Martin Folkes, Antiquary

Chapter six continues the intellectual connections between Folkes’s and his contemporaries’ work in natural philosophy, natural history and antiquarianism via two case studies involving Folkes’s work in numismatics and in the Egyptian Society. Just as Folkes promoted Newtonianism, his writing of his Table of Gold and Silver Coins reflected his allegiance to his mentor Newton, Master of the Royal Mint, as his editing did of Newton’s biblical chronologies. Royal Society Fellows were also deriving metrological standards and tables of specific gravities of metals, so these concerns dovetailed in Folkes’s work on the English coinage. Use of material culture to reconstruct the past was inherent to antiquarianism and to natural philosophy at the Royal Society. Fellows attended experimental demonstrations from which axiomatic principles were formulated via discursive practice; members could also access this material by the reading of reports of experiments. The Egyptian Society to which Folkes belonged (1741–3) had the same methodology, to discover principles of sociocultural and religious practices in Egypt, as well as to provide ‘object biographies’ of artefacts that belonged to members that they examined with speculations on their manufacture and use, for instance of ancient enamels and pigments, as well as the practice of mummification.