Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Science and Society
- Part II Disciplines
- Part III Special Themes
- 22 Eighteenth-Century Scientific Instruments and Their Makers
- 23 Print and Public Science
- 24 Scientific Illustration in the Eighteenth Century
- 25 Science, Art, and the Representation of the Natural World
- 26 Science and Voyages of Discovery
- Part IV Non-Western Traditions
- Part V Ramifications and Impacts
- Index
- References
23 - Print and Public Science
from Part III - Special Themes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
By
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Science and Society
- Part II Disciplines
- Part III Special Themes
- 22 Eighteenth-Century Scientific Instruments and Their Makers
- 23 Print and Public Science
- 24 Scientific Illustration in the Eighteenth Century
- 25 Science, Art, and the Representation of the Natural World
- 26 Science and Voyages of Discovery
- Part IV Non-Western Traditions
- Part V Ramifications and Impacts
- Index
- References
Summary
CULTURES OF PRINT AT THE ONSET OF ENLIGHTENMENT
During the eighteenth century, natural knowledge became the focus, the vehicle, and the archetype of public enlightenment. This chapter describes some of the most important conditions underpinning that development. Its central subject is a distinctive realm of print that matured toward the end of the seventeenth century and lasted until the first quarter of the nineteenth – a realm differing in important respects from anything that had existed before. The chapter explains its principal characteristics, showing how they came about and why in the end they proved unstable. It outlines how printed materials were made, circulated, and put to use. From there it proceeds to explain how the features of this realm affected the creation and distribution of knowledge. The materials created by printers and booksellers – not only books themselves but also new objects such as periodicals – substantially changed the construction and representation of knowledge. The chapter’s major claims in this regard are of a general character. They are certainly applicable to what we would now call science; but they also extend far beyond that, and encompass knowledge of many other kinds.
The world of the book in the eighteenth century was simultaneously uniform and various. On the one hand, the régimes of custom and regulation guiding the conduct of printing and publishing in most countries rested, to a greater or lesser extent, on similar mechanisms of guilds, licensing, patronage, and privileges. In France, for example, Louis XIV’s reign saw the establishment of a comprehensive system of press regulation based on these foundations that would last until the revolution a century later.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 536 - 560Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
References
, Travelers and Travel Liars 1660–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962)Google Scholar
(ed.), Publishing and Readership in Revolutionary France and America (Westport: Greenwood, 1993).Google Scholar
, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar
, Witchcraft and its Transformations, c.1650–c.1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997).Google Scholar
, The Question Concerning Literary Property (London: W. Strahan and M. Woodfall, 1773)Google Scholar
, , Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. , ed. (New York: Noonday Press, 1955)Google Scholar
and , Typographia Naturalis: A History of Nature Printing (Wymondham: Brewhouse Press, 1967).Google Scholar
, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar
, “l’Ancien Régime Typographique: Réflexions sur Quelques Travaux Récents,” Annales E.S.C., 36 (1981).Google Scholar
, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991)Google Scholar
, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences fom Codex to Computer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Leisure and Sociability: Reading Aloud in Early Modern Europe,” in and (eds.), Urban Life in the Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989).Google Scholar
, “Figures of the Author,” in , The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).Google Scholar
, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979)Google Scholar
, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar
, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995)Google Scholar
, “Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity,” in , The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984).Google Scholar
, A System of Experimental Philosophy, Prov’d by Mechanicks (London: B. Creake etc., 1719)Google Scholar
, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology Medicine and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Les Freins à la Diffusion des Idées Nouvelles,” in (ed.), L’Espagne: de l’Immobilisme à l’Essor (Paris: CNRS, 1989).Google Scholar
, “A Satire on the Royal Society, dated 1753, attributed to Henry Fielding,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 23 (1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1979).Google Scholar
, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee-Houses (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956).Google Scholar
, “Médecins, Empiriques, et Charlatans dans la Presse Provinciale à la Fin du XVIIIe Siècle,” in Le Corps et la Santé: Actes du uoe Congrès Nationale des Sociétés Savantes (Paris: CTHS, 1985)Google Scholar
, “Translating the New Science: Women and the Circulation of Knowledge in Enlightenment Italy,” Configurations, 2 (1995).Google Scholar
, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).Google Scholar
, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
, “Peter Shaw: Chemistry and Communication in Augustan England,” Ambix, 30 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. (Cambridge: Polity, 1989; originally published in 1962).Google Scholar
, “Trials and Criminal Biographies: A Case Study in Distribution,” in and (eds.), Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1982).Google Scholar
, London News papers in the Age of Walpole: A Study of the Origins of the Modern English Press (London: Associated University Presses, 1987).Google Scholar
, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar
, “Economic Upheavals in Publishing,” in and (eds.), Revolution in Print: The Press in France 1775–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)Google Scholar
and , The Notebook of Thomas Bennet and Henry Clements (1686–1719), with Some Aspects of Book Trade Practice (Oxford: Bibliographical Society, 1956)Google Scholar
, “‘A Sickle unto thy Neighbour’s Corn’: Book Piracy in the Dutch Republic,” Quaerendo, 27 (1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “‘A Sickle unto thy Neighbour’s Corn,’” and (ed.), Les Presses Grises: La Contrefaçon du Livre (XVIe-XIXe siècles) (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1988).Google Scholar
, The Formation of the German Chemical Community (1720–1795) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).Google Scholar
(ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone, 1993).Google Scholar
, “‘Is He Like Other Men?’ The Meaning of the Principia Mathematica, and the Author as Idol,” in (ed.), Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History (Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar
, “Naturphilosophie and the Kingdoms of Nature,” in , , and (eds.), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
, “The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, 101 (1996)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
, “What is Enlightenment?” in , Political Writings, trans. , ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1970)Google Scholar
, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)Google Scholar
, A History of Scientific and Technical Periodicals: The Origins and Development of the Scientific and Technical Press, 1665–1790 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976)Google Scholar
, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar
, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar
, “The Scandinavian Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” in and (eds.), Buch und Buch-handel in Europa im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981)Google Scholar
, Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Development of European Scientific Journal Publishing Before 1850,” in (ed.), Development of Science Publishing in Europe (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1980)Google Scholar
, The French Book: Religion, Absolutism, and Readership, 1585–1715, trans. and (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
and (eds.), The Bowyer Ledgers (London: Bibliographical Society, 1991), iv (no. 2968).Google Scholar
, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
, The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)Google Scholar
, “Reading Women: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century England,” in and (eds.), The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995).Google Scholar
, “Print Culture in the Netherlands on the Eve of the Revolution,” in and (eds.), The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar
, Revolutionary News: The Press in France 1789–1799 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990)Google Scholar
, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar
, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility,” Studies in the Eighteenth Century, 3 (1976)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
, “Defoe’s Natural Philosophy and the Worlds of Credit,” in and (eds.), Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle,” History of Science, 21 (1983).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
, “Newton in the Nursery: Tom Telescope and the Philosophy of Tops and Balls, 1761–1838,” History of Science, 23 (1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Extraordinary Experiment: Electricity and the Creation of Life in Victorian England,” in , , and (eds.), The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar
, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar
, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar
, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).Google Scholar
, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1790 (Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar
, “Seeing through the Scholium: Religion and Reading Newton in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science, 24 (1996).Google Scholar
, “‘In the even my wife read to me’: Women, Reading and Household Life in the Eighteenth Century,” in , , and (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar
, The Royal Company of Printers and Booksellers of Spain, 1763–1794 (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1984)Google Scholar
, “The History of the Book in Eighteenth-Century England, Ireland, and America,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 16 (1992)Google Scholar
, “L’Espace de la République des Lettres,” in and (eds.), Commercium Litterarum: La Communication dans la République des Lettres, 1600–1750 (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1994)Google Scholar
, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar
, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)Google Scholar
, “Genius, Method, and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760–1860,” Science in Context, 2 (1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 2
- Cited by