Elizabeth Yale

This dissertation investigates the “manuscript culture” of a group of seventeenth-century English scientists, including Robert Plot, John Evelyn, John Aubrey, Henry Oldenburg, Edward Lhwyd, and Samuel Hartlib. Looking past the technologically deterministic framework of “print culture” in which the circulation of knowledge in early modern Europe has often been understood, this study reconstructs the material details of the circulation of knowledge. As the world of seventeenth-century scientific readers and writers is revealed, so, too, are the ways in which their social and material choices conditioned the formation of scientific knowledge.