosers, sope sellers, taylers, and other occupiersshoppes, some in shyppes ready to be carried over the sea into Flaunders tobe solde—for in those uncircumspecte and carelesse dayes, there was noquiyckar merchaundyce than library bookes.’’36 Tradesmen hoarded andsold vellum and parchment because it could be put to many uses: not onlyplugging up the bung holes in barrels of beer (as we have seen) but alsostopping 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 Flushedout of the monastic libraries, manuscript books were ubiquitous. Available

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everywhere in seemingly endless supply, their very ubiquity doomed themto destruction through casual use.

Over the next hundred years, through the English Civil War, the rubbish-ing of manuscripts continued, and the dispersal of the monastic librariesstill haunted antiquaries and naturalists.39 In the ‘‘Digression’’ quotedabove, Aubrey mixed his centuries, referring in one breath to the destructionwrought by the violence of both the Civil War during the 1640s and theReformation of his grandfather’s day, when ‘‘the Manuscripts flew aboutlike Butterflies.’’ These were wars and tumults of religion, but because thedestruction was motivated by economic necessity and ignorance as well asideology, natural philosophical, mathematical, and natural historical manu-scripts were destroyed along with theological ones. Aubrey suspected that,at the very least, a more perfect copy of Pliny’s Natural History had beenlost in the destruction of Malmesbury Abbey.40 In this light, John Dee’s earlyinterest in collecting old manuscripts makes perfect sense.

Although most manuscripts were trashed through re-use as glove wrap-pers, bung-hole stoppers, and the like, the learned still blamed ignoranceand animosity rooted in confessional conflicts. One of the respondents toEdward Lhwyd’s ‘‘Parochial Queries’’ noted that during the Civil War,Cromwellian agitators destroyed ‘‘a large British Manuscript History’’ onceheld 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 bonfire.41 Although this story—repeated toLhwyd some fifty years after the fact—may have been more of a local legendthan an accurate historical account, its telling indicates a popular linkagebetween religious violence and the destruction of historical records.42 Cath-olics as well as Protestants were accused of destroying manuscripts. In theearly eighteenth century Lhwyd corresponded with William Baxter aboutthe ancient (possibly Celtic, or British, as Lhwyd called them) inhabitants ofSpain. Some manuscripts that might have provided useful evidence, Lhwydbelieved, had been destroyed by zealous religious reformers. He wrote toBaxter that ‘‘it is not to be questioned but several of the Primitive Christianshad mistaken zeal as well as our reformers; and twas but 50 years ago thatthe Jesuit, Julian Manoir, being a missionair in Basbretaign, obtained anorder from his superiors to burn what British manuscripts & other bookshe should meet with, excepting such as tended to devotion and were ap-prov’d of.’’43 Although Manoir’s book burning was inspired by theologicalzeal, it indiscriminately destroyed religious and secular books alike. Lhwydrealized that the fight against heresy was not solely to blame for the destruc-tion of manuscripts: often enough, he wrote to Baxter, the simple ‘‘misman-

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agement of posterity’’ did the trick, though rarely with Manoir’s fervor andthoroughness.44 But the result was the same: a world impoverished of itsown historical and scientific records.

What Did Naturalists Do with Papers?

Antiquaries were interested in manuscripts for an obvious reason: they wereused to construct histories. Some were more polemical (such as MatthewParker’s and William Cecil’s accounts of the English church and state) andsome less so, though in a country troubled by ongoing religious tensions,political and theological history always spoke in some way to present divi-sions.

Whence came, however, the naturalist qua naturalist’s interest in pa-pers? How was a concern with preserving records of the medieval pasttransferred to the reams of paper, copiously scribbled, crossed, and anno-tated, that naturalists produced in the seventeenth-century present? Natu-ralists and antiquaries wrote much more than they could ever hope toprint. The invention of print, as well as the development of a reliable postalsystem, may have spurred this explosion of manuscript.45 Yet these papers,often (though not always) the product of activity directed toward produc-ing print publications, were not necessarily wastepaper. Whether in theform of letters; fragmentary notes; drawings; diagrams; tables; common-place books noting observations taken from travel, conversation, reading,and experiment; or complete finished treatises, papers could be mined forinsights and observations that contributed to the advancement of naturaland technical knowledge. Because the Baconian sensibility encouraged thecollection and organization of myriad, often disparate, pieces of informa-tion into more or less coherent accounts of nature, a commonplace bookor an alchemical receipt book could provide a wealth of raw material forthe construction of natural knowledge. The connection between manu-scripts and papers was in the use value of the papers: it made them worthyof preservation, not as historical documents, but as storehouses of scientificand technical information.

In An Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen, John Aubrey illustratedthe different kinds of material found in naturalists’ papers.46 In this ‘‘privateessay’’ Aubrey put forth a plan for a reformed school for the sons of thenobility and gentry. The curriculum he designed emphasized mathematicsand other practical subjects, and was meant to prepare students for posi-tions 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 aswell as printed ones. The best mathematical textbook then in print would‘‘only do the business’’ if used in conjunction with John Collins’s manu-script ‘‘augmentation’’ of it.47 For the study of politics and economics, herecommended two treatises by William Petty, one in print and one thencirculating only in manuscript.48 In addition to suggesting handwritten textsas educational resources, Aubrey drew on them for evidence in support ofhis pedagogical innovations. In justifying his method for teaching law, hequoted a quarto manuscript written by the early seventeenth-century lawyerJohn Selden.49 He also assembled a small book of tracts on educationalreform and related subjects, a kind of supplement to the Idea itself. In thisbook, Aubrey bound together handwritten sheets, printed tables, and shortprinted pamphlets. Israel Tonge’s ‘‘Epitome of Grammar,’’ the first item inthe book, consists of a set of Latin grammar lists and tables, of which twoare hand-drawn and three printed. The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Hartlib forthe Advancement of Learning (1648), item eight, is a small printed pam-phlet that Aubrey annotated, identifying (for example) ‘‘W. P.’’ as WilliamPetty.50

Aubrey included samples of relevant handwritten texts within his Idea,interleaving them at appropriate pages. He tipped a table summarizing vari-ous aspects of the law into the section on legal education. As he recordedon the sheet itself, Aubrey had taken the table from Seth Ward’s study afterhe died: ‘‘Seth Ward the Bishop of Salisbury studied the Common-Lawe—and I found this paper [which is his owne hand-writing] amongst his scat-ter’d papers.’’51

Despite this emphasis on Ward’s ‘‘owne hand-writing,’’ Aubrey was notan early modern autograph hunter. His interest in preserving manuscripttexts, at least in the context of An Idea of Education, was entirely utilitar-ian. He did not save papers and manuscripts for the sake of an ‘‘aura’’ thatattached 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 ofthis attitude may be found in Aubrey’s discussion of John Collins’s ‘‘aug-mentation’’ of the recommended Latin mathematical text. Aubrey tracedthe history of the paper on which Collins’s notes were written. He fearedthat the ‘‘augmentation’’ had been lost: the mathematician told him that SirJonas Moore, mathematician and founder of the Greenwich Observatory,had borrowed it. Aubrey searched Moore’s papers shortly after his death,but did not find it among them. ‘‘It is thought Mr. Flamsteed has got it buthe denies it,’’ wrote Aubrey, continuing, ‘‘It is thought to be stifled and lost,

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which would be a great pity.’’ Still, no matter: ‘‘Mr. Paget of ChristchurchHospital or some other ingenious young mathematician may make suchanother.’’53 One almost sees the shrug of the shoulder when Aubrey settledit that Mr. Paget, an instructor at the Royal Mathematical School, couldproduce a text like enough to Collins’s to be sufficient to the purpose. Itwas not the particular piece of paper with John Collins’s handwriting on itthat 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 scientific papers (correspondence, for example) after anedition 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, evenseemingly inconsequential slips and scraps. Who knew what might contrib-ute to the study of nature and antiquities in coming centuries? In November1692 he wrote to Anthony a Wood, his friend and constant collaborator,asking him to find his ‘‘Verses of the Robin-red-breast to insert and pin itto my Villa. I should be very sorry to have it lost: and I see one is sure ofnothing that is not in one’s owne Custodie—and when one is dead, all islost 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 naturalphilosophy, natural history, mathematics, and husbandry. Yet they lay scat-tered across the country, squirreled away in private libraries and the studiesof the recently deceased. Thus naturalists searched for papers just as theyhunted 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 bothreligious and scientific manuscripts as a key part of his work as an in-telligencer.56 Working through his correspondence among the learned ofEngland and Europe, he hunted for manuscripts and papers.57 In his Ephe-merides, or diary, he recorded who had seen or heard of caches of letters,unprinted treatises, even notes and fragments. Although Hartlib collectedand disseminated treatises and letters written by living naturalists, he seemsto have turned to collecting entire manuscript corpuses only after their au-

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thors’ deaths. He sought the papers of recently deceased contemporariesas well as those of naturalists of previous generations, including GeorgeStarkey, Francis Bacon, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Joachim Jungius, themathematician 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 wouldbest use them to generate new knowledge for the public good. If he ob-tained, for example, the fragmentary remains of Francis Bacon’s papers, heplanned to disseminate them among his correspondence: ‘‘the only and bestuse of such fragments,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is to improve them by way of correspon-dency as a bate to obtain the like from others.’’59 As we shall see, this prac-tice stood in strong contrast to that of the next generation of Englishnaturalists, who tended to deposit papers in public repositories rather thandisseminate them.

The early fellows of the Royal Society, following on Hartlib’s work, en-thusiastically searched out manuscripts. They proposed to use their powersas licensers of the press to print treatises by Roger Bacon and the stellarcatalog of the fifteenth-century Persian astronomer Ulugh Beg (both frommanuscript material in the Bodleian).60 Soon after the society was founded,mathematician John Pell, who had worked with Hartlib to locate papersproduced by the Northumberland circle, led the effort to collect and printHarriot’s writings.61 The papers of astronomer Lawrence Rooke and physi-cian William Harvey were similarly sought after.62

For the most part, as Adrian Johns has observed, these plans failed oncefellows realized how expensive and onerous collecting and printing manu-scripts was.63 But their interest, and a sense of the usefulness of old manu-scripts to natural history and antiquarian projects, persisted. EdwardLhwyd’s 1696 ‘‘Parochial Queries’’ specifically asked respondents to iden-tify any manuscripts extant in their neighborhoods, including their authors,transcribers, subjects, languages, and dates.64 Lhwyd also invited respon-dents to send him originals or copies of ‘‘any Letters, Papers, or Manu-scripts’’ they thought might be relevant to his investigation.65 The RoyalSociety asked the Duke of Norfolk, Charles II’s ambassador to the Emperorof Morocco, to keep an eye out for ‘‘any Antient Manuscripts that maypossibly 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 be-came keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Robert Plot proposed travelingthrough 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 madegathering up dispersed pre-Dissolution manuscripts central to his plan. IfOxford University and the Crown would provide the funding, he proposedto purchase as many manuscripts as private owners would relinquish andcopy the rest. If owners proved immune to his money and his charms, hewould at the very least produce a thorough catalog of manuscripts in privatehands.68 Despite Leland’s successes in building the Royal Library from dis-persed manuscripts, Plot believed that many English manuscripts were still‘‘lost to the World, lying secretly in Corners and in private Hands, no Manknowing either what MSS. there be, or where to find them.’’69 A wealth ofsecret knowledge rested with private owners who often had no idea of thevalue of what they held. When rediscovered by the right researchers, thesemanuscripts could be used to build new natural histories of Britain (themetaphor of building is Plot’s).70

Naturalists and antiquaries increasingly sought to make manuscriptspublic and accessible to scholars like themselves. Plot desired a catalog inwhich the learned could easily locate copies of manuscript texts. Lhwydreserved dark words for private collectors who refused to share what theyowned or permit copying. Regarding some religious charters he wished toborrow, he complained to a Welsh correspondent, ‘‘I suppose no Gentlemanthat’s any thing a scholar would scruple to lend them; but for those thatare 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 willingto grant access to scholars, for the public good.

But in what did the ‘‘public good’’ consist? Naturalists did not seek tomake manuscripts and papers accessible to a ‘‘public’’ that included all En-glish subjects. Instead, their efforts signaled a growing faith in the powerof public institutions to preserve cultural patrimony and memory throughchanges of time, war, government, and religion. In modern-day usage, oneof the more common meanings of the word ‘‘public,’’ according to theOED, is that of a mass, loosely organized audience for cultural and politicalproductions—something like Jurgen Habermas’s ‘‘public sphere.’’72 In theseventeenth century, however, learned naturalists and antiquaries tended touse the word as an adjective: they saw their work as a ‘‘public service,’’something they did for the public benefit and the public good. This kind ofrhetoric was in many ways pioneered during the Interregnum by Hartlib,who employed it in pamphlets describing his Office of Address, a clearing-house for scientific, agricultural, and other technical information for whichhe sought parliamentary funding.73 Because Hartlib believed that scientificadvancement would necessarily stimulate economic and spiritual improve-

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ment, the public benefit would encompass all British subjects, from the low-liest field hand to Oliver Cromwell himself.

Naturalists continued to employ the rhetoric of public benefit and publicservice after the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. It was espe-cially prominent in their appeals to government and private individuals toprovide financial support for their work.74 Their sense of ‘‘public,’’ however,was considerably more restricted than Hartlib’s, and their rhetoric did notsignal that they intended their work, or the papers, manuscripts, and otherrelics upon which it was constructed, to be accessible or beneficial to abroad public composed of all His Majesty’s subjects.75 The ‘‘public’’ libraryin which Plot sought to collect British manuscripts, the Bodleian, was opento the university community and to scholars from foreign universities, butnot much beyond that.76 It was ‘‘public’’ in comparison to the ‘‘private’’libraries housed in the colleges, access to which was generally restricted tomembers of those colleges.

For naturalists, gathering papers and manuscripts into public handsmeant concentrating them in sites at which they would always be accessibleto themselves and other scholars. Their interest and efforts in this directionsignal a new and rising trust in public institutions like the Bodleian. Not thatlong ago (the mid-sixteenth century) Oxford’s public library was emptied ofits books, and even the bookcases were sold off.77 Yet by the end of theseventeenth century—as shown by Plot’s proposal to deposit in the Bodleianthe manuscripts found in his travels—naturalists looked on the library topreserve in perpetuity the manuscripts, papers, and books that were thefoundation of their work.

In founding the Ashmolean Museum to house his collection of books,papers, pamphlets, and natural and artificial curiosities, Elias Ashmoleemerged as a key representative of the nascent faith in public institutions.The Ashmolean was designed as much to house its benefactor’s collection ofpapers, manuscripts, pamphlets, and books as the more famous Tradescantrarities.78 If they had not been willed to the museum, such papers wouldlikely have been sold at auction, carried off piecemeal by former associatesand competitors, or otherwise trashed. Ashmole understood that an institu-tion offered some measure of protection, but he also recognized the limitsof institutional protection: unless the university’s commitment to preservethe material was reinforced by the terms of the gift, it was likely to weakenover time. Thus, he required as a condition of his bequest that the universitybuild a special museum to house the collections and hire a keeper to curatethem.79 He donated not only his books and papers, but also the lockedchests in which to store them.80 Ashmole further approved strict statutes, in

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16 Book History

place in 1688, requiring that manuscripts be kept in a separate closet withinthe library. Although anyone paying the admissions fee could enter the mu-seum, ‘‘the Curious, & such others as are desirous’’ were allowed to read ortranscribe the library’s manuscripts only with the approval of the Keeper.81

A building enacted a permanent commitment to preserve the material—and permanently celebrate Ashmole’s name. Without a building, the col-lections would most likely have been dispersed through the university,intermingling with other libraries and collections. Without a keeper tomaintain and catalog the material, it could also have disappeared into pri-vate hands (those of greedy fellows and grubby undergraduates alike) with-out anyone so much as noticing.82 Though now standard features ofmuseums, the permanent curator and single-purpose building—as opposedto rooms rearranged and curators hired and fired according to the whimsof a collection’s royal or noble owner—were relatively uncommon at thetime.83 Ashmole’s insistence on them thus implies not simply a growing faithin the ability of public institutions to secure the survival of books, papers,and natural curiosities, but also a commitment to forming public institu-tions as secure repositories. The cultural and physical form of the museumdid not drop ready-made from the sky: Ashmole purposefully fashioned hismuseum as a secure repository of cultural and scientific patrimony, in re-sponse to an era marked by the mass dispersal and destruction of valuablemanuscripts.

As for Plot and his proposed catalog, ultimately he did not undertake hisambitious plan. Instead he focused on more doable projects that he had ahope of finishing, such as his county histories. However, the scope of hisdesign indicates the importance that natural historians and antiquariesplaced on manuscripts. Everywhere they went, they sought them out: recov-ering them was felt to be the key to constructing regional histories of antiq-uities, nature, and human arts and inventions, as well as promoting learningand trade through the publication of such histories. And later in the century,a plan not unlike Plot’s did produce a catalog of English and Irish manu-scripts in public and private hands: Oxford scholar Edward Bernard pub-lished his Catalogi manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in 1697.84 Incontrast to Plot’s aborted catalog, which largely depended on the laboriousefforts of one man, Bernard instigated a large-scale collaboration by adver-tising his project, and inviting correspondents to assist him, in the Londonnewspapers.85 According to a note in the preface of the catalog, such adver-tisements in ‘‘London Mercuries’’ were part of a concerted strategy to pullin manuscripts outside the academic, collegiate, and clerical orbit.86 Theproject was also advertised independently via a Latin broadside, printed in

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Oxford—presumably in large enough numbers for distribution to booksell-ers in Oxford, Cambridge, and London. This advertisement listed the librar-ies to be surveyed for the catalog (including the university and collegelibraries of Oxford and Cambridge, cathedral libraries, and notable privatelibraries such as those of Plot and Samuel Pepys) and repeated the call forpatrons of literature to assist in the program.87 Bernard’s ability to engagecorrespondents as collaborators, and the success of his project, illustrate thevalue that the learned, including antiquaries and naturalists, placed on suchresources.88 Furthermore, his broad appeal for information and assistanceis a sign that, as in Bale’s day, naturalists and antiquaries thought thatmanuscripts were still almost as likely to be found on a grocer’s or soapsell-er’s 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 posthumoussurvival of their own. But what kind of effort was involved in securing one’spapers? What were the practical steps one could take? John Aubrey wasparticularly dogged in his pursuit of a public resting place for his archive.His story suggests that it was by no means easy to protect one’s papers, butthat with persistence and the right connections, it was possible. It also re-veals that civil and religious unrest continued to be felt as threats to thematerial continuity of history.

Aubrey’s strenuous efforts to secure the survival of his manuscriptsstemmed in part from his failure to print the books he had spent his lifewriting—these included An Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen andMonumenta Britannica, to name just two.89 As Kate Bennett has shown,however, Aubrey did not view print and archival preservation as inter-changeable.90 His papers were troves of facts and empirical observationsthat he hoped future scholars would mine for the raw materials of their ownaccounts of nature and history.91 Printed, they would no longer be able tofulfill this function. The biographical compendium Brief Lives, for example,included personal details that were not printable by polite standards. And itmight be difficult to print An Idea of Education with its supporting materi-als, the small volumes of mixed manuscript and printed material Aubreyhad pieced together from various books and authors.92 Yet the Idea couldonly be fully understood in the context of this assemblage of texts.93 Thebest way to preserve the full content of papers like these was not to print

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them, but to archive them. With this in mind, Aubrey deposited his papersin the library of the Ashmolean Museum rather than the Bodleian Library—then and now the more conventional repository for manuscripts—for tworeasons.94 The first was that he feared that John Wallis, the Savilian Profes-sor of Geometry and Keeper of the Archives, might selectively suppress ordestroy papers under his control in the Bodleian. Aubrey, having written inhis Brief Lives that the mathematician was a plagiarist, did not wish toentrust to his care either that manuscript or any other. Secondly, the Ashmo-lean had been founded as a collection of natural and artificial objects, manu-scripts, and experimental apparatus for the study of nature and antiquities,making it the perfect repository for a collection of papers that Aubreythought 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 inher-ently risky business. Once out of his direct control, his papers could easilyfall into unfriendly hands. Someone might attempt to print his work, de-stroy or deny the originals, and take credit for his labors. More prosaically,papers could be lost in transit. Poorly secured in the carrier’s cart, they couldeasily fall into the road.95 Or a carrier, not knowing the name of the recipi-ent, might hold onto the package. Unless the sender wrote a letter underseparate cover to the recipient, notifying him of the delivery, he would neverknow to claim it.96 But if Aubrey died without securing the survival of hispapers, he—and the work to which he had dedicated his life—were equallydamned to historical obscurity. In the end, he feared the loss of his legacyeven more than he feared the specters of plagiarism, theft, and loss. In thelate 1680s Aubrey started sending boxes of papers to his friend Anthony aWood—at the time, one of the few men he felt he could trust—for him toperuse and then deposit in the Ashmolean.97

But even if friends could be trusted, external events could still imperilpapers, much as in centuries past. Aubrey’s faith in Wood’s ability to pre-serve his papers fluctuated with the rise and fall of political and religiousunrest. In the fall of 1688, as the Roman Catholic James II struggled tomaintain his grip on the throne, only to cede it to the Dutch ProtestantWilliam of Orange in December, even suspicions of Catholic sympathieswere enough to draw the inquisitive eye of officials and the popular angerof the mob. Wood was a potential target of any anti-Catholic action.Though he always denied having converted, his friends and patrons in-cluded known Catholics. At the time of the Popish Plot in 1679, his roomsopposite Merton College were searched by the vice-chancellor of Oxford.98

Nine years later these suspicions were enough to fuel not only Aubrey’s

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fears for his papers’ safety, but also Ashmole’s. On 23 October 1688 Aubreywrote angrily to Wood, transmitting his patron’s message that certain sensi-tive papers should immediately be moved to the Museum for safekeeping:

Mr Ashmole is much vex’t at my managem{en}t of this business.. . . I told Mr Ashmole in May, before I came to Oxo{n}, that youshould have the perusal of all, in the first place: I expected (youknow) the receipt of the Things when I was there: and now he tellsme the reason: Sc{ilicet} because You are lookt upon as a P———and in these tumultuous Turns your papers will be searcht, whichis like enough, for people grow mad by changes of————and soof leaving of any thing in your hands, it would be a means to havethem lost; wherefore (in passion) he desires that those papers that Iconceive fitt to be kept secret, should be all sealed-up (after youhave donne with them) and putt in the Museum; not to be openedtill 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 Decem-ber 1688. By then Aubrey was furious (as was Ashmole) that Wood hadstill not transferred the boxes of papers to the Ashmolean. He described athrilling sickbed scene, witnessed by himself and an unnamed Oxfordscholar, a kinsman of Ashmole’s:

Mr Wood! Last Tuesday I went to see Mr Ashmole (whom I foundill) He lately received a letter from Dr Plott about the things that Isent to Oxford He desired you to send to the Musaeum, but youdenied it: and would not let him—See the Catalogue, that I sent.Mr Ashmole desired to speake with me about it: and is most out-rageously 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 uponyou as a P. and sayeth, so does the whole University, and there waspresent at this angry fitt of his, an Oxford scholar (I thinke hiskinsman) who owned what, Mr Ashmole sayd. Mr Ashmole saiesthat now there is such care and good method taken, that the Bookesin the Musaeum, are more safe, than those in the Libraries, or Ar-chives: 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 notleft in the world and he further bids me tell you, that if you shallrefuse to deliver the things sent downe by me, to Oxford, that hewill never looke on you as a Friend: and will never give a farthingmore to the University of Oxford.100

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Anti-Catholic tensions ran high, and Aubrey feared more than the ordinarysorts of loss and destruction—papers being cut up for pie-liners and glovewrappers. The anti-Papist ‘‘mobile,’’ or mob, was abroad.101 They had burntdown the Spanish ambassador’s house in London; might not similar mobscoalesce in Oxford around rumors of a scholar’s Catholic sympathies? Ithad happened before: there were stories of both Catholics and radical Prot-estants alike burning books and manuscripts thought to be heretical, and ofbooks getting caught up in general waves of destruction. In these troubledtimes, not just any institutional repository would do. As described above,Ashmole had made stringent efforts to establish his museum as a securepublic archive. ‘‘Such care and good method’’ guaranteed that Aubrey’s pa-pers were much safer in the museum than in the Bodleian or any of thecollege libraries, much less Wood’s attic rooms in Merton Street.

Aubrey’s letters to Wood reveal how he mobilized friends, patrons, andacquaintances to assist him in moving his books and papers into the mu-seum. In his second letter to Wood, Aubrey mentioned five persons: himself,Ashmole, Wood, Plot, and an anonymous Oxford scholar, Ashmole’s kins-man. Hiding in the background were the package and letter carriers andservants participating in the chain of transmission. A carrier transported thebox of papers from London to Oxford, either by wagon or riverboat, whilethe post took Plot, Aubrey, and Wood’s letters on horseback from Oxfordto London and back. Meanwhile, in London, a friend or servant of Ash-mole—possibly the kinsman and Oxford scholar—fetched Aubrey to thesick man’s bedside so that he could communicate his displeasure withWood. The disposal of Aubrey’s papers concerned not just Aubrey andWood, or Aubrey and the keeper of the Ashmolean, but a swathe of theircorrespondence.

The large number of people involved in this transaction, and the resultingconfusion 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 curi-ously eager to disperse them among his correspondents. Rather than trans-fer his papers directly to the museum, Aubrey involved many friends withsimilar interests in antiquities and natural history by sending them paperswith 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 Ash-molean as a centrally located pick-up and drop-off point for his Oxfordreaders. The peregrinations of Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica, his treatiseon British antiquities, are representative. In the fall of 1693 Aubrey sent theMonumenta 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 oronely deposit them for the present in my custody. Mr. Tanner brought methe key of your Box; and I have delivered him your Monumenta Brit{an-nica}. But no other papers for he desired no more.’’103 While in Lhwyd’skeeping, the manuscript circulated to other readers as well, most likely atAubrey’s request (given Lhwyd’s sensitivity to Aubrey’s wishes, it seemsunlikely he would share the manuscript without permission). In a letterdated 29 May 1694 Lhwyd wrote to Aubrey that ‘‘Dr. Edwards I know isvery sensible of the true worth of your labours, as he was pleased to declareupon perusal of your Monumenta Britannica.’’ Lhwyd had shared Monu-menta with Edwards before returning it to Tanner. When Lhwyd finally didreturn the manuscript to Tanner in March 1694, it was so that Tanner couldsend the manuscript back to Aubrey, probably because he hoped to have itprinted by subscription.104 At the time of Aubrey’s death, London book-seller Awnsham Churchill owned the copy, having purchased it from Aubreyin the (false) hope of turning a profit on its print publication. Finally, in1836, Churchill’s 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 finally, and posthumously, coming torest in a public repository.

Although Aubrey dispersed his papers widely, seemingly encouragingthese complicated exchanges, he did not always look favorably on requeststo use or peruse his papers. Lhwyd, at work on his contribution to the newOxford edition of Elizabethan antiquary William Camden’s Britannia, oncerequested to check Monumenta Britannica for information on Welsh antiq-uities, including Caerphilly castle near Cardiff. In October 1693 he wroteto Aubrey in polite terms, asking permission to study the relevant papers:‘‘Pray let me hear from you at your leisure; & let me know whether youpermit me to open your box for my own private use. What Mr. Gibson hasof your’s I would also beg the perusal of, when he has done.’’ AlthoughLhwyd promised Aubrey that he would ‘‘be carefull to doe you right, androb you of any part of that honour and thanks that is due to you fromthe curious and ingenious,’’ Aubrey responded rather touchily, denying himaccess.106 In November Lhwyd wrote apologetically to Aubrey that he couldnot ‘‘in the least blame your Caution in communicateing your MonumentaBritannica’’ 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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people using (and misusing) his work in print without crediting him. Al-though one of the earliest and most enthusiastic donors of material to theAshmolean, Aubrey struggled to believe that his papers would be safe there.The physical structure of the archive may have been in place, but the con-comitant mental and cultural structure, an understanding that an archivewas a secure location whose personnel could be trusted as custodians ofone’s papers, was not yet fully established.

Conclusion

In some ways, the situation facing seventeenth-century naturalists and anti-quaries 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 data-bases; online journals, magazines, and papers; Wikipedia and other commu-nally authored reference sources; blogs; email; and instant messaging tax thecapabilities of public archives designed for paper media. The preservation ofinformation communicated through these media—as well as the paper re-cords that they supersede—is in question. The historical interests guidingthe development of new media—and ultimately our decisions about howand what to preserve—may 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 andmanuscripts have been described in this essay. Samuel Hartlib collected themanuscripts of naturalists in order to prime further advancement and dis-covery by redistributing them among his correspondence. John Aubrey,Elias Ashmole, and Robert Plot, on the other hand, focused on collectingwritten 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. Ashe neared the end of his life, part of his archive was destroyed by a housefire. The remainder was further depleted by untrustworthy friends who tookwhat they would from the ill and aging Hartlib. After Hartlib’s death in1662, William Brereton, a friend and natural philosopher, purchased theremainder of the collection. At Brereton’s Cheshire country house, clericJohn Worthington cataloged and ordered the papers, all the while allowingothers, including mathematician John Ward and possibly John Milton, toremove or burn items in the collection that cast their ‘‘involvement in theaffairs of the Commonwealth and Protectorate in not quite the uncommit-

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ted light that they hoped to put abroad post facto,’’ as Mark Greengrass hasput it.108 The collection was broken up, and some of the papers emergedlater in the British Library and Yale University Library. In 1933 GeorgeOsborn, professor of education at Sheffield University, rediscovered and ob-tained for his university a large portion of the original archive: this materialhas since been made available electronically through the Hartlib Papers Proj-ect.109 Aubrey deposited his papers in the Ashmolean precisely in order toavoid the posthumous mutilation that Hartlib’s collection suffered. The pa-pers Aubrey and Ashmole gave to the museum have largely survived intactto the present day (with some exceptions—the second book of Aubrey’sWiltshire Antiquities was lost, for example, when his brother permanentlyborrowed it from the library in 1703).110

But although Aubrey, Plot, and Ashmole showed more of a concern withthe preservation of written records, they agreed with Hartlib as to whomwere the intended beneficiaries of their activities. Much as Hartlib soughtto further the progress of natural knowledge through the circulation of pa-pers and manuscripts, Aubrey, Plot, and Ashmole sought to further itthrough their preservation. Their targets were not historians, but future nat-uralists. Similarly, in their capacity as antiquaries, they preserved papers andmanuscripts in order to contribute to the construction of the history of theplaces in which they lived, not in order to answer the metaquestion atwenty-first-century historian might ask: what were the historical attitudesof seventeenth-century English men and women?111

Naturalists’ and antiquaries’ efforts to preserve their papers in public ar-chives marked a transitional moment in the evolution of a historical con-sciousness. They developed an interest in the preservation of their papersand manuscripts, and even begun acting on it, founding archives and librar-ies and contributing materials to them. Yet they did not view these papersas ‘‘historical’’ documents, that is, as ‘‘primary sources’’ that would be stud-ied and interpreted by historians whose aims and understanding were notfundamentally continuous with their own. The disjunction between pastand present approaches to history is perhaps best represented by the differ-ent ways seventeenth-century and twenty-first-century historians treat ar-chival documents. Early moderns did not regard the physical medium, thepaper itself, as having an intrinsic historical value—recall Aubrey’s indiffer-ence to whether mathematical demonstrations were written in the hand ofwell-known mathematician Seth Ward or that of a lowly mathematics in-structor at Christ Church Hospital. Value inhered in the information, not inthe paper or the handwriting in which it was stored. Likewise, seventeenth-century antiquaries happily annotated and otherwise added to, rebound,

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and mixed together manuscripts and papers of both recent and medievalvintage.112 No twenty-first-century historian would write her own thoughtsin the margin of a fifteenth-century historical chronicle.

How might the development of new technologies for storing, accessing,and processing historical information be shaking up our ideas about theproper use of archives? Although Aubrey and his colleagues saw their audi-ence as future naturalists, the paper-based archive has solidified in the cul-tural consciousness as a site where historians learn about and process thepast for the rest of the public, rather than as a site of active scientificresearch. Science, in turn, has become increasingly present-minded, as thescientific community has grown and the pace at which it creates new infor-mation accelerated. Science and history have largely parted ways. However,it seems possible that the explosion of digital and internet-based communi-cations media may change this. As current and historical scientific informa-tion goes online and increasingly powerful methods for searching andprocessing massive amounts of data are developed, it may be that scientistswill engage with it in new ways, no longer leaving it solely to the histori-ans.113 With the advent of technologies for communicating, storing, process-ing, and searching massive amounts of information, we may be entering anew ‘‘Baconian’’ age.

Returning to the seventeenth century’s transitional moment, if Aubrey’sstory displays a prophetic enthusiasm for the ‘‘public repository,’’ it revealsa certain ambivalence as well. Reluctant to exchange disseminating his workin the present for its secure preservation after his death, he sent material toLhwyd 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 hecould no longer control who read them and how they used them—recall hisperemptory requests that Lhwyd not consult Monumenta Britannica. Hecould not guarantee that future naturalists using his work would properlyattribute credit to him (a constant worry throughout his life) or that futuregenerations would remember him in a way he would recognize.114 Sealinghis remains in the archive thus entailed both a preservation of self and agiving up of that same self. And yet, placing his faith in the future, he depos-ited as full a record as possible, preserving every page, every scrap, everynote that he could.115

Notes

1. John Aubrey, Memoires of Naturall Remarques in the County of Wilts, Royal SocietyMS 92, 221 (hereafter RS MS 92). A marginal note at the line beginning ‘‘Dorset’’ reads: ‘‘In

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Mr. Wm. Gardners time, it was the most eminent Schoole for the Education of Gentle Men inthe West of England.’’ Note that in this and all subsequent transcriptions from early moderntexts, the following conventions are observed: familiar abbreviations (‘‘Dr.,’’ ‘‘Mr.,’’ etc.) havebeen left ‘‘as is’’ while most abbreviations of names and words not now commonly abbreviatedhave been expanded in braces. Common abbreviations like ‘‘wch,’’ ‘‘ye,’’ ‘‘yt,’’ however, havebeen silently expanded to ‘‘which,’’ ‘‘the,’’ and ‘‘that.’’ All superscripts have been lowered. Textcrossed out by an author, where legible, is shown with a line through it. Authorial insertions tothe text are presented in angle brackets. Editorial comments and insertions are enclosed bybraces. Braces are used because early modern authors quoted in this essay, including JohnAubrey, employed square brackets, leaving them unavailable for use as editorial tools. Wheredates are conjectural (as in dating of correspondence), they are also enclosed by braces. Thesepractices largely follow the recommendations of Michael Hunter, as described in ‘‘How to Edita Seventeenth-Century Manuscript: Principles and Practice,’’ Seventeenth Century 10 (1995):277–310; and Editing Early Modern Texts: An Introduction to Principles and Practice (Basing-stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). The reader will note that I cite Memoires of Naturall Re-marques (RS MS 92), the copy of The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire (Bodleian Library, MSAubrey 1, 2) that Aubrey made in 1690–91 at the request of the Royal Society (hereafterBodleian manuscripts abbreviated Bod MS). I do this because the passage cited above is presentonly in the Royal Society copy of the manuscript.

2. Compare Ernst Gerhardt, ‘‘ ‘No Quyckar Merchandyce than Library Bokes’: JohnBale’s Commodification of Manuscript Culture,’’ Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 421–22.There were a few exceptions to the general rule of destruction. Charters, wills, monastic regis-ters and other documents that pertained to legal rights and land tenure were often carefullyprotected. See Adam Fox, ‘‘Custom, Memory and the Authority of Writing,’’ in The Experi-ence of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 89–116; Jan Broadway, ‘‘No Historie So Meete’’: Gen-try Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 121–26.

3. In the decades after the dispersal of the monastic libraries, those turning to this kindof labor included Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker, the historian John Stow, andRobert Cotton, the founder of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries. On Stow, see Ian Gaddand Alexandra Gillespie, eds., John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past(London: British Library, 2004), in particular Gillespie, ‘‘Stow’s ‘Owlde’ Manuscripts of Lon-don Chronicles,’’ 57–67. On Parker, see C. E. Wright, ‘‘The Dispersal of the Libraries in theSixteenth Century,’’ in The English Library Before 1700: Studies in Its History, ed. FrancisWormald 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 EarlyStuart Collector and His Legacy (London: British Library, 1997).

4. See Margaret Aston, ‘‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and theSense of the Past,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 231–55.

5. County natural histories—such as those compiled by Robert Plot and Aubrey—werebuilt in part out of the diligent study of manuscript records scattered in private homes, cathe-dral and church buildings, and the public libraries of Oxford and Cambridge. On the connec-tion between John Aubrey’s studies of natural history and antiquities, see Michael Hunter,John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (New York: Science History Publications, 1975),191–202.

6. On Bacon and Baconian method in seventeenth-century natural history, see LorraineDaston, ‘‘Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,’’ Critical In-quiry 18 (1991): 93–124; Stephan Clucas, ‘‘In Search of ‘The True Logick’: MethodologicalEclecticism Among the ‘Baconian Reformers,’ ’’ in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation:Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and TimothyRaylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 51–74; Daston and Katharine Park,

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Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), especially‘‘Strange Facts,’’ 215–53; Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Cornell:Cornell University Press, 2000), especially 63–85 and 105–38; and William T. Lynch, Solo-mon’s Child: Method in the Early Royal Society of London (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2001), especially 1–33.

7. Lesley B. Cormack, ‘‘ ‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbors’: Geography as Self-Defi-nition in Early Modern England,’’ Isis 82 (1991): 639–61 (quote on 656). Though not its soleoriginator, Francis Bacon was one of the earliest formal proponents of such a method. DeborahHarkness argues that Bacon’s science was not a new creation, but a version of ElizabethanLondon science, a practical mix of theory, experience and experimentation, invention, andmechanical ingenuity going on every day in London streets, alleyways, gardens, and work-shops. Bacon’s innovations were, in fact, to describe this unruly activity in terms of learnedphilosophical method and express a desire to bring it under the control of a central authority(Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution [New Haven:Yale University Press, 2007], 214–16, 241–53). While I agree with Harkness as to the originsof ‘‘Baconian’’ science, I continue to use the term for two reasons. One, late seventeenth-century naturalists, especially those affiliated with the Royal Society, explicitly took their inspi-ration from Bacon’s writings. Two, ‘‘Baconian science’’ is convenient shorthand for a methodthat grew organically from the practices and writings not only of London experimentalists andartisans, but of surveyors, antiquaries, natural historians, alchemists, physicians, humanistscholars, gentleladies, gardeners, and many others in England and abroad. For example, the‘‘Baconian’’ method also had its roots in the work of influential Elizabethan chorographerWilliam Camden, who based his best-selling survey of Britain, Britannia, on facts and observa-tions gathered from personal experience (both his own and others’). See Cormack, ‘‘ ‘GoodFences Make Good Neighbors,’ ’’ 658–60.

8. Compare Ann Blair, ‘‘Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The CommonplaceBook,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 541–51.

9. Michael Hunter, introduction to Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formationand 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 ofworks (Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 66–67).

10. Naturalists also used the word ‘‘archives’’ to refer to this collection of material. SeeHunter, introduction, 11. Hunter argues that ‘‘papers’’ and ‘‘archive’’ are conceptually identi-cal for naturalists of the Scientific Revolution because papers were shaped through a lifetimeof selection and editing. The final culling of the papers in preparation for transfer to the archivewas simply a culmination of this process.

11. Evelyn, Memoires for my Grandson, British Library MS ADD 78515, 32r (BritishLibrary hereafter ‘‘BL’’). Evelyn, conscious of his legacy, and not wanting it to be marred byposthumous revelations of imperfect, impertinent, or unpolished work, asked his grandson to‘‘burn or otherways dispose of’’ these materials. Luckily for historians, Evelyn’s heir disre-garded these instructions. Evelyn’s attitude was very different from Aubrey’s, who regardedsuch materials as the raw stuff of scholarship, out of which future naturalists and antiquariesmight construct new studies. On Evelyn’s fear of humiliation or embarrassment, see FrancesHarris, 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. HenryW. Robinson and Walter Adams (London: Taylor and Francis, 1935), entries of 21 September1677, 314; 19 November 1677, 329; 28 November 1677, 330; 26 December 1677, 336; 28December 1677, 337; 31 December 1677, 337–38; 1 January 1677/78, 338; 4 January 1677/78, 338; 12 January 1677/78, 340. These passages, which are largely concerned with Hooke’sefforts to survey and sort the books and papers left in Royal Society secretary Henry Olden-

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burg’s lodgings after his death, are rich with references to books and papers, but never onemanuscript.

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 thisquestion (MS Ashmole 1820, 121v, 133v, 143r).

14. Evelyn, ‘‘Of Manuscripts: An Unfinished Treatise,’’ in Memoirs Illustrative of the Lifeand Writings of John Evelyn, Esq. FRS, ed. William Bray (London: Henry Colburn, ConduitStreet, 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 well-

populated with ‘‘Abbeys or Convents for Men’’: in addition to Malmesbury, Aubrey notedthat the ruins of Broadstock Priory and the abbeys of Stanley, Farleigh, Bath, and Cyrencesterwere 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 Commerceof Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massa-chusetts Press, 1998).

18. See Aubrey to Anthony a Wood, {11 March 1690}, Bod MS Wood F.39, 400r: ‘‘MrWood, I know you me �&� I take you to be my faithfull friend: I am in a dilemma, & knownot well what to doe as to securing my MSS. Mr Ashmole &c: advise me by all meanes tosecure them in the Musea{m} which (I grant) would be safe; but many parts want a littletranscribing: and if I dye before they are printed my Will and intention & desire is, that youmight have the Benefit of them as well as care. But if they are deposited in the Museam DrPlott, or &c: will and must have the benefit: and (no doubt) would have the Credit too: whichI �verily believe you would not doe� You are not very young, & a mortall man, & when youdye, then your Nephew stoppes Gunnes with them, or are putt under Pies. What should I doein this Case? When I come to Oxo{n} I will make a short Will as to these MSS to give you titleto them.’’ See also Aubrey to Wood, 24 April 1690, Bod MS Wood F.39, 403r; Aubrey toWood, 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 thatvolume. Lhwyd assisted Aubrey in these efforts: as receiver of Aubrey’s collections, he had theloose pamphlets bound together, and offered to do the same with the letters once they were inhis 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 tomake 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). Thatthis was a physical, rather than a metaphorical volume, Aubrey made clear in a second letterto Wood, noting that he sent to Oxford by Robert Plot ‘‘a thick folio of Letters’’ (Aubrey toWood, 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 Au-brey, 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 aletter of 4 March 1693/94, as well as one letter for which no year is available, but which waslikely written about the same time, Lhwyd refers to Aubrey’s ‘‘papers,’’ slipping from his stan-dard use of ‘‘MSS’’ in this series of letters (Lhwyd to Aubrey, 4 March 1693/4, Bod MS Aubrey12, 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 ‘‘manu-scripts’’ and unfinished ‘‘papers.’’ Writing to Wood in 1690, Aubrey noted that he had plannedto send to Oxford ‘‘4 volumnes of MSS of my owne,’’ but had held them back because theRoyal Society first desired transcriptions of them. In the same letter, Aubrey wrote, ‘‘I long tobe at Oxford to finish my papers there.’’ ‘‘Papers’’ were rougher notes, not yet possessed of

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28 Book History

historical status, while ‘‘manuscripts’’—finished papers—were ready to take up their perma-nent home in the Ashmolean, and bear the scrutiny of future generations (Aubrey to Wood, 5July 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 Aubrey’s efforts, primarily in the last twenty years of his life, toorganize, circulate, and preserve his notes on natural history, biography, antiquarian studies,and miscellaneous topics. As quoted by Hunter, Aubrey used various words for his writtenmaterials, including ‘‘papers’’ and ‘‘manuscripts’’ or ‘‘MSS.’’ Instances of ‘‘papers’’ date to1679–85, before Aubrey transferred his collections to the Ashmolean (Hunter, 79, 80, 82). Inquotations from 1692–94, Aubrey exclusively used ‘‘manuscripts’’ or ‘‘MSS’’ (Hunter, 85, 87can 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 manuscriptsto the Ashmolean).

23. Elias Ashmole, 20 August 1672, BL MS Sloane 3188, 2r–2v and Ashmole, 10 Septem-ber 1672, BL MS Sloane 3188, 2v–3 in Elias Ashmole, 1617–1692: His Autobiographical andHistorical Notes, His Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to His Lifeand Work, ed. C. H. Josten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 3:1264–65, 1270–71 (hereafterAutobiographical and Historical Notes).

24. Ashmole, 20 August 1672, Bod MS Ashmole 1136, 47v; Ashmole, 10 September1672, BL MS Sloane 3188, 2v–3; and Ashmole to Wood, 20 December 1672, Bod MS WoodF. 39, 59; in Autobiographical and Historical Notes, 3:1264, 1271, 1289.

25. Ashmole, 29 January 1672, Bod MS Ashmole 1788, 158, in Autobiographical andHistorical Notes, 3:1242–43.

26. Gabriel Naude, Instructions Concerning Erecting a Library, trans. John Evelyn (Lon-don: Printed for G. Bedle, T. Collins . . . and J. Crook, 1661), 80–82 (quote on 81). DavidMcKitterick argues that a sense of separation between manuscript and print was forced in theearly seventeenth century, and completed by the end of the century, by librarians and catalogersseeking to impose order on their collections (McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search forOrder, 1450–1830 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 12–15). Naude, writingmidcentury, practiced a partial, pragmatic version of this division, shelving costly manuscriptsseparately from printed books, but otherwise classing bound manuscripts with bound printedbooks. The separation of print and manuscript was by no means a given: through the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries, readers frequently combined manuscript and print by marking, dis-membering, and resewing their printed books in more or less invasive ways with little regardfor supposedly divergent categories of print and manuscript. See William H. Sherman, UsedBooks: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 2008), especially 7–10.

27. Naude, Instructions, 81. Loose manuscript sheets were not to be left out on the librarytable. These especially were ‘‘daily obnoxious’’ to being stolen, borrowed, and copied: as withmanuscripts of consequence, only the librarian should know where to find them (Naude, In-structions, 81–82 [quote on 81]).

28. Ashmole, ‘‘Copy of Elias Ashmole’s Will from the Registry of the Prerogative Courtof Canterbury,’’ Bod MS Ashmole 1834, 62r. Ashmole’s library reflected his interests in thehistory of the English Order of the Garter as well as alchemy and astrology. In his library, onecould find records of the Garter dating back to its founding by Edward III in 1348 (Josten, inAutobiographical and Historical Notes, 2:671; 3:1117–18, 1240). More recent papers andmanuscripts included not only those of Dee and Lilly, but also those of the Elizabethan astrolo-ger-physician Simon Forman and the Stuart astrologer-physicians Richard Napier and hisnephew Sir Richard Napier. On Ashmole’s acquisition of the Napier and Forman papers, seeJosten, Biographical Introduction, in Autobiographical and Historical Notes, 1:209–10; forDee, see references in n.22 above. Ashmole inherited Lilly’s papers as his patron and friend;for a sense of the range of material encompassed in this collection, see Ann Geneva, Astrology

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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 inElizabethan London: Simon Forman: Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford: Claren-don Press, 2005).

29. Stephen Clucas, ‘‘Samuel Hartlib’s Ephemerides, 1635–59, and the Pursuit of Scien-tific and Philosophical Manuscripts: The Religious Ethos of an Intelligencer,’’ Seventeenth Cen-tury 6 (1991): 33–55. In 1634, as he formulated his plan for advancing the progress of naturalknowledge and the Protestant cause, Hartlib noted that searching out and disseminating thepapers of living naturalists was necessary because ‘‘there are ‘Few good English bookes . . . thebest things are kept in men’s studies in Manuscripts’ ’’ (Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1634, HartlibPapers, Sheffield University Library, 50H, 29/2/53B–54A; quoted in Clucas, ‘‘Samuel Hartlib’sEphemerides,’’ 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, andstories 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 thepriory, etc.’’ (Aubrey, ‘‘Brief Lives’’ Chiefly 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. Al-though Hartlib recorded in his Ephemerides a one-volume collection of Cruger’s writings in1635, it was only in 1639 that he became concerned with locating and obtaining, if possible,all the mathematician’s papers (Clucas, ‘‘Samuel Hartlib’s Ephemerides,’’ 46).

32. See, for example, Hartlib’s catalog of Francis Bacon’s extant manuscripts, compiled in1639 (transcribed in Clucas, ‘‘Samuel Hartlib’s Ephemerides,’’ 50–51).

33. Some of the books were gathered into the Royal Library (which Henry VIII begancollecting before the dissolution of 1536 in part as a search for historical evidence to supporthis case for a divorce from both Rome and Catherine of Aragon), but possibly dispersed againafter his death because the Crown had neither the space nor the financial resources to holdonto 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., 153–54. 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. TimothyGraham 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 toline the crust during blind baking. Weights, such as dried beans or peas, were poured into thepaper-lined crust, which was then pre-baked; the weights prevented air bubbles from formingin the crust. Once the crust was done, the paper and beans were lifted out, the filling added,and the pie cooked again as necessary. Bale also described the use of manuscript (generallyparchment, in his case), in bookbinding, candlestick scouring, and boot cleaning (John Baleand John Leland, The Laboryouse Journey and Serche of Johan Leland [London: S. Mierdmanfor J. Bale, 1549], Giiir; quoted in Gerhardt, ‘‘ ‘No Quyckar Merchandyce than LibraryBokes,’ ’’ 421). Elias Ashmole told the story of John Dee’s papers being used to line pies beforethey came into his hands: they were discovered by a London confectioner and his wife, in asecret compartment in a chest they purchased at second hand in the early 1640s. Ashmolewrote in his diary, ‘‘they made no great matter of these Bookes &c: because they understoodthem 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,

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though not the chest, were saved from the Great Fire in 1666, and the lady’s second husband,a warder in the Tower of London, knew of Ashmole and his interests, and thought he mightlike to see them (Autobiographical and Historical Notes, 1:184–86 and 3:1270–71; quote on1271). The waste of manuscript (both ‘‘papers’’ and medieval parchment) to stop and scourguns and line pies haunted Aubrey: recall his complaints, quoted above, that Parson Stump’ssons had cleaned their guns with manuscript (Aubrey, RS MS 92, 221). After Bishop SethWard’s death, Aubrey also rescued from his study papers that were ‘‘destined with many othergood papers and letters, to be put under pies’’ (Aubrey, An Idea of Education of Young Gentle-men (1683/84), Bod MS Aubrey 10, 65r).

38. See John Houghton, A Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade (Lon-don: n.p., 1692–1703), 13.356–59 (19 May–9 June 1699) for a description of paper manufac-ture. 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, chorog-raphy, one of the strands feeding into seventeenth-century natural history, had monastic ori-gins, at least in Britain—medieval English chorographers were associated almost exclusivelywith monasteries (Stan A. E. Mendyk, ‘‘Speculum Britanniae’’: Regional Study, Antiquarian-ism 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 (Roch-ester, 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 incentiveto produce more papers as products of researching and writing printed works and as texts tobe circulated and read in their own right. On the relationship between the invention of printingand the increase in the production of handwritten documents, see Peter Stallybrass, ‘‘Printingfor Manuscript’’ (Rosenbach Lectures, University of Pennsylvania, February 2006).

46. Aubrey, Idea of Education. An edition of the manuscript was prepared by J. E. Ste-phens as Aubrey on Education: A Hitherto Unpublished Manuscript by the Author of BriefLives, ed. J. E. Stephens (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). Michael Hunter alsosummarizes the content of the manuscript in John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 50–55.Stephens’s edition is not without its defects. His transcriptions were sometimes haphazard, andhe rearranged some of Aubrey’s material in what he felt to be a more coherent manner, com-bining what were in fact two separate treatises on education, Aubrey’s Idea of 1683/84 andIdea Filioli seu Educatio Pueri of 1669, a small handwritten pamphlet that has been storedinside MS Aubrey 10 in the last century (see Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning,50n.11). Stephens’s justification was, as he thought, Aubrey’s own wishes for an ‘‘Aristar-chus,’’ or editor, to prepare the manuscript for publication. In a letter to his friend AnthonyHenley 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 ofEducation, 2r). In what follows, I make use of both the original manuscript and the printededition. The defects of Stephens’s edition, while serious, do not detract from the thrust of myargument in this section, which is that Aubrey used manuscript materials both as educationaltexts and as sources for his own arguments. For a more detailed consideration of Stephens’s

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edition, see Michael Hunter’s 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. JohnPell which are done on one side of a sheet of paper most curiously, fifty years since,’’ wouldteach his students to comprehend the second book of Euclid’s Elements (Aubrey, Aubrey onEducation, 109). Aubrey further directed that the students should be taught mechanics in partfrom ‘‘two sheets in French (a manuscript) of the five mechanical powers’’ (Aubrey, Aubrey onEducation, 111).

48. Aubrey, Aubrey on Education, 129.49. Ibid., 125–26. See also Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning, 52. When

Aubrey read it, Selden’s manuscript was in the possession of the Earl of Abingdon. Aubreyquoted Selden approvingly as saying that studying ‘‘the Reports alone, teach not a man Lawe.’’He was familiar with the earl’s library because of the time he spent on his estate as a houseguest.

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, Au-

brey’s mania for collecting and preserving papers extended far beyond his own unprintedworks. Aubrey haunted dead men’s studies. In 1680/81 he wrote to Wood, ‘‘I suppose youheare that Dr Tong is dead, he hath left 2 Vol: MSS in Alkymy (which was his Talent) I shallretrieve a Catal{ogue} of all his Writings’’ (Aubrey to Wood, 13 {January?} 1680/81, Bod MSWood F.39, 351v). Dr. Tong was cleric Israel Tonge, an informant on the Popish Plot of 1678whose interests included alchemy and gardening. His alchemical papers have not survived. Formore on Aubrey’s enthusiasms for others’ papers, see Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm ofLearning, 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), 217–52.

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 Hartlib’s Ephemerides,’’ 33–55.57. Like seventeenth-century intelligencers, I use the word ‘‘correspondence’’ to refer to

the sum of a naturalist’s contacts, those with whom he shared information by letters andpersonal conversations, often passing material received from one correspondent into communi-cations with others. See Elizabeth Yale, ‘‘Manuscript Technologies: Correspondence, Collabo-ration, and the Construction of Natural Knowledge in Early Modern Britain’’ (PhD diss.,Harvard University, 2008), 61–64.

58. Hartlib’s work also encouraged others. In 1650 Robert Childe wrote from New En-gland to tell Hartlib that one of the primary missions of the chemical club he was formingwould be collecting and publishing chemical manuscripts (Clucas, ‘‘Samuel Hartlib’s Ephemer-ides,’’ 40).

59. Hartlib, Ephemerides, 1639, Hartlib Papers, 30/4/27B; quoted in Clucas, ‘‘SamuelHartlib’s Ephemerides,’’ 42. This habit of disseminating papers furthered an advancement inbotany: in his 1660 Catalogus Cantabrigium, a catalog of plants found in and about Cam-bridge, John Ray classified plants using terminology that Jungius developed in his IsagogePhytoscopica, a manuscript treatise Hartlib forwarded to Ray through John Worthington.Carolus Linnaeus adapted Jungius’s system, which he learned through Ray’s Historiae Plan-tarum (1682), which also used it (Clucas, ‘‘Samuel Hartlib’s Ephemerides,’’ 48–49).

60. Aubrey wrote to Wood to request a list of Bacon manuscripts in the Bodleian: ‘‘TheR. Societie have a wonderfull Esteeme of Friar Roger Bacon, and desire you to send me [forthem] the names of all the Treatises he wrote. They wish the University would print them’’

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32 Book History

(Aubrey to Wood, n.d, MS Wood F.39, 318r). According to Aubrey, Hooke was also involvedin this effort: he was enlisted to review the manuscripts to determine whether they were suitablefor printing. Unfortunately, the Royal Society’s esteem did not translate into a willingness tospend the money required to put Bacon into print. On the attempts to search out and print theworks of Bacon and Beg, see Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1998), 496–97.

61. This undertaking foundered upon the fellows’ inability to locate any of his manu-scripts, though some turned up in the eighteenth century (Clucas, ‘‘Samuel Hartlib’s Ephemeri-des,’’ 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 Emper-our 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. 1503–52) was one of the first English topographers. In 1533

Leland received a warrant from Henry VIII to search out and catalog the books in Englishmonasteries and colleges. After the dissolution of the monasteries, he continued to travel inEngland and Wales, making at least five journeys in the 1540s during which he recorded manydetails of local history, antiquities, and topography. Leland’s Itineraries describing these jour-neys 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 tothis edition, however, the manuscript original of The Itinerary was well known in antiquariancircles. Seven of the eight manuscript volumes were donated to the Bodleian by William Bur-ton, author of The Description of Leicestershire (1622), in the first half of the seventeenthcentury. The eighth volume, which had been borrowed by a friend of Burton’s, resurfaced inthe latter half of the century and was donated to the Bodleian by Charles King in or around1677. See James P. Carley, ‘‘Leland, John (c.1503–1552),’’ Oxford Dictionary of NationalBiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–8); hereafter ODNB. A number of sixteen-th- and seventeenth-century antiquaries read and copied material from the Leland manuscripts,including John Stow, William Harrison, William Camden, William Lambarde, and WilliamDugdale (Mendyk, ‘‘Speculum Britanniae,’’ 45–46).

69. Plot to Fell, c.1673, ESIO, 12:337.70. In his letter to Fell, Plot described Leland’s efforts as the ‘‘Foundation,’’ upon which

chorographer William Camden built the ‘‘superstructure’’ of his Britannia (first published inLatin in 1586). His own projected efforts Plot described as ‘‘a fair new Building erected (alto-gether as much to the Honour of the Nation) out of Materials they [Leland and Camden] madelittle or no use of’’ (Plot to Fell, c. 1673, ESIO, 12:335–36).

71. Lhwyd to Lloyd, 23 November 1707, ESIO, 14: 536. See also Lhwyd to ThomasTanner, {spring 1698}, ESIO, 14: 370 and Lhwyd to Thomas Tonkin, 16 March 1702/3, ESIO,14: 485. In the first letter, Lhwyd complained that a gentleman who had promised him accessto his study in order to view and transcribe ancient Welsh manuscripts, ‘‘was pleasd neverthel-esse afterwards to refuse when I sent a purpose messenger twice to him.’’ In the second, Lhwyddescribed how he ‘‘was refused access to the two studies’’ where a number of manuscript‘‘British Elegies’’ were preserved.

72. See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiryinto 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, ‘‘Phantas-ies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of the Historians,’’ Journal of ModernHistory 72 (2000):153–82; Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stu-

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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 (NewHaven: 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 Accom-plishment of Englands Reformation in Church and State (London: n.p., 1647); Hartlib, AFurther Discovery of the Office of Publick Address for Accomodations (London: n.p., 1648).

74. Such rhetoric was, for example, common in subscription proposals for scientificbooks. See Yale, ‘‘Manuscript Technologies,’’ 196–235.

75. See Charles Webster, The Great Instauration (London: Duckworth, 1975); and JamesR. Jacob and Margaret C. Jacob, ‘‘The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The MetaphysicalFoundations 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 Bodleianadmitted Oxford ‘‘bachelors of arts and all other persons being undergraduates,’’ senior schol-ars (including fellows and professors), and students from abroad. Special sanctions, however,limited the privileges of undergraduates and foreign scholars. When in the library, undergradu-ates were enjoined not to stray from the area where faculty of arts books were located (ArtsEnd in the Duke Humfrey’s Library). They were ‘‘to show due observance and deference tothe seniors by giving place to them the moment they see them approaching the bench or book-case where they are, or else by passing to them, if the case require it, the book which they werepreviously using’’ (this and previous quotation from Oxford University Statutes, trans.G. R. M. Ward [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1845], 264; quoted in Philip, The BodleianLibrary, 34). Foreign students were not bound by these rules. However, if they—or others whowere not members of the university—wished to consult manuscripts, they were required tobring a Master of Arts or Bachelor of Laws to watch them while they read (Philip, The Bod-leian Library, 34–37).

77. For a brief account, see Philip, The Bodleian Library, 5–6.78. Ashmole’s library, donated to the museum after his death, numbered 1,758 volumes,

620 of which were manuscripts (Josten, Biographical Introduction, in Autobiographical andHistorical Notes, 1:301).

79. See Martin Welch, ‘‘The Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum,’’ in Tradescant’sRarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum in 1683, with a Catalogue ofthe Surviving Early Collections, ed. Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 40–58. See also Elias Ashmole, ‘‘Statutes, Orders, & Rules for the Ashmolean Museum in theUniversity of Oxon,’’ Bod MS Ashmole 1820, 296r–297v. These are dated 24 June 1686 andsigned by Ashmole.

80. Ashmole willed that his manuscript books and papers ‘‘not yet sorted nor boundup . . . bee preserved in the Musaeum Ashmoleanum in Presses with locks and keys to beeprovided for them’’ (Ashmole, ‘‘Copy of Elias Ashmole’s Will,’’ 62r–v).

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 refined its priorities over the years, items from its collectionshave been transferred to Oxford’s Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, andthe Bodleian (Ashmolean Museum of Art and Architecture, ‘‘The Historical Development ofthe Ashmolean Museum,’’ http://www.ashmolean.org/about/historyandfuture/ [accessed 8 Sep-tember 2008]). Still, at the very least, a building and a keeper forestalled such losses to pointsin time at which they did not threaten the survival of the museum.

83. Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early ModernEngland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), especially 16–54; AshmoleanMuseum of Art and Architecture, ‘‘The Historical Development.’’

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34 Book History

84. Edward Bernard, Catalogi manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae, 2 vols. (Oxford: ETheatro Sheldoniano, 1697).

85. Bernard announced his plans for a catalog in 1694 in an advertisement that appearedin John Houghton’s Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade. He requested‘‘all lovers of Learning and Antiquity . . . to communicate a List of such Manuscripts as theyare 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 manuscriptorumAngliae et Hiberniae, vol. 1.

87. Edward Bernard, Librorum manuscriptorum academiarum Oxoniensis & Cantabri-giensis & celebrium per Angliam Hiberniamque Bibliothecarum Catalogus cum Indice Alpha-betico (Oxford: n.p., 1694).

88. The importance of the assistance of the learned to the completion of the catalog wasemphasized again in the preface (Bernard, Catalogi manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae,1:3).

89. Aubrey’s Miscellanies was published only in 1696, at the very end of his life. When hebegan transferring papers to the Ashmolean in the late 1680s, he did so with none of his booksin print.

90. Kate Bennett, ‘‘Materials Towards a Critical Edition of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives’’(PhD diss., Oxford University, 1993), 23, 25.

91. To Aubrey’s way of thinking, the fragmentary nature of these materials was not adeficiency. Following Bacon’s famous definition of antiquities in The Advancement of Learn-ing, he regarded the knowledge collected in his papers as ‘‘spars from a shipwreck’’: ‘‘Antiqui-ties, or remnants of histories, are (as was said) like the spars of a shipwreck; when, though thememory of things be decayed and almost lost, yet acute and industrious persons, by a certainpersevering and scrupulous diligence, contrive out of genealogies, annals, titles, monuments,coins, proper names and styles, etymologies of words, proverbs, traditions, archives and instru-ments 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 oftime: a work laborious indeed, but agreeable to men, and joined with a kind of reverence. . . .In these kinds of Imperfect History I think no deficiency is to be assigned; for they are things,as it were, imperfectly compounded, and therefore any deficiency in them is but their nature’’(Bacon, Works, ed. James Spedding [Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1864], 8:423–24). Seealso Bennett, ‘‘Materials Towards a Critical Edition of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives,’’ 10, 25.

92. On the flyleaf of this volume, Aubrey wrote, ‘‘This Collection of Grammaticall learn-ing, and another in 8o. is in relation to my Idea of the Education of the Noblesse’’ (Bod MSAubrey 22, 1).

93. Fully conceived, the Idea was not simply a one-volume treatise, but a collection ofprinted books, pamphlets, and manuscript texts supporting Aubrey’s case for educational re-form. It included a small library of books in addition to the Collection of Grammatical Learn-ing. The Idea served as an emissary to readers and a prospectus of the plan, inviting them toread further or—Aubrey’s great hope—offer material support to help him establish his re-formed 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 desireyou, 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 Aubrey’s Collections and the Early Modern Museum,’’ Bod-leian Library Record, 17 (2001): 213–45. Bennett writes that ‘‘Aubrey has traditionally beentreated dismissively for ‘failing’ to print his writings. Yet we may see the choice to place hismanuscripts in a ‘public repository’ as a publication of them in terms of the ideals to whichthe Ashmolean was a monument. The Ashmolean was a container of raw materials for experi-

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mentation, a starting-point for scientific discovery’’ (218). Aubrey thought of his papers as the‘‘raw materials’’ out of which natural histories and other works could be constructed. Bennett’sthesis is supported by the fact that Aubrey chose different repositories for different kinds ofmaterials. He donated, for instance, twenty-nine printed books to the Royal Society. See JohnBuchanan-Brown, ‘‘The Books Presented to the Royal Society by John Aubrey, FRS,’’ Notesand 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 Wilt-shire, 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. Lhwydthanked Aubrey for writing to him to let him know about a package: ‘‘for the generality of thepeople at Oxford doe not yet know, what the Musaeum is; for they call the whole Buylding theLabradary �or Knackatory� & distinguish no farther. That nothing miscarried soe directed toDr Plot was because the person was known better than the place, but things directed to me orMr Higgins commonly stay’d at the carriers till we fetch’d them.’’ Gunther’s reading of thisletter is slightly amended based on my own partial transcription of the manuscript source.

97. Writing to Wood in 1689, Aubrey confided that he feared he would die before he sawhis papers preserved. He determined to ‘‘send them to you: for fear of Death’s preventing me.For Life is uncertain: and this morning I was anguishi{d} and if I die, before I send them �toyou� all will be lost: there is no trust (hardly) to anybody.’’ He concluded, ‘‘And I know youare so much a Gentleman, that you will not doe me wrong by putting out another’s Laboursunder 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 secretlya Catholic priest). Ralph Sheldon, a Catholic gentlemen with whom he shared antiquarianinterests, was a patron and friend (Graham Parry, ‘‘Wood, Anthony a (1632–1695),’’ ODNB).Friendly relations with known Catholics easily aroused the suspicions of one’s neighbors. Sincethe Reformation, Protestant and Catholic antiquaries had gone their separate ways, as theirfamilies were increasingly less likely to intermarry and move in the same social circles (seeBroadway, ‘‘No Historie so Meete,’’ 95–100). Hence, the ties of friendship with which menvoluntarily bound themselves looked all the more suspicious. Aubrey once thought himself atrisk of censure or injury for having expressed ‘‘friendship’’ with the Church of Rome in atletter to Wood in the mid-1670s. He soon repented of his kind words: in 1676 he wrote to hisfriend, ‘‘If you die; or, one knows not some time or other as the World runs madding, yourpapers may be sifted & examined. Therefore ex abundanti consela, I would entreat you toburne (or blott out) a passage in a letter of mine, about 1674, or 5, wherein I expressed myfriendship to the Ch: of R. God blesse us, from another Rebellion’’ (Aubrey to Wood, 11September 1676, Bod MS Woof F.39, 302r). Aubrey wrote this note on a separate piece ofpaper, and sent it enclosed in another letter—even this slip was intended to be burnt.

99. Aubrey to Wood, 23 October 1688, Bod MS Tanner 456a, 34r. Some time after receiv-ing the letter, Wood filled out the blank ‘‘P—’’ as ‘‘Papist.’’ The second blank, in the phrase‘‘changes of—’’ may likely be filled 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 Boxforthwith (you may keep the Key) for feare that all my MSS etc: should be rifled by the Mobile(which God forbid but Mr E. Ashm{ole} �doe� much feare) . . . I am mighty troubled andconcerned for you, for feare of your writings being confounded by the Mobile’’ (Aubrey toWood, 22 December 1688, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 2r–v). On mobs and crowds in early modernBritain, see Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politicsfrom the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1987).

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102. Lhwyd first mentions having Monumenta Britannica in his custody in a letter of 14October 1693 (Bod MS Aubrey 12, 248r).

103. Lhwyd to Aubrey, 4 March 1693/4, Bod MS Aubrey 12, 252v–253r.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: Hartlib’s Papers and the Workings of an In-

telligencer,’’ in Archives of the Scientific Revolution, 35–47 (quote on 42).109. Greengrass, ‘‘Archive Refractions,’’ 42. Somewhat similarly, John Evelyn’s papers

were preserved only by the accidents of history, one of which was his heir’s inattention to hiswish that they be destroyed. John Evelyn’s famous Kalendarium (his diary) lay dormant in acabinet at the Evelyn home in Surrey until William Bray, lawyer and antiquary, along with theautograph collector and antiquary William Upcott, rediscovered it in the 1810s while catalog-ing the Evelyn family library. See Theodore Hofmann, Joan Winterkorn, Frances Harris, andHilton Kelliher, ‘‘John Evelyn’s 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 cul-

ture’s ‘‘historical consciousness,’’ rather than the political, religious, or natural history of a groupof people or a geographical area, may be a consequence of the development of history as a self-reflective profession. Attempts to understand the early modern British historical sensibility in-clude 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 ofToronto Press, 1990); Mendyk, ‘‘Speculum Britanniae’’; Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulationof 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 ofpolitical, religious, or economic events or as accounts of exemplary lives and deeds (categoriesearly modern naturalists might have recognized). Rather, they make use of records compiled byantiquaries and naturalists to understand the ways in which they thought about history.

112. Gillespie, ‘‘Stow’s ‘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 records—some dating backto the seventeenth century—to inform long-term climate models. See, for example, JonathanLeake, ‘‘Captains’ Logs Yield Climate Cues: Records Kept by Cook and Nelson Are SheddingLight 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 Golin-ski for telling me about the use of early modern weather diaries by modern climate scientists.

114. Indeed, perhaps Aubrey’s worst fears are realized in the common image of him as agullible gossip, promoted by unsympathetic readings of The Miscellanies, his one printed work,and editor Andrew Clark’s sour presentation of Aubrey in his 1898 edition of Brief Lives.

115. Aubrey’s efforts were not in vain. His papers were consulted in the archive, and somewere even printed by later naturalists and antiquarians, including The Natural History andAntiquities of the County of Surrey (London: W. Mears and J. Hooke, 1723). I plan to addressthe 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 ofmanuscripts in the construction of natural knowledge in a subsequent essay, the sequel to thisone.

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