Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science
In "Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science", Richard Yeo interprets a relatively unexplored set of primary archival sources: the notes and notebooks of some of the leading figures of the Scientific Revolution. Notebooks were important to several key members of the Royal Society of London, including Robert Boyle, John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, John Locke, and others, who drew on Renaissance humanist techniques of excerpting from texts to build storehouses of proverbs, maxims, quotations, and other material in personal notebooks, or commonplace books. Yeo shows that these men appreciated the value of their own notes both as powerful tools for personal recollection, and, following Francis Bacon, as a system of precise record keeping from which they could retrieve large quantities of detailed information for collaboration. The virtuosi of the seventeenth century were also able to reach beyond Bacon and the humanists, drawing inspiration from the ancient Hippocratic medical tradition and its emphasis on the gradual accumulation of information over time. By reflecting on the interaction of memory, notebooks, and other records, Yeo argues, the English virtuosi shaped an ethos of long-term empirical scientific inquiry.
About the Author
Richard Yeo is adjunct professor in the School of Humanities, Griffith University, Australia, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including "Defining Science" and "Encyclopaedic Visions".
Reviews
"Yeo has written a learned, lively, and provocative book. He shows us that the English virtuosi of the seventeenth century – long famed as the creators of a new method for studying the natural world – learned their ways of capturing, storing, and accessing observations of nature from erudite humanists, who had devised them for making excerpts from books. Two hundred years and more into the age of print, a cultivated memory and a carefully cultivated set of notebooks remained as central to the practices of many innovative natural philosophers as they had been to those of scholars like Petrarch and Erasmus. Yet, as Yeo also makes clear, these virtuosi compiled and understood their records in novel ways. In building their sets of data, Robert Hooke and others came to see the study of nature as a long-term enterprise, necessarily disciplined and collaborative – and to envision notebooks not only as an aid to memory and reflection, but also as part of a formal archive that would grow and change and serve the creation of new theories for generations to come" – Anthony T. Grafton, Princeton University
"Behind most great books lies a great set of notes – typically left unnoticed or neglected unto loss. In this delightfully innovative and lucidly written study, Yeo opens a whole new perspective on the central figures of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century by delving deeply into the surviving evidence of their note-taking. Whether messy or neat, kept on loose sheets or in notebooks, notes were essential tools for Baconian empiricism, which served to relieve the memory and to facilitate collaboration with others" – Ann Blair, Harvard University
"In this book, Yeo gives a vivid and insightful account of note-taking in scientific circles in seventeenth-century England, dealing both with well-known figures like Robert Boyle and John Locke and lesser men like Thomas Harrison and John Beale. He stresses how Francis Bacon's emphasis on the accumulation of empirical information complicated the inherited humanist tradition of 'commonplacing', and he has very interesting things to say about the way in which memory and note-taking are interrelated. The book reaches a climax with Yeo's account of Robert Hooke's vision, in the context of the early Royal Society, of a databank that might be both cumulative and analytic" – Michael Hunter, Birkbeck, University of London
"Lively and learned, Yeo's book opens new vistas on early modern science and scholarship. Through a careful examination of scientific notes and note-taking, he shows how the virtuosi of the seventeenth century retooled old scholarly conventions for new empirical applications and created new ways of managing and sharing information. Yeo's book at once illuminates the deep history of our information culture and the striking novelties of seventeenth-century science" – Daniel Rosenberg, University of Oregon
