DOCSLIB.ORG

Download (4Mb)

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Download (4Mb) University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/58036 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. Thoroughly English: County Natural History, c. 1660-1720 David Beck University ID Number 0200818 Submitted in part fulfilment for the degree of PhD in History at the University of Warwick July 2013 i Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................... iii List of Illustrations ...........................................................................................................iv Declaration ...................................................................................................................... v Conventions .................................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1 Indigenous knowledge .................................................................................................... 4 The Construction of Space and the Landscape since the Linguistic Turn ..................... 13 Disenchantment and Utility .......................................................................................... 29 “Mouldy” Antiquarians, Historical Sensibility and Nature ............................................ 41 Chapter Structure ......................................................................................................... 49 CHAPTER ONE- THE LANDSCAPE OF COUNTY NATURAL HISTORY: MEMORY, PATRONAGE, AND SOCIABILITY .. 53 Before County Natural History: Antiquarianism in Tudor and Early Stuart England .... 59 The Civil War: Rupture or Catalyst? .............................................................................. 81 The Restoration of Learning and the Birth of County Natural History ......................... 96 Post-Revolution County Natural History ..................................................................... 112 Conclusions- Change and Continuity .......................................................................... 120 CHAPTER TWO- “SEARCHING INTO NATURAL KNOWLEDGE”: PRACTICES OF COLLECTION, DESCRIPTION, AND VERIFICATION ...................................... 123 Far from Random Perambulations. ............................................................................. 132 ‘A Great Deal of Pains… But With a Great Delight’ ..................................................... 149 Literary Technologies .................................................................................................. 155 Editing, Illustration, and Textual References .............................................................. 171 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 189 CHAPTER THREE: ‘FAITHFUL REPRESENTATION’ ....... 193 Antiquarianism and the Epistemology of ‘Historia’ .................................................... 200 “The Improvement of Knowledge” ............................................................................. 211 Fidelity and Empiricism ............................................................................................... 220 Utility and Curiosity..................................................................................................... 236 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 247 i CHAPTER FOUR- “THE CARE AND WISDOM OF THE GREAT CREATOR”............................................................................................. 250 ‘The Great Magnificence of God’- Description and Display ........................................ 262 Fossils and the Universal Deluge: Physico-Theology in Practice ................................ 277 “All Thy Marvellous Works”: The Landscape and Man ............................................... 288 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 304 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................ 307 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................... 318 Manuscript Sources .................................................................................................... 318 Printed Primary Sources (pre-1800) ........................................................................... 319 Editions and Collections of Primary Sources (1800 onwards) .................................... 325 Printed Secondary Sources ......................................................................................... 327 Unpublished Theses .................................................................................................... 347 Web Pages................................................................................................................... 347 ii Abstract This thesis focuses upon the county natural history, a genre of writing unique to England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century which spanned subjects which we might now refer to as genealogy, heraldry, cartography, botany, geology, and mineralogy, among others, while retaining a focus on a single county. It situates the genre firmly as a successor to local antiquarianism and chorography in Tudor and early Stuart England. In focusing on a single genre which spans both historical and natural topics, methodologies of enquiry from several historiographic fields are utilized: particularly heavily drawn upon are historical geography, historical epistemology, as well as cultural histories of both history and religion. The thesis aims to make two specific historiographic contributions. Firstly, it demonstrates the value of integrating cultural histories of natural objects and the landscape with historical epistemology. As well as being an object of philosophical or “scientific” knowledge, nature and the landscape held significant cultural meaning, particularly when located in historical narratives and understood as part of God’s world. This is exposed particularly clearly in chapter four’s discussion of physico- theology’s duality: both biblical and natural study combined to emplace God in the landscape. Secondly the thesis offers a reflection on the meanings of locality, place, and the construction of the landscape utilized in historical geography and the history of science. In this period both the nation and physical landscape were envisaged as constructed from discrete “parts”, counties. This is set in the context of earlier, and better known, ‘nation’ constructions, Camden’s construction of the nation by analogy to the human body around the turn of the seventeenth century, and Defoe’s construction of the nation as a trade network centred upon London in 1724. iii List of Illustrations Figure 1- Map of Middlesex. Source: Norden, Speculum Britanniae, pp. 14-15. ............ 66 Figure 2- Amended Copy of Norden’s Map of Middlesex. Source: Camden, Britain (1610), pp. 418-9............................................................................................................... 68 Figure 3- Map Illustrating Social Ranks. Source: Speed, Theatre of the Empire, pp. 5-6.69 Figure 4- Illustrated Echoes. Source: Plot, of Oxfordshire, pp. 16-17. ........................... 159 Figure 5- Specific Density of Samples. Source: Morton, of Northamptonshire, p. 132. 162 Figure 6- Shard of Flint, Plot, of Stafford-shire, pp. 396-7 ............................................. 164 Figure 7- "Mock Sun". Source: Plot, of Stafford-shire, pp. 28-29. ................................. 167 Figure 8- Table 22. Source: of Staffordshire, pp. 266-7 .................................................. 177 Figure 9- Ingestre Hall. Source: Plot, Of Staffordshire, pp. 298-9 ................................... 179 Figure 10- Shells. Source: Morton, of Northamptonshire, pp. 220-21. .......................... 180 Figure 11- Coins. Source: Leigh, of Lancashire, vol. 3, p. 109. ..................................... 182 Figure 12- Belemnite. Source: Plot, of Oxfordshire, p. 100 ........................................... 224 Figure 13- Depressed Orbicular Stones. Source: Morton, of Northamptonshire, pp. 184- 85. ................................................................................................................................... 227 Figure 14- Cloak Button-like Stone. Source: Plot, of Stafford-Shire, pp. 198-99. ......... 228 Figure 15- Summer Solstice at Leek. Source: Plot, Of Stafford-Shire, p. 28. ................. 234 iv Declaration This thesis is entirely my own work. The thesis has not been submitted for a degree at another university. An article based on Chapter Four has been published as David Beck, ‘Regional Natural History in England: Physico-Theology and the Exploration of Nature’, Society and Politics 6 no. 2, special issue: God and the Order of Nature in Early Modern Thought (Nov. 2012), pp. 8-25. Conventions Except where indicated I have modernized spellings, but retained original capitalization, punctuation
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Historic County of Westmorland
    The Historic County of Westmorland A Case Study on the range, availability and usefulness of publications relating to the Historic County of Westmorland, and on the current provision of support for Local Historical Studies, with specific reference to the county town of Kendal Contents Introduction 3 Purpose and Scope of the Report 3 The Historic County of Westmorland 4 A Survey and Critical Evaluation of the Scholarly Resources Relevant to the History of the County of Westmorland, and to the County Town of Kendal, from the Early Modern Period to the Present Day Antiquarians and Archive Makers of the 16th and 17th Centuries 6 The First County History in Print 12 In Search of the Picturesque/Losing sight of the Goal 13 Late 19th Century Foundation of Modern Historical Scholarship 15 The Historical Society and the Victoria County History 16 Local History Groups 17 Contemporary Narratives for Kendal 18 An Assessment of Current Provision for Local History Studies in Westmorland and the County Town of Kendal Libraries and Archives 19 Online/Digital Resources 20 Conclusion 21 Bibliography 22 Appendices 26 Appendix I Annotated Lists of Published Resources Appendix Ia Selected 16th & 17th Century Scholarship Appendix Ib Selected 18th Century Scholarship Appendix Ic Selected 19th Century Scholarship Appendix Id Selected Modern Scholarship Appendix Ie Selected Cartographic Evidence Appendix If Selected Resources for Kendal Appendix II Libraries, Archives and Record Offices Appendix III Historical Societies and Local History Groups Appendix IV Online/Digital Resources Illustrations Cover: Detail from William Hole’s county map of ‘Cumberlande, Westmorlande’ of 1622, created to illustrate Michael Drayton’s 15,000-line poem the Poly-Olbion P4: ‘The Countie Westmorland and Kendale the Cheif Towne Described with the Arms of Such Nobles as have been Earles of Either of Them’.
    [Show full text]
  • How Good a Historian Was Francis Blomefield
    Aberystwyth University 'Francis Blomefield as a historian of Norwich Stoker, David Published in: Norfolk Archaeology Publication date: 2005 Citation for published version (APA): Stoker, D. (2005). 'Francis Blomefield as a historian of Norwich. Norfolk Archaeology, 54, 387-405. Document License Unclear General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Aberystwyth Research Portal (the Institutional Repository) are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the Aberystwyth Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the Aberystwyth Research Portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. tel: +44 1970 62 2400 email: [email protected] Download date: 24. Sep. 2021 Francis Blomefield as a historian of Norwich David Stoker, M.Phil, Ph.D. This is the second of two papers seeking to examine the credentials of Francis Blomefield as the historian of the county of Norfolk. The first article sought to identify Blomefield’s contribution to the published history and analysed his approach to dealing with the rural areas and market towns of the county. This article will look at Blomefield’s approach to the history of Norwich, and answer the question as to whether Blomefield was a historian, an antiquary or a topographer.
    [Show full text]
  • Capital in the Countryside: Social Change in West Wiltshire, 1530-1680
    ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Capital in the countryside: social change in West Wiltshire, 1530-1680 https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40143/ Version: Full Version Citation: Gaisford, John (2015) Capital in the countryside: social change in West Wiltshire, 1530-1680. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email 1 Capital in the Countryside: Social Change in West Wiltshire, 1530-1680 John Gaisford School of History, Classics and Archaeology Birkbeck, University of London Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2015 The work presented in this thesis is my own. ©John Gaisford 2015 2 Abstract West Wiltshire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was among the leading producers of woollen cloth, England’s most important export commodity by far, but the region’s importance is often understated by modern historians. The cloth towns of Bradford-on-Avon, Trowbridge and Westbury were thriving when John Leland visited in 1540; but GD Ramsay thought they had passed their golden age by 1550 and declined during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Joan Thirsk – following the precedent of John Aubrey, who wrote a survey of north Wiltshire in the 1660s – characterised the region as ‘cheese country’. Based on new archival research, this thesis argues that, far from declining, cloth manufacture in west Wiltshire grew throughout the Tudor era and remained strong under the early Stuarts; that production of this crucial trade commodity gave the region national significance; and that profits from the woollen trade were the main drivers of change in west Wiltshire over the period 1530-1680.
    [Show full text]
  • How Good a Historian Was Francis Blomefield
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Aberystwyth Research Portal Aberystwyth University 'Francis Blomefield as a historian of Norwich Stoker, David Published in: Norfolk Archaeology Publication date: 2005 Citation for published version (APA): Stoker, D. (2005). 'Francis Blomefield as a historian of Norwich. Norfolk Archaeology, 54, 387-405. Document License Unspecified General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Aberystwyth Research Portal (the Institutional Repository) are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the Aberystwyth Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the Aberystwyth Research Portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. tel: +44 1970 62 2400 email: [email protected] Download date: 09. Jul. 2020 Francis Blomefield as a historian of Norwich David Stoker, M.Phil, Ph.D. This is the second of two papers seeking to examine the credentials of Francis Blomefield as the historian of the county of Norfolk. The first article sought to identify Blomefield’s contribution to the published history and analysed his approach to dealing with the rural areas and market towns of the county.
    [Show full text]
  • William Camden and the Re-Discovery of England R.C
    William Camden and the Re-Discovery of England R.C. Richardson William Camden (1551–1623) stands out as one of the founding fathers of English Local History, with Britannia (1586) his chief claim to fame. This article takes stock of the remarkable shelf life of this classic book, its aims, methodology, structure and achievement. Camden’s account of Leicestershire receives special attention. By virtue of its agenda, Britannia needs to be seen as a work of national re-discovery, while its enthusiastic reception by the author’s contemporaries demonstrates how much it contributed to the defining and development of ‘Englishness’ in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The late sixteenth century in England stands out as one of the most remarkable periods in this country’s history and witnessed enormous and often unsettling and destabilising social, economic, cultural, religious and political changes as well as outstanding achievements in many fields. A huge outpouring of creative cultural energy occurred. Shakespeare, Ralegh, Sidney, Spenser and many more of their contemporaries are justly celebrated; the roll-call is stunningly impressive. William Camden, by contrast, did not become a household name either at that time or since. Even Thomas Fuller’s mid seventeenth-century The Worthies of England curiously omits him. His life was, by most standards, unspectacular and uneventful. Yet, within the scholarly circle in which he moved during his lifetime his reputation was very considerable. His tomb which is in Westminster Abbey, close to that of Chaucer, bears the inscription, ‘Camden, the Nurse of antiquity and the lantern unto succeeding ages’.1 A glowing biography of him in Latin by Thomas Smith was published in 1691.
    [Show full text]
  • The Lay of the Land: English Landscape Themes in Early Modern Painting in England
    The Lay of the Land: English Landscape Themes in Early Modern Painting in England Barbara Lou Budnick A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2017 Reading Committee: Christine Goettler, Chair Estelle C. Lingo Susan P. Casteras Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Art History ©Copyright 2017 Barbara Lou Budnick University of Washington Abstract The Lay of the Land: English Landscape Themes in Early Modern Painting in England Barbara Lou Budnick Chair of Supervisory Committee: Professor Christine Goettler Art History Landscape paintings generally offer a far and wide view of external world, including all parts of the built and natural environment that pass before the eye. As a genre in England, landscape painting arose slowly in the second decade of the seventeenth century, portraying royal palaces and their prosperous environs along the Thames. This dissertation examines the development of an English landscape iconography based on property, both real and intellectual. I argue that during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries traditional English hierarchies of ownership were combined with new concepts of achievement to reimagine exclusive rights. To analyze visual works within an early modern context, I draw on a range of late sixteenth- to late eighteenth-century written sources, including diaries, journals, private correspondence, public rolls, personal account ledgers, periodicals, poetry, histories, travel texts, and scientific works, as well as economic, political, and aesthetic treatises. Such a broad literature of source material is interdisciplinary and situates landscape imagery in its historical period. Similarities and differences in verbal and visual representations reveal how concepts of knowledge changed throughout the period: just as contemporary manuscripts and printed texts celebrated increasing concentrations of riches and innovative technologies, landscapes depicted larger properties, advances in science, and recent sources of prosperity.
    [Show full text]
  • Shire, 1530-1680
    ORBIT - Online Repository of Birkbeck Institutional Theses Enabling Open Access to Birkbecks Research Degree output Capital in the countryside: social change in West Wilt- shire, 1530-1680 http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/143/ Version: Full Version Citation: Gaisford, John (2015) Capital in the countryside: social change in West Wiltshire, 1530-1680. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London. c 2015 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copyright law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit guide Contact: email 1 Capital in the Countryside: Social Change in West Wiltshire, 1530-1680 John Gaisford School of History, Classics and Archaeology Birkbeck, University of London Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2015 The work presented in this thesis is my own. ©John Gaisford 2015 2 Abstract West Wiltshire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was among the leading producers of woollen cloth, England’s most important export commodity by far, but the region’s importance is often understated by modern historians. The cloth towns of Bradford-on-Avon, Trowbridge and Westbury were thriving when John Leland visited in 1540; but GD Ramsay thought they had passed their golden age by 1550 and declined during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Joan Thirsk – following the precedent of John Aubrey, who wrote a survey of north Wiltshire in the 1660s – characterised the region as ‘cheese country’. Based on new archival research, this thesis argues that, far from declining, cloth manufacture in west Wiltshire grew throughout the Tudor era and remained strong under the early Stuarts; that production of this crucial trade commodity gave the region national significance; and that profits from the woollen trade were the main drivers of change in west Wiltshire over the period 1530-1680.
    [Show full text]
  • How Good a Historian Was Francis Blomefield
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Aberystwyth Research Portal Aberystwyth University 'Francis Blomefield as a historian of Norwich Stoker, David Published in: Norfolk Archaeology Publication date: 2005 Citation for published version (APA): Stoker, D. (2005). 'Francis Blomefield as a historian of Norwich. Norfolk Archaeology, 54, 387-405. Document License Unspecified General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Aberystwyth Research Portal (the Institutional Repository) are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the Aberystwyth Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the Aberystwyth Research Portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. tel: +44 1970 62 2400 email: [email protected] Download date: 03. Oct. 2019 Francis Blomefield as a historian of Norwich David Stoker, M.Phil, Ph.D. This is the second of two papers seeking to examine the credentials of Francis Blomefield as the historian of the county of Norfolk. The first article sought to identify Blomefield’s contribution to the published history and analysed his approach to dealing with the rural areas and market towns of the county.
    [Show full text]
  • 06 Thomas 1034 18/11/02 9:51 Am Page 201
    06 Thomas 1034 18/11/02 9:51 am Page 201 BRITISH ACADEMY LECTURE The Life of Learning KEITH THOMAS Fellow of the Academy BIRON What is the end of study, let me know? KING Why, that to know which else we should not know. BIRON Things hid and barred, you mean, from common sense? KING Ay, that is study’s god-like recompense. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost,I.i. THERE WOULD BE NO BRITISH ACADEMY if there were no individuals who devoted their working lives to the study of the past—its history, its lan- guages and literature, its material remains and its religious, legal and philosophical traditions. These are the studies which, along with the social sciences, the Academy exists to foster. Yet many intelligent people are perplexed, and sometimes even indignant, that human energies should be expended in this way. Here is an irate peer, speaking some years ago in the House of Lords: ‘What a scandal, and what a perversion of resources...when one considers some of the subjects of the research being undertaken at postgraduate level in our universities. I pluck one . Someone in a university somewhere has been beavering away for the past three or four years on a study called “Concepts of Civility in England between 1570 and 1670”. Fundamental, my Lords, to our pioneering economic and technological future!’1 It would be easy to assemble similar expressions of scepticism about the value of humane scholarship, even scholarship as distinguished as Read at the Academy 20 November 2001. In all quotations, spelling, capitalisation and punctuation have been modernised.
    [Show full text]
  • Printed Questionnaires and the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge in The
    Parochial Queries: Printed Questionnaires and the Pursuit of Natural ∗∗∗ Knowledge in the British Isles, 1650-1800 We live in an “age of information” in which electronic media have revolutionised our capacity to acquire and disseminate knowledge. These circumstances have prompted the wave of scholarly attention now being paid to the origins, development and consequences of new technologies of communication over the centuries. As Paul Slack has written, “Studies of the information revolution brought about by modern electronic media have naturally prompted interest in how information was created, diffused and manipulated in the past and with what effects”. i As he points out, much focus in this respect has been directed towards the early modern period in Europe in which the invention of moveable type, the creation of a mass market for printed matter, and the expanding bureaucracy of both Church and State were among those developments which contributed to a huge elaboration of the ways in which ideas and instructions were transmitted and received. For the most part, however, studies of the ways in which print transformed the possibilities of communication and knowledge exchange in early modern Europe have been concerned with the function of this new technology as a means of presenting and distributing information. ii There has been far less analysis of the use of the printed word in the process of contemporary fact-finding. During the seventeenth century, printed instruments were increasingly circulated by civil and ecclesiastical authorities, commercial organisations and private individuals, for the purposes not only of disseminating intellectual capital but also of acquiring it.
    [Show full text]