Seeking Natural Knowledge in Later 17th Century England

Abstract The work offers a view of the social and cultural context for collecting of natural history in late seventeenth-century England. It seeks to show the continuing intrinsic connection between chorography, antiquarianism, natural history, and even applied mathematics, and the interest of such matters for the University of Oxford. An introductory chapter places chorography in its European cosmological context before looking at details of its study—in both its antiquarian and practical aspects—in Early Modern England, and the methods by which it was pursued there. Parallels are drawn with similar activity in France and Germany. In the following chapters, through an account of the work of Robert Plot, the way in which his writings established a new form of chorographical natural history investigation and writing is described, and how this work fed into, and in part provoked, the foundation of the Ashmolean Musæum as a non-collegiate, university institution, in Oxford. Activity in the Musæum during its early years is described as is the work of the Philosophical Society that met within it. The composition of this body is analysed. A final chapter describes Plot’s influence, and his successors up to the very early eighteenth century. The eight appendices supply an essential documentary underpinning for the work offering new material on the burial of Plot, the bibliography of his works and his portraits, and supplies hitherto unpublished documents concerning the Oxford Philosophical Society and science lectures.