Manuscript technologies

This dissertation examines scientific communication and collaboration in seventeenth-century Britain. More precisely, it analyzes the ways in which these activities were carried out through the production and exchange of scribal texts by individuals active in the allied (and often overlapping) fields of natural history and antiquarian studies. In these fields, manuscript exchange was naturalists' primary means of constructing knowledge. Textual practices--such as reading, writing, annotating and sending letters--were as vital to the creation of scientific knowledge as observing, calculating, and experimenting. Although printed books were often the end products of research in these fields, these books grew out of long processes of exchange and collaboration. Scribal exchange occurred within what natural historians and antiquarians referred to as their "correspondence," the sum of the social, material, and intellectual links between naturalists and antiquarians. Through the correspondence, naturalists pursued ambitious goals, such as surveys of all known plants and animals and detailed local histories of nature and antiquities. They exchanged not only scribal texts, such as letters,