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Micrographia

Micrographia

Narrating a New World How Microscopic Experience was Communicated through the Words and Images of ’s .

By Jacob Orrje

Magister Essay Autumn 2007 / Spring 2008 Supervisor: Otto Sibum Department of and Ideas Uppsala University Abstract Narrating a New World: How Microscopic Experience was Communicated through the Words and Images of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. Uppsala University: Department of History of Science and Ideas, Magister Essay, autumn 2007 / spring 2008.

This essay revolves around Micrographia written by the English 17th century experimental philosopher Robert Hooke and the way it mediated microscopic experience. The focus of this study is on one hand the strategies Hooke used to communicate experience and on the other the responses by some of Hooke’s contemporary readers. By comparing Micrographia to Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy, we see that Micrographia uses images where the author is invisible and textual narrations with an explicit authorial voice to mediate experimental experience to his contemporaries. Samuel Pepys uses the mediated experiences to learn how to see through the and to become more like the author in Micrographia, Margaret Cavendish does not trust the representational techniques of Hooke and the playwright Thomas Shadwell satirizes the gentleman virtuoso that constitutes the narrative voice in Micrographia. By the study of these three readers, I build on Peter Dears definition of a scientific text as having an inherent reference to an experimental situation. By seeing Micrographia as defined through the interactions between the author and the readers, we see that this reference, and therefore a text’s scientific status, is defined by a relation between author and reader based on trust. The reader has to trust both the author and the representational techniques used in the text. The appropriation of Micrographia by readers who do not possess this trust, results in the redefinition of Micrographia into other kinds of texts that fill different purposes defined by the readers.

Keywords: Micrographia, Robert Hooke (1635-1703), experimental experience, communicating science, English restoration, scientific text.

Contents

Introduction ...... 1 Purpose...... 2 The Microscope and the Experience ...... 3 Communicating Experimental Experience ...... 5 Setting the Stage: Characters and Context...... 13 Micrographia Enters the Stage...... 17 Micrographia: Letters and Strokes ...... 18 Images and Words in Micrographia...... 22 Micrographia and Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy...... 25 Comparing the Images and Words of Hooke and Power...... 28 Samuel Pepys: “What to expect from my glasse” ...... 31 Margaret Cavendish: Observing Micrographia ...... 36 Cavendish’s View of Instruments and of Reading ...... 38 Pictorial Representations – Experience or Fantasy?...... 41 Thomas Shadwell: Observing the Experimentalists...... 43 Ridiculing Hooke’s view of the Small as Great ...... 46 Conclusions: Whole Sentences and Large Pictures ...... 51 Finale: Further Research and Final Thoughts...... 57

Image on title page: Hooke’s drawing of his compound microscope from Micrographia, plate facing page 1. 1

Introduction

To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. William Blake - Auguries of Innocence

The world is not what it seems. If the contents of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia were to be condensed into one sentence, that may be the one. The world is not what it seems because our senses do not reveal it as it really is. As I type these sentences on my computer, black words form on my screen. But if I was to examine them closer I would only find dots creating an intricate pattern of various colours. Then I would view the world in the way Hooke does in Micrographia. In 1665 the experimentalist Robert Hooke (1635-1703) published Micrographia, a book that described and displayed the world as seen by Hooke through his microscope. During the 17th century, was in fashion among experimentalists and wealthy amateurs. Through their lenses, the observers saw a new world that was often compared to, and considered as new and exiting as the new lands discovered by explorers at sea. What was seen through the microscope was perceived as a discovery that changed the way one viewed the old world: microscopic experiences of everyday objects like food, or printed text, rendered these objects strangely different. Micrographia can be seen as the culmination of this interest in microscopy. Microscopists could compare what they had seen in their to the book’s detailed full page pictures. But Hooke’s bestselling and repeatedly reprinted book was not only read by microscopists. Through the book, readers without access to expensive microscopes could experience the new microscopic world too. The last few decades have seen a substantial increase of interest in the experimental philosophy of the English Royal Society among historians of science. The Royal Society, founded in 1660, was a society that championed a based on an experimental ground. In other words: knowledge based on experimental experience. New social constructivist studies have viewed the collective organisation of the Royal Society as a typical example of how knowledge is constructed in a social context. These studies have discussed how individual experiences could be augmented into collective credible knowledge and how this was done by communicating experience in a social context. With the third

2 centennial of Hooke’s death, the focus of these historians of science has increasingly turned to Robert Hooke. Micrographia can be and has been studied as a part of this process of knowledge production, but to see it only as a part of this process is, I believe, too narrow a way to view Hooke’s book. Hooke does not only seek to produce knowledge of the microscopic. He also, seeks to mediate experience for its own sake, in the same way that travellers returning from foreign lands narrated their experiences to an anticipating public. But what attitude did the readers have to the experiences narrated in Micrographia? As it was a well circulated book, there are many texts that in some way relate to Micrographia. Both contemporary readers and later ones read, commented, discussed and satirized the contents of Hooke’s book. In this essay I will pick up some of the texts that enter into dialogue with Micrographia. The choice of readers should not be seen as representational of readers of Micrographia in general, but as especially interesting in answering the central question of this essay: how experience was mediated through Hooke’s book. My study is focused on the responses to Micrographia by readers that are Hooke’s contemporaries. Even though Micrographia was read well into the 18th century, I will only study the and the 1670s. The texts are chosen on basis of the diversity of their stances towards Micrographia, as I by their help want to show how readers could relate to Hooke’s text rather than to give a representational description of how reader in general did react to Micrographia. Through the canonical diary of Samuel Pepys, we get an example of how a reader with a microscope of his own related to prose narrating experimental experience. From the Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, a philosopher excluded from the contemporary philosophical discussion, we can read upon Experimental Philosophy. The Duchess’s book enters into a critical and interesting philosophical discussion on among other books Hooke’s Micrographia. Finally, we will turn to the satirist and playwright Thomas Shadwell and his comedy The Virtuoso. In The Virtuoso we get an example of how the experimental experience mediated in Micrographia is used to criticize the social structure of the Royal Society itself.

Purpose In my study I take a broad approach to Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. The purpose of this essay is not primarily to show how the knowledge of the 17th century experimentalists was created through experience, as shown by many earlier studies on the Royal Society. Rather, the focus is the mediation of experience itself. How did Hooke describe and relate to his own

3 and others’ microscopic experiences? How did Hooke attempt to convey experimental experience through Micrographia and how was this experience treated and related to by readers of the book? By relating the texts to each other, to the authors and to a contemporary social context, we can reveal the social aspects inherent in the mediation of Hooke’s microscopic experiences. Through studying the interactions between Micrographia and these texts we can seek to grasp the roles Hooke’s experience had, not only in the context of the knowledge production of the Royal Society, but in 17th century England at large. From the reaction of the readers of Micrographia, we can get an understanding of how the experience of Micrographia was transformed as it traversed different parts of the English restoration society. By broadening our focus from only the texts of the experimental philosophers and their ideas of how they should be read by a disciplined virtual witness, to also include various readers’ appropriation of these texts; I seek to deepen our understanding of the experimental text’s role in early modern society. My hope is that this shift of focus facilitates a more dynamic understanding of how the literary techniques were used in a social context. Also, by focusing on the readers of Micrographia, we can understand the relation of images and words better, by seeing how different readers responded to the images and the text in various ways.

The Microscope and the Experience

Before studying Hooke’s Micrographia, its contemporary readers and the mediation of experience, we must first discuss some earlier research done in conjunction to this subject. This essay revolves around experience gained through the microscope and the mediation of that experience to readers. But how can we as modern readers relate to this experience? In a very fundamental way, we can never totally grasp the individual experience gained through microscopes and books on microscopy. We can only try to get an understanding of how the 17th century Englishman experienced the microscopic world by reading attempts to mediate this individual experience to contemporary readers. In order to understand how microscopic experience translated into text, we first have to understand both what kind of instrument the 17th century microscope was and what role experience had in English restoration society. What was the microscope and microscopy in 17th century England? It is important to understand that the microscope was not a homogeneous artefact. Various forms of microscopes existed that had very different roles in the early modern society. In the 1660s,

4 observing through “ glasses” was a fairly common social pastime. These rather crude glasses let 17th century man observe the unmentionable filth of their own bodies in a magnified and therefore socially acceptable way.1 But even though magnifying lenses like flea glasses were fairly well spread, the art of microscopy was not. The commonly spread glasses were not very similar to the microscopes that were central in the launching of The Royal Society as an experimental philosophical community in the second half of the 17th century.2 Where the flea glasses magnified its study object roughly 10 times, which made it possible to see parts of , the microscopes utilized by the 17th century experimentalists had a magnification of 30 to 275 times.3 But the microscopes used by the experimentalists were very different from each other as well. The 17th century experimentalists’ microscopes can roughly be divided into two different designs. On one hand the two lens compound microscope and on the other a single lens simple microscope. While the simple microscopes had a superior magnification of up to 275 times, the compound microscopes only magnified its object 30-50 times. Still, Hooke used a compound microscope (see the title page of this essay for an image from Micrographia of Hooke’s microscope). He considered simple microscopes to be straining on his eyes. More important though, was probably that using a simple rather than a compound microscope would have forced Hooke to spend time learning how to use an instrument with which he was not familiar, time which he did not have. Furthermore, the simple microscope was better equipped to study opaque objects that did not transmit light of their own.4 But even though one could divide the microscopes into two categories, the problem of lighting was a shared problem for both designs. When magnifying an object through a lens, the light from the object is spread out. Therefore the object observed through the microscope gets darker. For the 17th century microscopists, the lighting conditions in which one observed microscopic objects was therefore very important. In the drawing of Hooke’s microscope we can see the candlelight that is focused through a lens and onto the microscope’s focal point (see title page). While this surely made the object brighter, the microscopic world in the 17th century was still a dark and obscure place.

1 Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World (Princeton, 1995), 78. 2 Brian J. Ford, "The Royal Society and the Microscope", Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 55 no 1 (2001). 3 Wilson, The Invisible World, 80. 4 Gerard L.E. Turner, "The Impact of Hooke's Micrographia and Its Influence on Microscopy," in Robert Hooke and the English , Paul Kent and Allan Chapman ed. (Leominster, 2005), 127.

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To understand the experience gained through the microscope by The Royal Society’s experimenters, one must understand the collective web spun by the community that was to manage and facilitate experimental practice. The experience gained through the microscope was in one sense very individual. First hand experience of the microscopic world could only be gained through one person’s gaze through the lens of the microscope. The experimentalists themselves did not see the individual experience as isolated to earlier experimental experiences; it was formed by the mediations and interpretations of earlier experiences and in turn constructed the basis for experiences gained through future . 5 When the early modern experimentalist looked through the lens of his microscope, he was greeted by a strange but inviting world. In the early modern books on microscopy this was often pointed out: through the microscope the experimental philosopher could gain experience that the ancients had never been able to attain.6 Through the microscope’s lens the philosopher could enter a new world hidden in the midst of everyday objects. Where telescopes maintained the distance between the observer and the observed universe, the microscope invited the observer to view objects in their very hands from a completely new perspective.7 As I said at the beginning of this section, it is difficult for a modern reader to fully grasp the novelty of the experiences of the microscopic. Also it is hard to realize the obscurity of the images that were gained through the microscope. The microscopic images that most of us have seen are rather different from what the early modern experimenter could see. We carry an unconscious preconception of the microscopic world that makes it very difficult for us to understand the individual microscopic experience of the 17th century experimenter.

Communicating Experimental Experience What we can try to understand is how individual experimental experience was mediated and how it was used in the community of experimental philosophers of the Royal Society. The Royal Society’s motto “nullius in verba”, which can be seen in an image at the beginning of

5 This can be seen for example in Hooke’s Micrographia, and I will go further into this subject in the part of the essay treating Hooke’s book. Robert Hooke [1665], Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses: With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon, Robert William Theodore Gunther ed., Early Science in Oxford: The Life and Work of Robert Hooke, vol. 13 (London, 1938), preface. 6 See for example Ibid. and Henry Power [1664], Experimental Philosophy, Containing New Experiments, Microscopical, Mercurial, Magnetical, Marie Boas Hall ed., The Sources of Science (New York-London, 1966). 7 Ford, "The Royal Society and the Microscope".

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Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667)8, has often been falsely read as “nothing in words” or as “nihil in verbis”. Clive Sutton argues that this misunderstanding is based on a common way of contrasting facts against words, or rather “hard facts against airy theories”.9 In a letter to Science Magazine , correcting Karl Popper who had made this common misinterpretation of the motto, called the translation of “nullius in verba” the “canonical mistranslation”. Instead of meaning just “nothing in words”, the quote is shorthand for a longer passage from Horace’s Epistulae that Gould translates as: I am not bound to swear allegiance To the word of any master Where the storm carries me, I put into port and make myself at home10

What “nullius in verba” means, read in the context of what it refers to and the experimental programme, is that the Royal Society renounces the authority of ancient philosophers (most notably ). Instead the Society saw authority in experimental experience. That is, individual experience turned into knowledge through a collective process. What the Society meant by its motto was not that words were unimportant, but that the scientific text should refer to experimental situations rather than to words in ancient texts.11 As Peter Dear states in “Narratives, Anecdotes, and Experiments”, the scientific texts and scientific practice should not be seen as two separate entities.12 An account of an action is an inseparable part of the action’s meaning, just as the meaning of the account itself relies on its implicit referent. Thus the meaning of an account of an experimental event – that which makes a text something that describes an experimental event rather than a series of marks on a

8 Thomas Sprat [1667], The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones ed. (Missouri, 1958), plate facing title page. 9 Clive Sutton, "'Nullius in Verba' and 'Nihil in Verbis': Public Understanding of the Role of Language in Science", BJHS 27 (1994), 58. 10 Stephen Jay Gould, "Letter", Science 251 (1991).The original is: Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri, quo me comque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes 11 Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (London, 1996), 80-82. 12 The use of the term “scientific text” can be somewhat misleading. Seeing the experimental philosophy of the Royal Society as a kind of “protoscience” can easily lead to a linear view of history where the early modern experimentalist’s research is viewed as an earlier version that compulsory leads to what we today know as “science”. Therefore, I intentionally seek to avoid using terms like “scientific text” in the essay. Instead I use the somewhat more cumbersome term “experimental philosophy” that was used during the studied period. In sections as above though, where I refer to texts that use the term “science” themselves in referral to what I call “experimental philosophy”, I will keep the original choice of words.

7 paper – is provided by its implicit reference to a “spatiotemporally defined region of clinking glassware or grooved pieces of wood being manipulated by a human agent”. 13 In other words, scientific text can be seen as constructed in relation to an experimental situation. Furthermore, the experimental situation (or the experimental experience) can be seen as constructed by the account describing it. Dear also argues that this account can be seen as a social currency, because language is irredeemably social.14 One can identify this norm of referring to actual experimental experience within the genre of early modern experimental prose. Thomas Sprat wrote in his History of The Royal Society that: [I]f the Royal Society shall much busie themselves, about such wonderful, and uncertain events, they will fall into that mistake, of which I have already accus’d some Antients, of framing Romances, instead of solid Histories of .15

What separates the experimental philosophical text from “romances” is the referral to actual experience. But experimental prose did not only refer to the individual experience of the author, which might be seen clearly in the 17th century controversies on propriety, piracy and abridgement described by Adrian Johns.16 As Johns shows in The Nature of the Book, the relation of experimental philosophical texts to earlier works of experimental scientists was not uncomplicated. In The Nature of the Book we can see how scientific text was created through a cycle of writing, printing and appropriation that leads to new writing.17 This process was not consistent with the norm of the genre of experimental prose to always refer to individual experience, which can be seen in the practice of experimentalists to claim not to have read certain books. This can be seen as a way for the experimentalists to adhere to their self imposed norms.18 But if the Royal Society saw authority in individual experience, transmuting this experience into knowledge was a collective process. Many texts in the history of science have treated this collective basis of the English experimental community. Most of these texts have focused on Robert Boyle (1627-91), experimental philosopher and member of the Royal

13 Peter Dear, "Narratives, Anecdotes, and Experiments: Turning Experience into Science in the Seventeenth Century" in The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument, Peter Dear ed. (Philadelphia, 1991), 136. 14 Peter Dear, "Narratives, Anecdotes, and Experiments: Turning Experience into Science in the Seventeenth Century", 137. 15 Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society, 241. 16 Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998), 444-542. 17 Ibid., 58-59. 18 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J., 1985), 68.

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Society. The central works in that discussion are without doubt the works by Stephen Shapin and Simon Shaffer that revolve around the concept of analysing the new science through three : the material, the social and the literary. Shapin and Shaffer argue that the members of the Royal Society developed these technologies as a means of establishing their knowledge on experimental ground.19 The “literary ” can be seen as a rhetorical framework constructed by the members of the Royal Society (most explicitly by Robert Boyle, for example in his New Experiments). This literary technology was based on a literary style of vividness that sought to establish an image of the experimental situation in the mind of the reader – in the reader’s “laboratory of the mind” or his “mind’s eye”. Shapin and Shaffer view this “literary technology” as a knowledge producing tool. But the analytical concept of the literary technology is not only something constituted by words, central in Shapin and Shaffer’s study of Boyle are the images used to mediate experience and the role they played in the literary technology.20 Shapin and Shaffer argue that the social, material and literary technologies used by the Royal Society were intimately linked to each other and that it is not possible to understand the literary technology without observing it in the context of material equipment and social practice. The knowledge of the new experimental philosophy was constructed through the communication of experiments in a social context, through replication of experimental results, direct witnessing of experiments conducted with material artefacts and through “virtual witnessing”, i.e. through apprehension of literary description of experiments.21 Shapin and Schaffer describe the virtual witnessing as involving: “the production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication”22. By having his experiments – for it was always a “he” – witnessed and replicated, the experimenter could establish his results on a credible ground. This way of establishing knowledge was in many ways influenced by the contemporary English judicial system, shown for example by Barbara Shapiro.23 As in court, it was however not sufficient just to have the

19 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 25. 20 Ibid, 25. 21 Ibid. ; Steven Shapin, "Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle's Literary Technology", Social Studies of Science 14 no 4 (1984). 22 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 60. 23 Barbara Shapiro, "The Concept "Fact": Legal Origins and Cultural Diffusion", Albion 26 no 1 (1994).

9 witnessed; the experiment had to be witnessed by people who were considered credible and truthful. The experiment also had to be witnessed in a disciplined way – avoiding the pitfall of radical individualism. Seeing in a disciplined way meant that the witness discriminated between true and false sensory experiences by conforming to the Royal Society’s norms of collective knowledge production.24 But apart from this, the witness itself also had to be the right person. That is, the disciplined seer had to be a gentleman. The 17th century English concept of the gentleman defined a male social sphere of men of means, who did not depend on work to make a living. This lack of dependency meant that the gentlemen were viewed by the surrounding society as unbiased: a gentleman’s word was intimately linked to his honour and was seen as trustworthy. The experimental community formed around this concept (and subsequently also formed the concept) and could therefore mobilize the social status of the gentleman as a means to managing controversies and knowledge production within their group as well as mobilizing support in the contemporary English society. The gentleman could be believed because he was self owning and did not depend on anyone else, partly because of his wealth partly through his role in contemporary English society. In contrast, women and men not belonging to the gentry were seen as depending on and belonging to someone else in a very literal sense: women to their husbands and men to their superiors. Therefore, the concept of the gentleman was central in attributing an experience to a certain individual and it was the core of the identity of the experimentalists, or the “virtuosos” as they called themselves. The concept of the virtuoso summed up all the qualities of a gentleman that pursued knowledge through experimental means.25 According to Shapin, the norms of the gentleman can be seen in the scientific language of The Royal Society as well as their social practice. Not only the author of experimental philosophical text was supposed a gentleman, both the direct and the virtual witness were thought to be gentlemen too. Through the Royal Society’s prose we can identify the ideas of modesty and the focus on facts rather than speculation, clear examples of gentlemanliness. Shapin sees these ideas as something necessary to manage scientific disputes among gentlemen in a non-violent way, and these ideas were also an integral part of the literary technology.26

24 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 56. M. A. Dennis, "Graphic Understanding: Instruments and Interpretation in Robert Hooke's Micrographia", Science in Context 3 (1989). 25 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994). 26 Ibid., 65-125.

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Donna Haraway identifies this gentlemanly way of writing experimental accounts as based on modesty. The author had to make himself invisible in order to create narratives that mirrored reality. The author, according to Haraway, belonged to a of no-culture, where they could be unbiased spokesmen for nature.27 Shapin’s view of the literary technology as something that mobilized support and provided credibility through virtual witnessing has been criticized by for example Lawrence M. Principe for being to functionalistic. According to Principe, the origin of Boyle’s prose style can be traced back to the style of 17th century French romances, something that according to him clearly “weaken[s] the ‘literary technology’ view of his style as strategically calculated for propagandizing the New Science”28. Principe has a point: the 17th century experimentalist prose should not only be seen as constructed in a social context, but also as relating to earlier literary tradition. But does this fact oppose the view that the members of The Royal Society constructed a literary technology to mediate experience from experimental situations? That the society drew on other literary genres when it constructed their own literary style does not mean that the prose they used cannot also be analyzed through its social and material context. That the literary technology draws on the style of the fictional romances is an interesting find of Principe’s, but I would not agree with him that it weakens Shapin’s claims of how the experimental prose was constructed in a social context. Many of the studies on the literary techniques used by the Royal Society, for instance Shapin and Schaffer’s concept of literary technology, have focused on how experimental experience was mediated within the bounded group of early modern experimentalists. But as has been noted by for example Larry Stewart, early modern scientists often used the same language to communicate their experimental experiences to a wider audience as within their social group. Micrographia is a typical example of this: a far greater audience than just the members of the Royal Society received Robert Hooke’s book on microscopy. The main reason for this is that Micrographia utilized both images and words in order to communicate experience. According to Stewart, this transformed the discourse of natural philosophy and “linked the issue of credibility to the rhetorical utility of statements that showed, rather than told, the scientific facts”.29

27 Donna Haraway, "Modest Witness: Feminist Diffractions in " in The Disunity of Sciences: Boundaries, Contents, and Power, Peter Galison and David Stump ed. (Stanford, 1996), 429-431. 28 Lawrence M. Principe, "Virtuous Romance and Romantic Virtuoso: The Shaping of Robert Boyle's Literary Style", Journal of the History of Ideas 56 no 3 (1995). 29 Larry R. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science (Cambridge, 1992), 13.

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In the 16th century, images had grown to be a necessary component of a marketable book of . By new techniques of printing, text and pictures could easily be reproduced side by side in large quantities of copies. The images were used for pictorial representation of natural objects in works of for example and .30 These images of the naturalists were constructed according to certain norms. As opposed to the artist’s way of depicting for example a , the naturalist’s images showed the plant in a way that it would never be seen in nature. Where the artist painted the plant as seen at a given moment in its existence, the naturalist created a general picture of the plant as it might be observed at any time.31 Through the example of the German botanist Konrad Gesner, Brian W. Ogilvie shows how images could be used. Gesner saw the role of the pictures as to aid the understanding of aspects of nature that were previously unknown and which therefore could not be easily conveyed to the reader though the use of words. On the other hand, words were considered more effective to describe subtle details in the objects described.32 In The Art of Describing, the art historian Svetlana Alpers relates 17th century painters to their contemporary English experimentalists. Through her comparison she constructs an analytical framework with which we can analyse and understand the mediation of individual experience through the concept of picturing.33 Alpers contrasts the Dutch “northern” art that deals with description with the Italian “southern” art that is based on narration.34 Through Alpers we can see that the experimental prose of for instance Boyle and Hooke are a part of a broad contemporary visual culture where “seeing is believing”35. Alpers relates this visual culture to Johannes Kepler’s (1571- 1630) theories of optics and his investigations into the optics of the eye. According to Alpers, Kepler viewed the eye as a creator of representations: “The function of the act of seeing is defined as making a representation: representation in the dual sense that it is an artifice […] and that it resolves the rays of light into a picture”36.

30 Brian W. Ogilvie, "Image and Text in Natural History 1500-1700" in The Power of Images in Early Modern Science, Wolfgang Lefèvre, Jürgen Renn, and Urs Schoepflin ed. (Basel, 2003), 141. 31 Ibid., 145. 32 Brian W. Ogilvie, "Image and Text in Natural History 1500-1700", 156. 33 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1983). 34 Ibid., 26. 35 Ibid., 36. 36 Ibid.

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But through Alpers we can also identify the microscope as part of this visual culture. By the use of a microscope, the early modern observer could see the microscopic world and therefore believe it. But if Alpers is correct in that 17th century England was part of a visual culture – how could one write a narration of experimental experience that was believed? In their study of Robert Boyle, Shapin and Shaffer argue that the English 17th century experimentalists used images as a mimetic device that was “not a schematized line drawing but an attempt at detailed naturalistic representation”37. This is more similar to how Alpers relates how the contemporary Dutch artists described their experience of the world than to how Ogilvie argues that natural historians represented experience of nature. Shapin and Shaffer further argue that the function of the experimentalists’ text can be understood through studying their images, thus indicating an identical function of both of them. This essay will study Micrographia from a perspective similar to the earlier research presented above. The ideas of literary technology, disciplined virtual witnesses and the roles of images and words will be central in what I am doing. But in order to separate Shapin and Shaffer’s analytical framework of the “literary technology” from Hooke’s literary practice, I will also use the terms “literary style” or “literary techniques”. I will use these when discussing Hooke’s text in a more narrow context and Shapin’s term “literary technology” when discussing it in the framework of experimentalist knowledge production. Further, Dear’s statement of an experimental account as a piece of social currency will be central in my study. Micrographia was not only appreciated by readers conforming to the norms of the disciplined witness and Hooke’s images and words can not only be seen as a literary technological device for knowledge production. How is the value of Micrographia as social currency appreciated as it traverses the English society? Furthermore, the roles of the text and the images in Micrographia are uncertain. Are the images mimetic devices or ideal pictures? In the next section, when we turn to the actors of this essay and the early modern English society they lived in, I will keep this earlier research ready, as tools that can be brought forth when useful.

37 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 62.

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Setting the Stage: Characters and Context

In 1665, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia was published in an English society that had undergone a period of political and military unrest. In the 1640s and the 1650s, England had witnessed civil war, the beheading of Charles I in 1649, James Cromwell’s regime and finally Charles II returning and restoring the Stuart line to the throne in 1660.38 While it would be wrong to read Robert Hooke’s Micrographia as just a product of this political situation39, the relative instability of English society is an important backdrop. It can be seen as a fond to both the contents of Micrographia and to the mediation and discussion of Hooke’s experiences. Even the name of the Royal Society should be understood in the context of the king’s restoration to the throne only some years before the establishing of the Society. Micrographia was first intended as a gift from the newly founded Royal Society to the new king Charles II. The Society’s member Christopher Wren had begun recording observations through the microscope, but soon the newly hired curator of experiments, Robert Hooke, was ordered to continue the work instead. Hooke presented his findings at the meetings of the Society at London’s Gresham College and through this process Micrographia eventually materialized. When finished, however, Micrographia was no longer intended as a gift to Charles II, but instead went into print (but with a dedication to the king). The book, with its 38 full-page pictures, became a well circulated bestseller on the English restoration book market.40 Even though the book became something else than just a beautiful gift to the Society's royal patron, the group of people appreciating and relating to Micrographia that I study in this essay was never far from the king. In fact, the readers were a small group of people that all knew of each other. Furthermore, they all belonged to an English elite rather near Charles II himself. The experimental technology used by the experimentalists was too expensive for most 17th century Englishmen to afford. The most extreme example is perhaps Boyle’s air- pump, which was very expensive and hard to build, something that made the replication of Boyle’s experiments difficult. Even though microscopes were also too expensive for the

38 Encyclopædia Britannica, ": Commonwealth and Protectorate" Encyclopædia Britannica Online, http://search.eb.com/eb/article-44866, ———, "United Kingdom: The Restoration" Encyclopædia Britannica Online, http://search.eb.com/eb/article-44869. 39 Michael Aaron Dennis is close to this way of reading Micrographia when he in a rather militaristic romanticizing fashion states that “Arms were to citizens what the […] microscope […] were to members of the early Royal Society”, Dennis, "Graphic Understanding", 309. 40 Turner, "The Impact of Hooke's Micrographia and Its Influence on Microscopy," 131.

14 ordinary 17th century Englishman, the equipment for microscopic examinations had spread somewhat among the 17th century London elite. In this context, one might see Micrographia as a poor man’s substitute for a microscope. But while Micrographia was certainly cheaper than microscopes, it was not inexpensive. In the 17th century, the printing of images was very costly, and Micrographia was richly illustrated. Therefore, its price of 30 shillings per copy was not something that all of Hooke’s contemporaries could afford.41 So while Micrographia, despite its price, was circulated among a broader group than had access to microscopes, this broader group of readers was initially a tightly knit London elite. It is there we find a discussion of Hooke’s experiences. In this essay, I am trying to listen in on this discussion. It was not limited to the group of virtuoso gentlemen, but also was conducted by people in proximity to the members of the Royal Society. One might see it as ironic that Robert Hooke (1635-1703) himself initially was not an obvious member of this elite. Hooke was born in the Isle of Wight in 1635 in a priest family that was neither poor nor rich.42 When Hooke was thirteen, his father died. Hooke moved to London and ended up at Westminster School. From there, he got to Oxford University as a choral scholar, i.e. he got his college charge reduced through participating in chapel activities.43 In Oxford, he met many of the virtuosos that were later founding members of the Royal Society. Hooke was not a virtuoso himself though, as he was not a gentleman of means. Instead Hooke became an instrumentalist for Robert Boyle, famous for his experiments with vacuum in his air pump. Eventually, Boyle accepted the newly founded Royal Society’s request to borrow Hooke and hire him as an instrumentalist.44 One can say that Robert Hooke became the first paid researcher in England, by getting £50 per year from the society for his services.45 While for the modern reader this might distinguish Hooke as a researcher, for his contemporaries it also meant that Hooke did not have the same position of a rich disinterested and unbiased gentleman as the other experimentalists. Even though Hooke eventually became a full member of the Royal Society, he always remained an instrumentalist of sorts and it is

41 Allan Chapman, England's Leonardo (Bristol, 2005), 56. 42 Lisa Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke : The Man Who Measured London (London, 2004), 22-23. 43 Ibid., 65. 44 Ibid., 87, 93. 45 Chapman, England's Leonardo, 33.

15 for his close knowledge of the instruments utilized by the instrumentalists that he gained much of his credit in the society.46 Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), the famous diarist, had a similar background to Hooke. Being the son of a tailor, born and raised on Fleet Street, Pepys entered the grammar school in Huddington by the help of a rich relative: Edward Montagu.47 Later he studied at Cambridge and finally got a position in the Cromwell administration under Montagu (later to be lord Sandwich). Through circumstances and smart political manoeuvring by his superior, Pepys did not become associated with the old regime when Charles II came to power.48 Instead his career prospered in the civil administration of the new Royal Navy. By the autumn of 1665, half a year after Micrographia was published; Pepys had created and given himself the position of surveyor-general of victualling for the navy. Through his work, in 1667 he had gained a great fortune of £7000.49 Pepys had a curiosity for experimental philosophy and in the spring of 1665, some months after reading Micrographia, he became a member of the Royal Society. Eventually he even became president of the society, though probably more through the credit of his administrative skills than of his experimentalist work.50 So even though both Hooke and Pepys became members of the inner circle of the Royal Society, they were not gentleman of old and esteemed families but practical men who had gained their positions through work and more circumstantial social connections. Thus, initially they were not the kind of noble gentlemen that the society mainly had among its members. As a duchess, Margaret Cavendish of Newcastle (born Margaret Lucas, 1623-1673), on the other hand, would have been more than qualified, had she been a man.51 But as a woman, though a woman of the uppermost aristocracy, she was even more excluded from the proceedings of the Royal Society. More excluded than Hooke, as an instrumentalist, ever was. Where the society’s norms on social standing seem to have been somewhat flexible, it seems as it was manliness that was the core of the concept of the “gentleman”. In other words: It was

46 Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, 106-108. 47 Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (London, 2003), 19. 48 Ibid., 96-97. 49 Ibid., 145. 50 Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, 254 -257. 51 Actually, Margaret Cavendish’s older brother, John Lucas was one of the founding members of the Royal Society. This shows how her sex limited her access to the society, even though she had a gentle background. See Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen (New York, 2002), 11.

16 more important to be a man than to be gentle. Cavendish was very much a person of controversy, as a 17th century English woman who tried to participate in a thoroughly male philosophical discourse. Through her marriage to William Cavendish of Newcastle, a nobleman with a natural philosophical interest, she was in close proximity to philosophical conversations. William Newcastle was the pupil of Thomas Hobbes and around him formed what has been called the “Newcastle circle”, a circle with strong associations to Hobbes and Descartes’ rationalistic program. While being near the conversation, her sex and lack of formal education hindered her from gaining true access to their discussions.52 But she could participate in the philosophical discourse as a reader, and more importantly she also participated as an author. Through her books, she discussed and criticized the male philosophers of her time – and 1666 she published the book Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, where she turned her criticism to the experimentalists and among other works Hooke’s Micrographia. Some eleven years after Micrographia was published, in 1676, the playwright Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692) set up his play The Virtuoso, a play that satirized the experimental community. Shadwell was a humorist, i.e. he championed a form of comedy named humour comedy. His view was that comedy should make human vices so laughable that no one would repeat them, a position he held against his contemporary John Dryden (1631-1700). Dryden championed a wit comedy that was to let the audience listen to the conversation of gentlemen and observe the behaviour of high society. Where Dryden created comedy through positive examples, Shadwell did it through negative ones.53 Even though Shadwell was not rich, he still considered himself a gentleman. For example, in the dedicatory epistle to his play The Libertine, Shadwell describes himself as having nothing to recommend him “but the Birth and Education, without the Fortune, of a gentleman”54. The experience of the English restoration theatre, where Shadwell’s plays were performed, was very different from that of our modern theatre. In contrast to modern stages that are lit while keeping the audience in the dark, in the restoration theatre the audience got as much light as the stage. By not keeping the audience in the dark, the reactions from the audience to

52 Londa Schiebinger, "Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle" in A History of Women Philosophers, Mary Ellen Waithe ed. (Dordrecht, 1991). 53 Brian Corman, "Comedy" in The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, Deborah Payne Fisk ed. (Cambridge, 2000), 52-53. 54 Thomas Shadwell [1675], "The Libertine" in The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, Montague Summers ed. (London, 1927), 20.

17 the play became a part of the play. Therefore, the theatre constituted a social sphere where actors and audience could interact. This audience was primarily from the upper class of the society, the same part of society who bought and read Micrographia.55

Micrographia Enters the Stage Robert Hooke’s Micrographia is interesting because it relates explicitly both to the experimental situation with the microscope and to other texts. Through Micrographia we can see that the experimental text not only was constructed through its relation to the experimental situation, as Dear states above, but also through dialogues with other contemporary texts. These texts were in turn not only experimental texts themselves – but texts from various parts of the early modern English society. By studying their interactions with Micrographia, we can understand how the experimental society interacted with those not members of the society. But before we start investigating these interactions, we must first study the work at the focus of this essay: Micrographia. In the next part we will examine Robert Hooke’s Micrographia at short hand. I will study how and why Hooke sought to mediate his experiences to his reader, how the images and words relate to each other within the book and how they were used to account for ocular experience of the microscopic world. Furthermore, by comparing Micrographia with other works on experimental philosophy we can see the variety of ways through which the experimental philosophers tried to convey their experiences through pictorial and narrative imagery. The writing and reading of Micrographia was in a way a restoration drama: a drama where the spectators in various ways interacted with the actor: Micrographia. We have a Samuel Pepys who attempted to replicate the microscopical experiences he read about by using a microscope of his own. Furthermore, we have Margaret Cavendish’s observations of Hooke’s book, and finally Shadwell’s own renaissance drama, The Virtuoso, in which he let the audience observe the virtuosos in much the same way that Hooke observed the microscopic world through his microscope. But now we are getting ahead of ourselves. Before we can observe the drama revolving around Micrographia, we have to focus on the protagonist of this essay: the book itself. For,

55 Edward A. Langhans, "The Theatre" in The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, Deborah Payne Fisk ed. (Cambridge, 2000), 12, 18.

18 as Hooke writes in his first : “We must first endevour to make letters, and draw single strokes true, before we venture to write whole Sentences, or to draw large Pictures”56.

Micrographia: Letters and Strokes

Being the focal point for this essay on the mediation of microscopic experience, Micrographia is the natural place for our analysis to begin. If the literary style of the early modern experimental philosophers was a technology of creating images through words, Micrographia can be seen as a development along that line. Rather than just containing metaphorical imagery in the text, Micrographia consists of 38 full-page picture plates of Hooke’s study objects seen through the microscope. Even though Micrographia is not the only book of the Royal Society that utilizes printed images, their use deviates somewhat from that in other contemporary works of experimental philosophy. Not only is the mere quantity of pictures something that distinguishes Micrographia, the way of using the images is also different from that of other contemporary works by the Royal Society. For example in Boyle’s New Experiments, images were used to depict experimental equipment and procedure. In Micrographia images were instead mostly used to account for experimental results, or rather to account for Hooke’s individual experiences gained through the microscope.57 When the book was published in 1665 it was well received by a large and various group of virtuosos and interested gentlemen. The contemporary scientific journals, both Philosophical Transactions published by the Royal Society and the French journal Le Journal des Savants, published enthusiastic reviews. In the Philosophical Transactions, the anonymous reviewer wrote that: [T]he Attentive Reader of this Book will find, that there being hardly any this so small, as by the help of Microscopes, to escape our enquiry, a new visible world is discovered by this means, and the Earth shews [sic] quite a new thing for us58

56 Hooke, Micrographia, 1. 57 In Micrographia, only one image was of the experimental equipment, the first one that is separating the preface from the observations as a portal leading the reader into the microscopic world. Apart from this image, and image 6 that is a schematic image explaining optical theories, all images in Micrographia are painted as naturalistic representations of microscopic experience. 58Anonymous [1665 - 1666], "An Account of Micrographia, or the Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, Made by Magnifying Glasses", Philosophical Transactions 1 (1665 - 1666), 27. This and the subsequent quotes from the 17th century are somewhat edited. While I have kept the occasional antique spelling intact, I have changed into s to make the quotes easier to read. Where the spelling diverges so as to look like a modern typo, I have indicated so with a [sic].

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Le Journal des Savants gave a similar account of microscopic experience: le Microscope nous a descouvert sur la terre un petit monde tout nouveau , & nous a fait appercevoir dans chaque chose une infinité de petites creatures qui ne sont pas moins admirables, que toutes celles qu’on auoit connuës jusqu’à present 59

[the Microscope has revealed to us, a small and completely new world on Earth, and has made us see in every thing an infinity of small creatures which are not less admirable than all those that we already knew.]

Central in both reviews, was the metaphor of Micrographia as a journey into a new and unknown world, where the common objects formerly thought to be well known are revealed possessing hidden qualities. This journey of Micrographia was a journey conducted through the senses. In the preface to Micrographia, Hooke described his views on how reason and the senses function and how they could be improved. That is to say, how the journey into the unknown should be conducted. Hooke starts by pointing out that the senses of men are not perfect and that we often take the shadow of things for the substance, small appearances for good similitudes, simulitudes for definitions; and even many of those, which we think to be the most solid definitions, are rather expressions of our own misguided apprehensions then [sic] of the true nature of the things themselves.60

Man’s lack of knowledge comes from her inferior senses, senses whose imperfection Hooke traced back to the Fall of Man. But the imperfection of the senses was to be overcome by adding “artificial Organs to the natural”61. By artificial organs, he meant mechanical instruments such as the microscope, and by adding these to our natural organs “there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding”62. Ultimately these were to make it possible to restore mankind’s senses and reveal the inner workings of nature. It is the well known and the obvious that was to be examined with a “sincere Hand, and a faithful Eye”63, rather than by reason alone. Reason was to serve as “a lawful Master, and not as a Tyrant”64, a master that ordered and disciplined the irregularities of the Senses.

59 Anonymous [1666], "Plusieurs Observations Tres-Curieuses Communiquées Au Public Par M. Hook Dans Son Livre, De La Micrographie", Le Journal des Savants (1666), 492. This French quote has been edited as described above. Furthermore, I have changed occurrences of “vne” and “vn” to “une” and “un” to make the quote more readable. 60 Hooke, Micrographia, preface, ii. To facilitate finding the quotes in Hooke's unpaginated preface, I have added roman numerals of my own starting from the beginning of the preface. Furthermore, to facilitate the reading, I have removed Hooke’s generous use of italics. 61 Ibid., preface, iii. 62 Ibid., preface, iv. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., preface, vi.

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In Micrographia, Hooke presents a cyclical idea of how knowledge should be gained, that “it is to begin with the Hands and Eyes, and to proceed on through the Memory, to be continued by the Reason […] to come about to the Hands and Eyes again”65. But where does a book on experimental philosophy fit in Hooke’s cyclical view of knowledge production? For Hooke, philosophy seemed to be something very physical, something conducted primarily through a body enhanced with instruments viewed as mechanical artificial organs. His view of books was not very different. Books, according to Hooke, were to function as a mechanical aid to the memory: If a physitian be therefore accounted the more able in his Faculty, because he has had long experience and practice, the remembrance of which, though perhaps very imperfect, does regulate all his after actions: What ought to be though of that man, that has not only a perfect register of his own experience, but is grown old with the experience of many hundreds of years, and many thousands of men.66

That is, books function both as an improvement to the memory and as a means of connecting the memory of men through time and space. Through books, one can gain experience from an event which one has not participated in. But, according to Hooke, it was just “of late” that men were beginning to use books in this “sensible way”. Even though books had been printed for some centuries, “yet for the most part they are set down very lamely and imperfectly, and […] many times not so truly, they seeming, several of them, to be design’d more for Ostentation then publique use”67. But when used in the right way, Hooke thought that through books “thousands of Instances, serving for the illustration, determination, or invention, of almost any inquiry, may be represented even to the sight”68. Hooke’s definition of using books in a sensible way is that which also Sprat put forward in his History of the Royal Society. Using a book sensibly was to use it to narrate actual experience rather than mere products of the fantasy. This way of seeing the book as a way of recording and representing experimental experience is seen throughout Micrographia. Its structure is rather loose and particular experiences are described and discussed separately, rather than as parts of a philosophical discourse on a certain defined subject. Possibly one could see Micrographia as a kind of travel journal of a voyage into the microscopic world. This analogy is especially fitting as Hooke had had fantasies of taking long journeys since he was young – expectations which

65 Hooke, Micrographia, preface, vi. 66 Ibid., preface, xii. 67 Hooke, Micrographia, preface, xiii. 68 Ibid.

21 never became a reality.69 In 1681, many years after publishing Micrographia, he convinced the captain Robert Knox to write an account of his voyages to Ceylon. Robert Hooke wrote a preface to Knox’s travel narrative, An Historical relation of Ceylon. This preface describes a process of discovery in many ways similar to the one described in Micrographia. Hooke describes Captain Knox: who though he could bring away nothing almost upon his Back or in his Purse, did yet Transport the whole Kingdom of Conde Uda in his Head, and by Writing and Publishing this his Knowledge, has freely given it to his countrey [sic], and to You Reader in particular.70

Further, Hooke describes the Captain as to be in no ways prejudiced or byassed [sic] by Interest, affection, or hatred, fear or hopes, or the vain-glory of telling Strange Things, so as to make him swarve from the truth of Matter of Fact.71

Finally he describes how the Captain by relating his voyage takes the reader on this voyage once again: After a general view of the Sea Coasts, […] then Conduct you round upon the Mountains that Encompass and Fortifie the whole Kingdom, and by the way carry you to the top of […] Adam’s Peak.72

Robert Hooke’s description of Robert Knox could in many ways also be a description of himself as an author in Micrographia. In the preface to Micrographia we can see that Hooke identified himself with the discoverers and surveyors of the world when he wants to: promote the use of Mechanical helps for the Senses, both in the surveying the already visible World, and for the discovery of many others hitherto unknown, and to make us, with the great Conqueror, to be affected that we have not yet overcome one World when there are so many others to be discovered, every considerable improvement of Telescopes or Microscopes producing new Worlds and Terra-Incognita’s to our view.73

As we can see, the analogy between the discovery of the new world and the experiences from the microscope is a recurrent one, both in Micrographia and in the reviews of the book. Hooke saw himself (and described himself in Micrographia) as someone who with a trained eye and the necessary mechanical help could see things others cannot. By carrying these experiences back “in his head” and by publishing them in a book, he could share his experiences of this unknown world. But how unknown did Hooke consider this world to be? Hooke described the troubles he had had to find the true shape of the objects he was observing:

69 Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, 258-259. 70 Robert Knox [1681], "An Historical Relation of Ceylon", Ceylon historical journal 6 (1958), lxxiv. 71 Ibid., lxxv. 72 Ibid. 73 Hooke, Micrographia, preface, xv-xvi.

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in making [a picture] I indeavoured (as far as I was able) first to discover the true appearance, and next to make a plain representation of it. This I mention the rather, because of these kind of Objects there is much more difficulty to discover the true shape, then of those visible to the naked eye, the same object seeming quite differing, in one position to the Light, from what it really is, and may be discover’d in another.74

Even though he admitted it as being complicated, Hooke believed that he had the ability to separate the true shapes of the objects from the false illusions that wrong lighting conditions creates. Hooke was conscious that the images of Micrographia not only described experiences, but experiences filtered through reason and memory. Seen in the light of Hooke’s cyclical view of knowledge production described above, this is not very surprising. Hooke did not only see the images of Micrographia as pictures of particular experiences of objects seen through the microscope. What Hooke presented in Micrographia was an idealised account of the new worlds he had discovered. This idealised account was meant to mediate a picture of true experience rather than the experience scrambled by faulty lenses and insufficient lighting conditions.

Images and Words in Micrographia The historian Brian W. Ogilvie, argues that the way words and images relate to each other in Micrographia can be seen as part of a tradition of natural history. Ogilvie argues that the pictures in Micrographia are used to describe objects for which there is no clearly defined language. That they could show an unfamiliar subject to an amateur for whom the scientific language would not create an image in the mind’s eye.75 This view resembles that of Michael Aaron Dennis, who describes the images of Micrographia as descriptions of disciplined seeing. In the light of Hooke’s view of knowledge production as a cyclical process, one can see Hooke’s pictures as created by reason’s disciplining of the experience gained through the senses.76 On the other hand, Micrographia and the experimental prose of its contemporaries can be seen as part of the tradition of “picturing of the north” that Alpers discusses. That is, as the mimetic devices of naturalistic representation that Shapin and Shaffer describes. When Robert Boyle sees the scientific essay as a valid substitution of direct witnessing, he indirectly states that the experience gained from reading a scientific narrative (if the narrative is written in the right way) can create a representational image of the experience in the mind of the reader in

74 Ibid., preface, xxiv. 75 Ogilvie, "Image and Text in Natural History 1500-1700", 162. 76 Dennis, "Graphic Understanding".

23 the same way that direct witnessing does. Boyle’s view of the readers of scientific texts presupposes a reader much similar to the receiver of images supposed by Kepler. In Micrographia, Hooke takes a somewhat different approach. Hooke’s aims could be described as similar to those of Boyle’s, but through Hooke’s use of images to describe experimental results one can see that he relates to the reader of scientific text in a slightly different way. The mere presence of images that describe experimental experience in Micrographia indicates that Hooke thought that texts and images had different influences on the receiver. Readers did not relate to narrations passively in the same way that Kepler thought beholders related to images. In other words, there is a reason for why there are images in Micrographia. That Hooke’s discourses related to the images indicates that Hooke saw these images as closer to the experiment that is described, and that the text can describe the results of the experiment in a more unambiguous way by having the images as a mediator between discourse and experiment. These two views, Dennis’s of Micrographia’s images as ideal pictures drawn by a disciplined seer and that seeing the images of the tradition of picturing of naturalistic representations of experience in the north, might seem irreconcilable. But in order to understand the images of Micrographia, I think one must see how Hooke wanted the images to simultaneously pass as ideal pictures of truth and naturalistic representations of experience. This problem of duality is similar to the more general problem of how the experimentalists knowledge was gained through both particular experience but also from an argumentative structure that sought to secure general and indubitable knowledge of the natural world.77 When comparing the preface and the rest of the book one can get an idea of how images, narrative and discourse interact in Micrographia. In the preface, there are no images. Instead it can be divided into an authorial discourse written in an active voice, and narratives written in a passive voice.78 The narratives describe how experiments were set up and the discourse in the active voice discusses the results. These narrations in the preface have a similar role as those of the images in the rest of Micrographia. Both are meant, in Hooke’s view, to describe matters of fact in an unbiased way. But still Hooke was aware that both the narrations and the images were filtered through the author’s reason.

77 Shapin discusses this in Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 82. 78 For a longer discussion on how active and passive voice were used in 17th century reports of experiments see: Peter Dear, "Totius in Verba", ISIS 76 (1985), 152-153.

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Before we study the images of Hooke’s, it is important to note that the difference between Hooke and other experimentalists like Boyle should not be overemphasized. Their publications were often collective attempts and as Boyle’s assistant, Hooke was often directly involved in Boyle’s publications. Most notably Hooke was responsible for drawing many of the pictures of Boyle’s books.79 Besides – Micrographia was a project initiated from the Royal Society and its contents cannot be seen merely as a result of Hooke’s individual choices. Perhaps the images of Micrographia have been the part of the book where Hooke’s authorship has been debated the most. Wilson describes Micrographia as “Hooke’s Classic, with the beautiful illustrations probably done by Christopher Wren”80. That is, the Christopher Wren that I previously described, who started the work on Micrographia as a gift to King Charles II. This notion that the images of Micrographia were not done by Hooke himself is indicated in various degrees throughout the literature on the book. On the other hand, the contemporary review in the Philosophical Transactions states that Hooke had “drawn all the Schemes of these 60 Microscopical objects with his own hand”81. In his biography on Hooke, Allan Chapman describes the images as probably inspired by the drawings of Christopher Wren, which might be seen as a middle ground in the discussion.82 But what was Hooke’s relation to the images of Micrographia? As this essay treats how the images of Micrographia were mediating Hooke’s experience of the microscopic world to a public, Hooke not drawing the images would be problematic indeed. Luckily, this does not seem to be the case, or at least not completely so. This relation between Micrographia’s images and Christopher Wren has been treated in detail by Maxwell E. Power in the article “Sir Christopher Wren and the Microscope”.83 After comparing the images of Micrographia with notes on meetings by the Royal Society where Hooke’s images were presented continuously, Maxwell Power draws the conclusion that

79 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 61. 80 Wilson, The Invisible World, 85. 81 Anonymous, "An Account of Micrographia", 28. 82 Chapman, England's Leonardo, 55. 83 Maxwell E. Power, "Sir Christopher Wren and the Micrographia", Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 36 (1945). That the images of Micrographia has been seen as the work of Christopher Wren is further ironic, as these images are not the only of Hooke’s works that Wren has been credited. A great deal of the architectural work that Hooke conducted after the great fire in London in 1666, for example the Royal College of Physicians building was for centuries considered to be the work of Wren, who worked as Hooke’s fellow surveyor in the rebuilding of London. See Chapman, England's Leonardo, 127.This fact can be explained by the way Wren’s architectural office worked, which made it difficult to decide which of the two men an individual project should be attributed, see Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, 151.

25 some of the images, but not all, were drawn by Wren rather than Hooke. The difficulty in assessing which plates belong to whom, is increased by the fact that neither of the two prepared the final plates from the drafts. That work was instead conducted, as was often done, by the printer’s engraver. If we accept Maxwell Power’s view that some of the images of Micrographia were drawn by Wren, the text of the book gets even more interesting. Because in the text of Micrographia, we find no hints of which images are representations of Hooke’s microscopic experience and which images he had gotten from Wren. In a way, the authorial voice in the text of Micrographia becomes a virtual witness itself – observing and discussing images of microscopic experience. That we as readers have no way to determine whether an individual observation is a product of the author’s own microscopic experience or if it is a product of Hooke’s virtual witnessing of Wren’s plates, is something that puts the Royal Society’s ideas of virtual witnessing to the point. It is clear that the text and the images of Micrographia interact in a different way than they do in other contemporary works. In the next section we will accentuate this difference further.

Micrographia and Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy An important part of understanding the literary technology of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia is to grasp the relation between images and words that I have touched on above. What role did these images play and how were they used by the readers of Micrographia? One way of answering this question would be to investigate if Micrographia was read and utilized in a different way by its contemporaries than other similar books. But how could this be done? Although much of the literature on Micrographia points out that Hooke’s book was groundbreaking in how it showed the microscopic world through images,84 many are also quick to add that it was not the first English book on microscopy.85 Just one year before Robert Hooke published Micrographia, Dr Henry Power (1823-1668) published the book Experimental philosophy: in three books containing new experiments, microscopical, mercurial, magnetical. The part of the book that focused on the microscopic world describes

84 See for example Stewart, The Rise of Public Science, 13. 85 See for example John T Harwood, "Rhetoric and Graphics in Micrographia," in Robert Hooke: New Studies, Michael Hunter; Simon Schaffer ed. (Woodbridge, 1989), 122. Still, Hooke’s book seems to overshadow Power’s. For example, Gerard L’E. Turner falsely attributes Micrographia to be “the first book devoted to the [microscope]”. Turner, "The Impact of Hooke's Micrographia and Its Influence on Microscopy," 124. Wilson also notes that Micrographia was not the first book that contained images of the microscopic world: Wilson, The Invisible World, 75.

26 experiments very similar to the ones in Micrographia. So similar that Hooke felt obliged to state in Micrographia’s preface that: After I had almost completed these Pictures and Observations (having had divers of them ingraven, and was ready to send them to the Press) I was informed, that the Ingenious Physitian Dr. Henry Power had made several Microscopical Observations, which had I not afterwards, upon our interchangably viewing each others Papers, found that they were for the most part differing from mine, either in the subject it self, or in the particulars taken notice of ; and that his design was only to print Observations without Pictures, I had even then suppressed what I had so far proceeded in.86

In Hooke’s words we can recognize the anxiety of being accused of plagiarism described by Adrian Johns as common in early modern England.87 That Hooke felt the need to append an explanation of how different his book and Dr. Power’s book were, can be seen as an indication that the books were similar enough for Hooke to deem an explanation necessary. That Hooke got to know about Power’s book just as Micrographia was going to print might be contested. Adrian Johns describes how James Allestry, the printer of Power’s Experimental Philosophy, sent proof sheets for approval to Hooke before printing it.88 This might indicate that the rhetoric of how Hook was just to send his book to the press when he noticed Power’s work might be more of social manoeuvring than actual fact. However, what is more interesting than whether Hooke was truthful or not concerning which time he had read Power’s book, is the details on how he defines the dissimilarities between Micrographia and Experimental Philosophy. Power’s and Hooke’s books have been compared by Christa Knellwolf, who focuses on the different rhetorical approaches used to describe the microscopic world in the two books.89 Knellwolf points out some important and interesting facts, but touches only briefly on perhaps the most obvious difference between the books. Hooke states the difference explicitly in the preface to Micrographia: that where Micrographia contains images, Power’s book does not. Actually Power’s book does contain images, but only a small number and they are crudely drawn (see figure 1). Hooke’s remark in the preface points to the integral role that the images played in Micrographia and also shows that Hooke himself understood their importance. Power also thought that words alone could not represent microscopic experience in a reliable way, and that the pictures of Micrographia would be able to mediate experience in a

86 Hooke, Micrographia, xxiix. 87 Johns, The Nature of the Book, 444-542. 88 Johns, The Nature of the Book, 103. 89 Christa Knellwolf, "Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and the Aesthetics of Empiricism", The Seventeenth Century 16 no 1 (2001).

27 way that his book could not. At the end of his “Microcopical Observations” in Experimental Philosophy, he states that: These are the few Experiments that my Time and Glass hath as yet afforded me an opportunity [sic] to make […]. But you may expect shortly from Doctor Wren, and Master Hooke, two Ingenious Members of the Royal Society at Gresham, the Cuts and Pictures drawn at large, and to the very life of these and other Microscopical Representations.90

Figure 1 – The images of Hooke and Power compared. Top left: Hooke’s drawing of a shepherd spider, top right: Power’s drawings of a spider’s eyes. Bottom left: Power’s (top) and Hooke’s (bottom) drawings of poppy seeds. Bottom middle: Power’s drawing of a silk ribbon. Bottom right: Hooke’s drawing of linen cloth.

90 Power, Experimental Philosophy, 83.

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In Henry Power’s Experimental philosophy we have a book in many ways similar to Micrographia, but one that mostly does not use images to communicate its experimental results. In the next section I will argue that it is through the lack of pictures that we also can understand the differences in language between the books, a difference that for example Crista Knellwolf describes as a “struggle between a metaphorical and a prosaic mode of description”91. Through a comparison between the two books, we might see more clearly the role Hooke wanted images to have in Micrographia.

Comparing the Images and Words of Hooke and Power In Power’s Experimental Philosophy pictures appear only on three occasions: in a description of “The little white Field-Spider with short legs” (Observation 9), the description of “Ribbans [sic] of all sorts of Colours, Silk, Satten, Silver and mixed” (Observation 37) and presented on the same page as the text aligned to the experiments they depict. Whereas Hooke continuously refers to the images in his text by numbers, as for example when he describes the seeds of Poppy: “The small seeds of Popy, which are described in the 19. Scheme […], deserve to be taken notice of among the other microscopical seeds of Vegetables”92, Power has no specific way of ordering them: They are none of them globular, nor of a smooth surface, but all like Kidneys in form, and of the seeming bigness of Walnuts, and like an Hony-Comb [sic] on the surface, with regular Sides and Angles, making all of them pentagonal and hexagonal areola’s and glistering in the sun-shine like Tissue, or the Foil on the backside of a Looking-glass, as is presented in these two Figures. Some other Seeds also looked not unlike them as Henbane, Flower of Bristow, &c.93

But what might be more interesting than the differences in the ways Hooke and Power refer to the pictures, is the roles the images have in the interaction with the two books’ textual narrations. As we can see in the quote above, Power used pictures to show what he had already described through words. Power’s images were not a replacement for narration but a way of trying to make the metaphors of his text more accurate. Hooke, on the other hand, left the describing to the images when stating that the seeds are “described in the 19. Scheme”. Instead, he continued with a discourse on how “Nature does seem to hint some very notable virtue or excellency in this Plant from the curiosity it has bestow’d upon it”94 and how we in

91 Knellwolf, "Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and the Aesthetics of Empiricism". 92 Hooke, Micrographia, 154-155. 93 Power, Experimental Philosophy, 49. 94 Hooke, Micrographia, 155.

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“the Book of Nature it self […] find the most natural, usefull, and most effectual and specifick ”95, for example “the juice of Poppy for the curing the defect of sleeping”96. I would argue that the different ways in which Power and Hooke used their texts can be traced to the different roles the images have in the two books. The abundance of images in Hooke’s Micrographia renders the narration through metaphoric language superfluous. Instead the text can function as a discourse of broader subjects in relation to the observed object, while the images describe the experimental experience itself. This way of letting both the text and the images narrate experience can also be seen in the two other illustrated observations of Power’s. Power describes the eyes of a field-spider as having “a very quick and lively transparency or fulgour, like Eagle’s eyes”97. When Hooke describes an eye of a spider he rather discusses how the “eyes, to appearance, seem’d to be of the very same structure with that of larger binocular creatures, seeming to have a very smooth and very protuberant Cornea, and in the midst of it to have a very black pupil”98. In both quotes the small eyes of the spider are described by comparing it to something bigger – but the comparison is done in a rather different way in the two texts. In the case of Power, the eyes of the spider and the eagle are related through the use of a literary allegory: the eyes are “transparent […] like eagles eyes”. Hooke, on the other hand, makes the comparison between the big and the small without the use of a direct allegory. He discusses their likeness, but instead of saying that the eyes are like the eyes of larger , he states that they appeared to be of the same structure as that of larger creatures. This is another example of how images are used in Micrographia to distance the text (and therefore the author) from the immediate experience. By letting the text discuss the images rather than describe the microscopic world itself through metaphors, Hooke tried to make the experience into “a matter of fact”: both for him as the author and for the reader. The images constituted a representational form where Hooke could hide the author (or rather the artist) of Micrographia. The image became a shared experience by the author and the reader that the author could discuss in the text and that the reader could relate to. In other words, the images became something that the authorial

95 Hooke, Micrographia, 155. 96 Ibid. Seen in the light of Hooke’s own life, and knowing that he himself suffered from sleeping disorders, further accentuates the difference between the more discussing text and the images that were to describe the world as it really was. For more on Hooke’s sleeping disorders, see Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, 221. 97 Power, Experimental Philosophy, 13. 98 Hooke, Micrographia, 198.

30 self of the text’s discourses and the readers of the text could observe together as “virtual witnesses” (to use Shapin’s terms). It is in this context we should view the way Hooke’s and Wren’s images are intermixed in Micrographia. The text discusses the images as unproblematic representations of microscopic experience. In one sense, the text does not relate to the images as images, but as actual experience. Therefore, Hooke did not let the authorial “I” in Micrographia relate to the images by Wren any differently than it relates to his own observations. Would he have done so, he would have broken the representational technique of the images linking them in an unproblematic way to microscopic experience. But it is important to note that the representational techniques of Micrographia are constituted both by the images where the author is made invisible (in the same way as Haraway describes the experimentalists’ texts in her article “Modest Witness…”99), and the textual narration where the author is visible. One should not view the text of Micrographia as a superfluous addition to the book’s images, but as an as important part of Hooke’s scientific prose. It is through the interaction between the images, that are supposed to be mirrors of nature, and the text, where a modest observing and visible author relates to the images, that one can find the core of Micrographia’s representational techniques for mediating experience. What was needed to make this rhetorical interaction between words and images possible? First, credibility for Hooke as a philosopher was needed as this credibility was essential in transferring the individual experience into true experience that could be used as collective knowledge. Through the text, Hooke could establish this authority as a scientific author. But credibility of the images was also needed. The techniques that were used to depict the microscopic experience had to show the objects in a way the reader considered believable. Instead of being only idealized sketches like the images in Power’s Experimental Philosophy, the images of Micrographia were both pictures of an idealized microscopic world and painted as to be realistic representations of actual experience. That is, the images were artistically drawn in a way so that the reader could identify with them as actual experience, while simultaneously they were idealized pictures of what the microscopic world were to look like if it was experienced by an experienced observer with flawless instruments. These two parallel ways of using pictures in Micrographia are an important key to understand the readers’ reception of Micrographia’s images and the experience they sought to mediate.

99 Haraway, "Modest Witness: Feminist Diffractions in Science Studies".

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Furthermore, in the case of Micrographia the words and the images were not the only way the reader interacted with the book. The readers in the outskirts of the experimental community, as can be seen in the case of Samuel Pepys in the next section, also bought microscopes through which, with mixed results and together with books on microscopy, they tried to make observations of their own.

Samuel Pepys: “What to expect from my glasse”

To understand how experience was mediated through Hooke’s Micrographia and other books of experimental philosophy, it is not sufficient only to study the books themselves. Equally or even more important is how the contemporary readers interacted with the book. How did they relate to the experiences? Did they accept what was described or oppose it? Did they agree that mediating experimental experience was important at all? Did they try to replicate the experiments described and therefore to turn the described experience into individual experience of their own? In this and the following two sections of this essay I will focus on some different ways in which accounts of microscopic experience was read and related to in Hooke’s 17th century England. The different reading were made in different social circumstances, by readers with or without access to a microscope. In this section I will describe how a reader with access to material equipment (a microscope) himself related to a description of the microscopic world. Doing this, I will temporarily shift the focus from Hooke’s Micrographia to Power’s Experimental Philosophy. Through this shift of focus, we will however eventually be able to say something about how experience was communicated through Micrographia’s words and images. In many cases, reading works on microscopy was not an isolated act of reading, but a process where the reader compared the experiences described in the book with the ones that the reader himself got from the microscope.100 Through the diary of the 17th century gentleman Samuel Pepys we can see this interaction between book and microscope clearly – a process that spans over a year and that involves microscopes, Power’s Experimental Philosophy and Hooke’s Micrographia.

100 This process can also be seen earlier in the appreciation of for example Galileo’s The Starry Messanger, where reading and telescopically observation by the reader were closely linked. See Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580-1670, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (New York, 2004), 101-136.

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Samuel Pepys’s micrographic adventures began on February 13th 1664, almost exactly one year before he read Hooke’s Micrographia. It all started in the “perspective glass maker” Mr Reeves’s shop in London: I took coach and to Reeves’s, the perspective-glass maker; and there did endeed see very excellent Microscopes, which did discover a or mite or sand most perfectly and largely. Being sated with that, we went away (yet with a good will, were it not for my obligations, to have bought one) and walked to the New Exchange,101

As Pepys states: though he was interesting in attaining a microscope, he seems to have been satisfied with this quite brief experience of microscopes for quite some time and he does not mention microscopes or microscopy until some months later on July 25th: Thence to Mr. Reeves, it coming just now in my head to buy a Microscope – but he was not within. So I walked all round that end of the town, among the loathsome people and houses.102

Suddenly Pepys became very insistent on getting the microscope and he returned to Mr Reeves the very next day: and "chose one which [he] will have.”103. Why this sudden interest after waiting for over 5 months after his first visit to Mr Reeves? Maybe an explanation could be that microscopy seemed to have become part of the London elite’s conversation. Some days after buying the microscope Pepys wrote (August 7th):

So I walked homeward and met with Mr. Spong; and he with me as far as the Old Exchange, talking of many ingenuous things, Musique, and at last of Glasses, and I find him still the same ingenuous man that ever he was; and doth among other fine things, tell me that by his Microscope of his own making he doth discover that the wings of a is made just as the feathers of the wing of a , and that most plainly and certainly.104

Pepy’s account of Spong’s remarks shows that the microscope had become a status symbol in restoration England. Not only were the stories of experiences of the microscopic world narrated in a way that made Spong seem “ingenious” in Pepy’s eyes, also the microscopic equipment itself and the ability to construct it made an impression on Pepys. On August 13th, six days after this conversation with Mr Spong, Mr Reeves delivered the microscope that Pepys had bought from him. It is not until then, when he had gotten a microscope, that he mentioned books on microscopy: There comes also Mr. Reeve with a microscope and scotoscope; for the first I did give him [£5] 10s, a great price; but a most curious bauble it is, and he says as good, nay, the best he knows in England, and he makes the best in the world. The other he gives me, and is of value; and a curious curiosity it is to [see] objects in a darke room with. […] Thence home and to my office; wrote by the post, and then to read a

101 Samuel Pepys [1664], The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, Robert Latham and William Matthews ed., vol. 5 (London, 1971), 48. 102 Ibid., 221. 103 Ibid., 223. 104 Ibid., 235.

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little in Dr. Powre's [sic] book of discovery by the Microscope to enable me a little how to use and what to expect from my glasse. So to supper and to bed.105

“Dr Powre’s book on discovery by the Microscope” that Pepys mentions is without doubt Power’s Experimental Philosophy. This entry gives us a great insight into how Power’s book was read. Pepys explicitly says he reads it to learn what to expect from his own microscopic observations. The reading of books on microscopy seems not to have been an isolated process but was combined with the reader’s own interaction with the microscope, at least in the case of Mr Pepys’s reading experience. We can see that Pepys used Dr Power’s book as a kind of map, or a manual, for his own experiments with the microscope. Through the book Pepys learnt how to use the microscope but also consciously sought to gain preconceived ideas on what to see through the lens. The next evening Pepys continues with his microscopic observations: After dinner up to my chamber and made an end of Dr. Powre's booke of the Microscope, very fine and to my content, and then my wife and I with great pleasure, but with great difficulty before we could come to find the manner of seeing anything by my microscope, at last did with good content, though not so much as I expect when I come to understand it better.106

Here we can see the preconceptions at work and as a central part of Pepys experience with the microscope. Pepys makes sure of finishing Power’s book before starting his own microscopic observations. When he finally starts observing (something he does together with his wife – which is interesting since experimental philosophy and the experimental community was a male sphere) he notes the difficulty of seeing anything. Microscopy was not an easy enterprise during the 17th century mostly because of the difficulty of getting a good lighting of the observed object. But even though Pepys had problems seeing through the lens, he finally was satisfied with what he saw, even though he thought he would be able to see more when he understood it better. Pepys continued his observations two days later on August 16th and Power’s book still played an important role: “then to my office again a while, collecting observations out of Dr. Powre's booke of Microscopes"107. Pepys did not only get ideas of what to see through the microscope by reading Power’s book, but was also “collecting observations”. That is, he also collected ideas of what to look at by reading Experimental Philosophy. Pepys used both Power’s book and his own microscope to understand the microscopic world. By his reading of Power, Pepys got an idea of what he should see through the

105 Samuel Pepys [1664], The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 241. 106 Samuel Pepys [1664], The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 241. 107 Samuel Pepys [1664], The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Robert Latham and William Matthews ed., vol. 5,, 244.

34 microscope. Here Power’s book functions in the same way as Pepys’s earlier conversation on microscopy with Mr Spong, but does so in a more detailed way. Through narrations of earlier experiments Pepys learned what to expect from the instrument and was able to separate “false” microscopic sightings from correct ones. The narrations formed an ideal that Pepys sought to reach from his own microscopic practice. Pepys never reached this ideal though, and blamed himself for this failure rather than dismissing the narrations from Power’s book. But there is more to the interaction between book and microscope than just the relation between an ideal and practice. The fact that Pepys wanted to see the phenomena described by Power with his own eyes shows that Power’s narrations did not suffice in describing the microscopic world. Power’s book could not give a complete picture of what the microscopic world looked like. One could state that Pepys wanted to see the microscopic world himself to verify what he read in Power’s book, but that I believe is false. As I have described above, Pepys seems instead to have verified his own observations of the microscopic world by using Power’s descriptions. So what is it that Pepys was trying to gain through his own microscopical observations? I would say that Pepys was trying to share the experience mediated by Dr Power. Pepys tried to replicate what is described in the book to verify his own observations. At the same time, he seems to see this process of replication as a way of developing his own skills, to learn to see in a disciplined way. Among the pages in his diary written in the autumn of 1664, Pepys does not mention any microscopy or Dr Power’s book anymore. It is not until January 2nd 1665 that the diary returns to the subject, and then only by briefly describing a newly found book: Thence to my bookseller’s and at his binders saw Hookes book of the Microscope, which is so pretty that I presently bespoke it.108

Some weeks later on the 20th of January, Pepys got the book he had ordered: So took coach and to my Lady Sandwiches; and so to my booksellers and there took home Hookes book of Microscopy, a most excellent piece, and of which I am very proud.109

Pepys started reading the book right away and between diary entries one can find Pepys stating that: Before I went to bed, I sat up till 2 a-clock in my chamber, reading of Mr. Hookes Microscopicall Observacions, the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life.110

108 Samuel Pepys [1665], The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, Robert Latham and William Matthews ed., vol. 6 (London, 1972), 2. 109 Samuel Pepys [1665], The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 17. 110 Ibid., 18.

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Pepys seems thrilled by what he has found in Micrographia. Much more so than he ever became by Power’s Experimental Philosophy that he just states as being to his “content”. Pepys’s relation to Micrographia seems to be one of fascination with the contents of the book, rather than the manual-like relation he has to Experimental Philosophy. Unfortunately Pepys did not write any more on his reading of Micrographia and therefore there is no conclusive evidence on whether he used Hooke’s book together with his microscope or not. What we can say is that Hooke’s Micrographia and Power’s Experimental Philosophy play two very different roles in the diary. The lack of comments on Micrographia in Pepys’s diary is striking, being the “most ingenious book” that he ever read. One possible reason for this could be that Pepys did not use Micrographia in the same way as Experimental Philosophy. This would support the conclusion that the reader and narrative voice of Micrographia’s discourses “observed” the images of Micrographia together through disciplined seeing and that the images were seen as valid substitutes for direct microscopic observation. This would also support the view that some readers of Micrographia considered the images unproblematic representations. Representations that with the help of the disciplined seeing of “Hooke the microscoper” and the faithful hand of “Hooke the artist” (and of Christopher Wren’s) could be considered identical to the true shape of the microscopic objects. By reading Experimental Philosophy and Micrographia, Pepys tried to become more similar to both the experimentalist authors, to become the disciplined seer who through the microscope and through artistic skill can mirror nature. The books could thus be seen as a way for the Pepys to form himself both as a gentleman and as a disciplined seer by relating to the narrations of experience contained in the books. For this to be possible, a trust in both the authors constructed in the books and the representational techniques used to mediate experience was presupposed. Pepys certainly seems to have had these trusts in the experimentalist prose. By studying Pepys own copy of Micrographia we could possibly find more notes by Pepys on his reading experience and how it related to his microscope. This could answer more questions on how Micrographia was used in conjunction with microscopes by 17th century microscopers. Unfortunately these are questions that cannot be answered within the scope of this essay. What we do know is that not all readers saw Hooke’s representations in Micrographia as unproblematic. In the following sections I will turn to readers of Micrographia who for different reasons did not use the book together with a microscope, but who nevertheless did

36 not consider the images to be unproblematic representations. How did they relate to Hooke’s experiences of the microscopic world and the way he described them through images and words?

Margaret Cavendish: Observing Micrographia

But though there be numerous books written of the wonders of these glasses […] they are but superficial wonders, as I may call them. Margaret Cavendish - Observations upon Experimental Philosophy111

In Leviathan and the Air-pump, Stephen Shapin analyses the controversy between Hooke’s fellow member of the Royal Society, Robert Boyle, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes as an example of 17th century controversies in natural philosophy. Even though they shared a mechanistic view of the world, they disagreed on the role of experiments. Boyle was perhaps the main protagonist for the experimental program of basing knowledge on collectivized individual sensory experience, a program that Hobbes challenged through a rationalistic approach. For Hobbes, certain knowledge could only be gained trough a logic of absolute compulsion, a program without the experimentalists’ managed dissent.112 It is somewhere in the framework of this dispute that we have to view the Duchess of Newcastle Margaret Cavendish. Even though Margaret Cavendish, because of her sex, was unable to participate in many of the philosophical discussions of the Newcastle circle, which Hobbes was a member of; she could participate in the philosophical discourse as a reader. Through the books that she wrote and read she could as it were participate in a discussion with the great male philosophers of her time. In this discussion she could criticize the vast group of natural philosophers, which she could not address outside of her texts. In her earlier works she discussed and criticized Hobbes’s and Descartes’ rationalistic philosophies.113 After her critique of Hobbes and Descartes, she turned to the experimentalists in her work Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), where she discussed the work of unnamed experimentalists who are rather easily revealed as mainly Boyle and Hooke, but also possibly Henry Power. In some ways, her work itself conforms to the genre of the

111 Margaret Cavendish [1666], Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, Eileen O'Neill ed., Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge; New York, 2001), 51. 112 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 152,170. 113 Schiebinger, "Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle", 5.

37 experimentalists’ books that she criticises. Her book contains several different descriptions of observations in the same way that Hooke’s and Power’s books do. But where their books contain observations on natural phenomena, Cavendish’s observations are based on her readings of the experimentalists’ books. Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy consists of critical observations on the work conducted by the experimentalists, rather than Cavendish’s own experimental philosophy. A reason for this might be Cavendish’s proximity to the “Newcastle circle”, but that is not the only explanation. There are indications that Cavendish was interested in the experimental philosophy and sought to approach the Royal Society. In the diary of Samuel Pepys we can read of a visit by the Duchess of Newcastle to the society: [1667 May 30th:] After dinner I walked to Arundell House, […] where I find much company, indeed very much company, in expectation of the Duchesse of Newcastle, who had desired to be invited to the Society; and was, after much debate, pro and con., it seems many being against it; and we do believe the town will be full of ballads of it. Anon comes the Duchesse with her women attending her; […]. She is indeed black, and hath good black little eyes, but otherwise but a very ordinary woman I do think, but they say sings well. The Duchesse hath been a good, comely woman; but her dress so antick, and her deportment so ordinary, that I do not like her at all, nor did I hear her say any thing that was worth hearing, but that she was full of admiration, all admiration. Several fine experiments were shown her of colours, loadstones, microscopes, and of liquors among others, of one that did, while she was there, turn a piece of roasted mutton into pure blood, which was very rare. […] After they had shown her many experiments, and she cried still she was full of admiration, she departed, being led out and in by several Lords that were there; among others Lord George Barkeley and Earl of Carlisle, and a very pretty young man, the Duke of Somerset.114

Cavendish does not mention this visit herself in her writings115 but from Pepys account there does not seem to have been any philosophical exchange between the Duchess and the members of the Royal Society. This might seem surprising, the visit being only one year after she published her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. But Cavendish’s omission to discuss with the experimenters can probably be explained by the norms for how a 17th century noble English woman should act. Cavendish did not have many possibilities of interacting philosophically with the members of the experimental community, as the philosophical interactions of the Society were so firmly based on the concept of gentlemanliness. This concept obviously excluded Cavendish from interacting with the society as a philosopher, even though she was allowed to visit Gresham College. Besides, Pepys account of the visit is probably shaped by the role a woman was supposed to play in such a social setting. By reducing Cavendish to a “very ordinary woman”, and ignoring her claims to be a part of the group of experimental philosophers, Pepys could resolve the discrepancy between Cavendish

114 Samuel Pepys [1667], The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, Robert Latham and William Matthews ed., vol. 8 (London, 1974), 243. 115 Schiebinger, "Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle," 3.

38 who wanted to be seen as a part of the group of virtuosos and the norms for a 17th century woman’s behaviour. But the visit is not the only mention of Cavendish in Pepys’s diary. About one year after the visit Pepys writes that he: [1668 Mars 18th.] stayed at home, reading the ridiculous History of my Lord Newcastle, wrote by his wife, which shews her to be a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and he an asse to suffer her to write what she writes to him, and of him.116

This is a rather different account of the Duchess of Newcastle than when Pepys describes her as a “good, comely woman” that visits the society. Pepys’s response can maybe partly be accredited to Cavendish’s eccentric style of writing, but is probably also an effect of Cavendish’s immodest transgression of the boundaries that bounded the role of the contemporary English noblewoman. What this controversy around the Duchess’s visit shows, is how impossible it was for Cavendish to conform to the gentlemanly masculine norms of the experimentalists, in Shapin’s words to the social technology of the Royal Society. That Cavendish does not conduct experiments herself in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy can be explained both by Cavendish’s philosophical position of being sceptical to the instruments of the experimentalists and by her excluded social position as a woman lacking formal education and access to the masculine gentlemanly culture.117

Cavendish’s View of Instruments and of Reading In her preface Cavendish lays down the objective with her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and the concerns she has about what she is to engage in: I have had the courage to argue heretofore with some famous and eminent writers in speculative philosophy, so have I taken upon me in this present work, to make some reflexions also upon some of our modern experimental and dioptrical writers. They will perhaps think me an inconsiderable opposite, because I am not of their sex, and therefore strive to hit my opinions with a side-stroke, rather covertly, than openly and directly; but if this should chance, the impartial world, I hope, will grant me so much justice as to consider my honesty, and their fallacy.118

116 Samuel Pepys [1668-1669], The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A New and Complete Transcription, Robert Latham and William Matthews ed., vol. 9 (London, 1976), 123-124. 117 Further, Cavendish’s scepticism of experimental instruments could be understood in the context of her social standing. As a noble woman of one of the highest ranks, Cavendish might have considered actually utilizing the equipment she discussed as beneath her. For instance, even the experimenter Robert Boyle let instrumentalists of less noble standing (like Robert Hooke) handle and construct the experimental equipment of his experiments. See for example Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 26. 118 Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, 10.

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Cavendish’s statement of being “an inconsiderable opposite” can be understood as an effect of her sex, as she herself sees it, but it is equally true that Cavendish’s philosophical method is an inconsiderable opposite to the experimental programme of the Royal Society. In her observations she establishes a method that in many ways is diametrically opposed to the ideas stated by Hooke in Micrographia: But to conclude this discourse, some parts of nature are more endued with regular reason than others, which is the cause that some creatures of one and the same sort or kind, as for example, mankind, are more wise and ingenious than others; and therefore it is not art, but regular sense and reason that makes some more knowing, and some more wise and ingenious than others; and the irregular motions of sense and reason that make some more ignorant or more extravagant in their opinions, than others.119

In Micrographia we can read that: this is the peculiar priviledge of humane Nature in general, so is it capable of being so far advanced by the helps of Art, and Experience, as to make some Men excel others in their Observations, and Deductions.120

Compared to Hooke, Cavendish did not have much to say for the artificial organs created through human art. Where Hooke champions the utility of artificial instruments to improve man’s senses, Cavendish instead favoured “regular sense and reason”. If viewing Cavendish as a rationalist, her favouring reason is easily understood, but what did she mean by “regular sense”? It seems as if Cavendish thought true knowledge was not gained through experimental experience and experimental instruments, but through everyday observations unaided by mechanical instruments. Everyday observations in the sense of an undisciplined experience that did not conform to the norms of Hooke’s and the experimentalists’ “disciplined seeing”. Of the microscope she says that: if a louse or flea, or such like , should look through a microscope, it would be as much affrighted with its own exterior figure, as a young beautiful lady when she appears ill-favoured by art.121

Cavendish identifies with the observed object rather than the observer. She also transfers the observed object from the experimental situation into one that is not experimental. The insect through the use of a metaphor is seen in the situation of a misrepresented beautiful lady, rather than an object of experimental observation. But Cavendish’s view of the microscopical is not thoroughly opposed to Hooke’s. It is possible to see a shared view on human art in Cavendish’s and Hooke’s texts. As I have stated above, a central point in Hooke’s Micrographia was to show the perfection of nature in comparison to objects made through human art. Through the microscope we can reveal

119 Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, 202. 120 Hooke, Micrographia, preface, i. 121 Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, 201-202.

40 manmade beauty as an illusion and discover the true beauty in the commonly thought everyday, or common, objects of nature. But are not the microscope and the other “artificial organs”, that Hooke thinks will improve man’s impoverished senses, themselves products of art? And are they therefore not susceptible to the same criticism Hooke with the aid of his microscope directs to other manmade objects? If we can not trust everyday manmade objects to look as sharp or as smooth as they appear – how can we trust the manmade lenses of the microscope to give us a correct picture of the microscopic world? This is the criticism that Cavendish has of microscopy, a criticism that in many ways also can be seen as lying inherent in Hooke’s Micrographia (and in Power’s Experimental Philosophy). What Cavendish does, rather than taking a directly opposing position to that of the experimental philosophers, is to continue Hooke’s arguments to what she sees as its logical conclusion. Artificial organs are imperfect because they are artificial products of art, Cavendish’s alternative to the lenses is reason, given to man by nature and therefore without the flaws of human art. By distancing herself from the instruments of the experimentalists, Cavendish seeks to avoid the illusions and false pictures of nature given through the faulty lenses. But in reading and discussing the experimental experiences, Cavendish still has to relate to the artefact described by Hooke as “what great assistance may be afforded the Memory, in the committing to writing things observable in natural operations”122 – the book. How does Cavendish relate to the experimental narrations of Hooke’s prose? How does she relate to Hooke’s experience without accepting the methodological premises through which it was gained? Elisabeth Spiller discusses Cavendish’s reading of Hooke’s Micrographia in Science, reading and Renaissance Literature. In her study she argues that “the New Science had little place for the contributions of readers”123 and that Cavendish’s texts “imagine active readers who are not simply necessary to the creation of knowledge but powerful enough to threaten that knowledge”124. Spiller argues that the experimentalist’s view of reading is founded in Hobbes’s philosophical position of reading “as occurring through the physical impact of visual images, striking the mind with external ideas”125. To identify the function of experimental

122 Hooke, Micrographia, xiii. 123 Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature, 141. 124 Ibid., 177. 125 Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature, 176.

41 philosophical text in these philosophical thoughts is to ignore the fact that text and images have two very different roles in Micrographia. Spiller argues that the experimentalists viewed reading as a process where the readers were passive recipients of experience. When studying Micrographia we can see that the way Hooke uses images and words presupposes a reader that is not passive, at least not a passive reader of text. Hooke’s text is on the contrary written in a way so that the reader can interact with it and its discussion of the book’s images. Spiller’s view might be applied to the function that images has in Hooke’s book, but then it was experiences that were to strike the reader’s mind rather than Hooke’s ideas. Furthermore, the dichotomy of passive versus active readers is not very enlightening when trying to describe the difference between Cavendish’s and Hooke’s views of reading. Hooke did not want the readers to relate in a passive way to either his words or his images, but he wanted them to interact with them in a certain way: a disciplined way. Hooke’s and Cavendish’s different views on reading text and viewing images should be understood through the role their texts had in their contemporary social context and through their different ways of relating to experience gained through material instruments (of which the book could be seen as one). In the next section, I will try to catch this difference through a closer reading of Cavendish’s observations in her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. I will mainly discuss the part of Cavendish’s book that treats ”Micrography, and […] Magnifying and Multiplying Glasses” and analyse how Cavendish’s discussion on magnifying glasses can be read against Hooke’s Micrographia.

Pictorial Representations – Experience or Fantasy? Cavendish starts her observations of ”Micrography, and of Magnifying and Multiplying Glasses” by stating her scepticism of experiences gained through lenses that I have described above. Cavendish’s draws her scepticism from the concept of pictures. An experience through a microscope is a picture, because it is not the real body of the object which the glass presents, but the glass only figures or patterns out the picture presented in and by the glass, and there mistakes may easily be committed in taking copies from copies126

It is not very surprising that Cavendish identifies microscopical experience with pictures, as Hooke represents that experience as pictures in Micrographia and as the relation to those

126 Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, 51.

42 pictures is the closest relation Cavendish has to experience of the microscopic world. But Cavendish continues her argument by saying that artists do confess themselves, that , and the like, will appear of several figures or shapes, according to the several reflextions, refractions, mediums and positions of several lights; which if so, how can they tell or judge which is the truest light, position, or medium that doth present the object naturally as it is?127

Cavendish’s argument can be read directly against the discussion that Hooke has in his preface about how different positions and lighting conditions can make an object appear in different ways in the microscope. Hooke’s discussion in turn has its edge against Power’s Experimental Philosophy: The Eyes of a in one kind of light appear almost like a Lattice, drill’d through with abundance of small holes; which probably may be the Reason, why the Ingenious Dr. Power seems to suppose them such.128

By questioning the possibility to separate the correct impressions from the false ones, Cavendish questions the superiority of Hooke’s observations over those of Power’s. But she also questions the rhetoric of Micrographia’s images. Besides stating that microscopical observations are only pictures and not real experiences of microscopical objects, she also implies that Micrographia’s pictures are only pictures and not representations of the real world. That is, that they are “copies of copies”. First, Cavendish argues that the experience gained through the microscope is not valid as it is not an experience of true nature but just a picture; second, she argues that the pictorial representation of that experience is a false one too, as the pictures represent a conceived idea of the microscopical world of Hooke’s rather than a true experience. That is – she questions that the images and the words really play such separated roles in Micrographia as Hooke claims they do. Where Hooke constructs a text where objective pictorial narrations of experience are discussed through a subjective textual discourse, Cavendish instead perceives Micrographia as a subjective discourse discussing pictures created through subjective choices. In Cavendish’s view, Hooke’s pictures are reduced to something more similar to Power’s poetic metaphorical descriptions of the microscopic world than the representations of experimental experience as which Hooke sees them. Even though Cavendish questioned the utility of experimental knowledge – she centred her criticism on the techniques used to gain and mediate knowledge. This criticism was directed at both the material lenses themselves and at the techniques used for representing microscopic experience in Micrographia, in other words at the acts of disciplined seeing and virtual

127 Cavendish, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, 51. 128 Hooke, Micrographia, xxiv.

43 witnessing. In a way, the genre of philosophic critique that Cavendish engaged in presupposed a certain respect of the issues criticised. That Cavendish wished to engage in philosophic discussion with the experimentalists also meant that she had to accept some of their social norms. As in the controversies within the experimentalist community, Cavendish chose to focus on the faults of the instruments and the techniques used rather than to attack the experimentalists in person. In the next section, I will discuss another text relating to Micrographia that did not consider these social rules of polite controversy.

Thomas Shadwell: Observing the Experimentalists

In “Graphic Understanding…” Michael Aaron Dennis states that “Seventeenth-century microscopy was never a performance”129. What Dennis means is that the actual experience from the microscope was not possible to share with direct witnesses in the same way as many other experiments (like in Robert Boyle’s experiments with the air-pump). The microscopic experiences had to be represented in words and pictures and mediated to a reader. The Royal Society’s relation to contemporary theatre was a divided one. On one hand, the theatre was sometimes used as a metaphor for the shallowness of mere fancy. For example Power writes in his preface that: our best philosophers will but prove empty Conjecturalists, […] like our Stage-scenes […] that shew things inwards, when they are but superficial paintings. 130

On the other hand, in his History of the Royal Society, Sprat describes how experiments will be beneficial to the “wits and writers”131. According to Sprat there “is in the Works of Nature an inexhaustible Treasure of Fancy and Invention” 132. Therefore, Sprat hopes that he will be able to Prevail something with the Wits and Railleurs of this Age, to reconcile their Opinions and Discourses to these Studies. For now they may behold that their Interest is united with that of the Royal Society; and that if they shall decry the promoting of Experiments, they will deprive themselves of the most fertile Subject of Fancy.133

What can be seen in the quotes from Power and Sprat, is an anxiousness of how the “wits” would describe their experimental program and a wish that the writers should see the same

129 Dennis, "Graphic Understanding", 319. 130 Power, Experimental Philosophy, preface. 131 Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society, 413. 132 Ibid., 413. 133 Ibid., 417.

44 value and authority in the matters of fact that they themselves trusted. But all playwrights did not share this view of the experimentalists. In 17th century drama we can find a critique of the experimental programme that questions the very value of mediating experimental experience. In 1676, eleven years after Micrographia was first sold in the London bookstores, a play closely linked to Hooke’s work was written. It was the playwright Thomas Shadwell’s comedy The Virtuoso which was performed at Dorset Garden in May 1676 and which received quite a lot of attention from the contemporary audience.134 What caught the attention of the 17th century theatre audience was the group of humorous characters that Shadwell himself described, in a manner typical of the time, as entirely new.135 The group consisted of Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, a self appointed virtuoso and experimental philosopher; Sir Formal Trifle, an eloquent speaker; Sir Samuel Hearty, a non-central character in the form of a coxcomb who supplies humorous remarks and Snarl, an old moralist who complains about the vices of the time that at the same time he indulges in. Even though these persons were not really as new as Shadwell professed, what can be seen as new is the way Shadwell paints a full-length satirical portrait of the experimental virtuoso in the form of Sir Gimcrack.136 Borgman points to two textual sources for Shadwell’s comedy: The philosophical transactions and Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. In the play there are explicit references to experiments described in Micrographia, such as Hooke’s descriptions of mites in cheese and the eels in vinegar and the of the moon.137 Borgman shows the striking textual similarities between the works and it cannot be denied that The Virtuoso contains explicit satire of Micrographia. But the way that Borgman stays very close to the text, somewhat overshadows what I see as the prerequisite for the satire in The Virtuoso. What made the satire of the experimentalist virtuoso possible was the interaction between the textual sources that Borgman among others identifies and the conception of the experimentalist community that the general audience had. As I have noted above, the interaction between the stage and the audience was something that distinguished the English restoration theatre. The importance of this interaction is illustrated through the discussion of whether Sir Nicholas was a straightforward parody of Robert Hooke himself or if the virtuoso should

134Albert S. Borgman [1928], Thomas Shadwell His Life and Comedies (New York, 1969), 160. 135 Thomas Shadwell [1676], "The Virtuoso", in The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, Montague Summers ed. (London, 1927), 101. 136 Borgman, Thomas Shadwell His Life and Comedies, 165. 137 Ibid., 171-173. See also Hooke, Micrographia, 213-214, 216, 242- 244.

45 rather be seen as a parody of experimental philosophers in general.138 For example, Shapin identifies Gimcrack as Robert Boyle, while acknowledging that Hooke believed that “he was Gimcrack”139. Even though you cannot simply identify Sir Nicholas with Robert Hooke, and though Gimcrack certainly contains ingredients from other contemporary experimentalists, the audience saw enough of a resemblance so that even Robert Hooke himself noted his concern in one of his diary entries. In his entry from June 2nd 1676 he wrote: “With Godfrey and Tompion at Play. Met Oliver there. Damned Doggs. Vindica me Deus. People almost pointed”140. Even though Hooke has been known to be rather sensitive in regard to public opinion of him141, the incident shows that what Hooke was concerned with was the audience’s reception of The Virtuoso rather than what happened on the stage. This, I would like to argue, shows that the satire of The Virtuoso grew from the interaction between the acting on stage and the interacting between the social codes of the contemporary society. The social codes of the more general public visiting the playhouses were not the same as the ones of the experimental community. Both the clash between these two sets of social norms and the literary clash between experimental prose and Shadwell’s satiric drama can be seen as the basis for Shadwell’s play. It was through these clashes that Shadwell’s play punctured the authorial voice Hooke had created in Micrographia. Even though The Virtuoso was not only a response to Hooke’s book, the play can be seen as a reply to Hooke’s scientific prose. A response made by a reader that has ruthlessly appropriated it and transposed its content from the social space of the experimentalists into the playhouse. Or more specifically: into the genre of dramatic satire. But in order to understand the critique of the experimentalists and of Micrographia contained in The Virtuoso and to grasp the social dimension of this critique, we must first briefly recapture the main structure of Shadwell’s play. After this I will discuss Shadwell’s satire of the experimental virtuoso and the experimental community in general. In addition I will examine how this satire can be seen as a response to the rhetoric Hooke uses in Micrographia to

138 Everett L. Jones, "Robert Hooke and the Virtuoso", Modern Language Notes 66 no 3 (1951). 139 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 70. 140Robert Hooke [1672-1680], The Diary of Robert Hooke 1672-1680, Henry W. Robinson and W. Adams ed. (London, 1935), 235. 141 Especially one should note that Hooke of 1676 was not the same man as the one who published Micrographia in 1665. Through various setbacks and an intensive self medication, Hooke’s mental and physical health and also his trust others started to decline in the mid 70s. See Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, 214-216.

46 legitimize his experiments and to establish a positive normative value in the mediation of experimental experience. In the first act of The Virtuoso we are presented to two gentlemen, Longvil and Bruce, who are in love with the virtuoso’s two overprotected nieces Miranda and Clarinda. The intrigue grows more complicated as the virtuoso’s best friend, the orator Sir Formal Trifle, is also interested in Clarina. The two gentlemen realise that the only way to win their loves is to pretend to be “the greatest Philosophers, and the greatest Admirers of the Virtuoso and his Works that can be”142, of which they also are able to convince Sir Formal Trifle. The play starts out as a typical romantic comedy and the plot might seem far from the text of Micrographia, but through the portrait of Sir Nicholas Gimcrack and the people around him we get an insight into how the experimental community was perceived by a person outside of their circle. The play was a satire of the experimental philosophy and especially of the norms established through the literary and social technologies of their community. Or as the play’s title expresses: a satire of the virtuoso.

Ridiculing Hooke’s view of the Small as Great At the end of the preface to Micrographia, Hooke makes an argument by which he legitimates his observations. He writes: “my little Objects are to be compar’d to the greater and more beautiful Works of Nature, A Flea, a Mite, a Gnat, to an Horse, an Elephant, or a Lyon”143. It can be seen as a central point to the whole of Micrograhia: that the small is as great and as rewarding for a philosopher to study as the things commonly believed to be great. This concept of seeing the small as something great is a theme that can be identified in much contemporary experimental philosophy and not just in Micrographia144. This argument of Hooke’s is closely linked to another one: that the superiority of God’s work of nature to man’s work of art is most easily distinguished when comparing them up close in a microscope. Not until we see the objects magnified by the microscope’s lens do we see the unevenness of art and the splendour of creation, or as Hooke himself states: “the more we see of their shape, the less appearance will there be of their beauty: whereas in the works of Nature, the deepest Discoveries shew us the greatest Excellencies”145.

142 Shadwell, "The Virtuoso", 107. 143 Hooke, Micrographia, xxiix. 144 Johns, The Nature of the Book 428-429. 145 Hooke, Micrographia, 2.

47

Robert Hooke considers seeing the small as a way of unveiling the omnipotence of God, or to use a contemporary metaphor: as a way to read God’s book of nature. In the 17th century, phycico-theology was a common way of seeing experimental research as work equally important to the study of scripture.146 But through Shadwell’s satire we see that this idea of the grandeur of the minute was not an uncontroversial concept among Hooke’s contemporaries. In Shadwell’s introduction to The Virtuoso we can see a similar view of art versus nature: But Natural imperfections are not fit Subjects for Comedy, since they are not to be laugh’d at, but pitied. But the Artificial folly of those, who are not Coxcombs by nature, but with great Art and Industry make themselves so, is a proper object of Comedy as I have discoursed at large in the Preface of the Humorists, written five Years since.147

What Shadwell claims to be doing through satire is thus the same thing as Hooke does through many of his experiments: he shows the imperfections of human art and the comedy in the imperfection that underlies the human strife to perfection. But in The Virtuoso it is the art of the experimental philosopher himself that is put under the lens. In one way this makes Shadwell’s criticism similar to Cavendish’s. But where Cavendish mostly criticizes the possibility of gaining knowledge through lenses and other instruments, Shadwell criticizes what the hunt for experimental knowledge does to the experimenter himself. He criticizes the moral framework which states that conducting experiments and participating in experimental philosophical discussion is constructive, well natured and gentlemanly thing to do. Shadwell, as well as his contemporary audience, does not consider the experimental science an unproblematic reading of nature, but an art one can fail in. A failing through which, according to Shadwell, one is rendered a “coxcomb” worthy of ridicule. But the failures do not come from looking through the lens in the wrong way or not looking in a disciplined way. The failure rather originates from the experimenter who loses grasp of what is important and what is not. By growing dependant on the artificial organs, the experimentalist loses focus of what is important: human life. The experimentalist confuses the microscopic world with the large one. It is these failures that Shadwell makes satire of – and demonstrably Hooke identified himself in this satire. That Hooke identified himself in the play is not so hard to grasp. When the Virtuoso is described by Sir Formal in the first act of the play, he is described as: the finest speculative Gentleman in the whole World, […] Not a Creature so little, but affords him great Curiosities : […] Not a Creature so inanimate, to which he does not give a Tongue ; he makes the whole

146 Stewart, The Rise of Public Science, 31-33. Wilson, The Invisible World, 176. 147 Shadwell, "The Virtuoso", 102.

48

World Vocal ; he makes Flowers, nay, Weeds, speak eloquently, and by a noble kind of Prosopopeia, instructs Mankind.148

By describing the virtuosos’ experiments as a “kind of Prosopoeia”, i.e. a kind of figure of speech that in which an absent or imaginary person is represented as speaking, Shadwell follows the Baconian tradition of seeing an experiment as interrogating nature.149 But in the satirical context of Shadwell’s play this concept of making the voiceless speak is turned into something absurd. The microscopic objects that according to Hooke’s Micrographia harbours the truth not only about themselves but also about the mechanisms of the macroscopic world, are by Shadwell turned into voiceless products of the experimentalist’s imagination. Where Hooke’s microscopic objects give meaning to the world, Shadwell sees the experimentalists as reading meaning into something meaningless. The absurdity of the task is expressed through the voice of the virtuoso’s two nieces: Clarin: A Sot, that has spent [£2000] in Microscopes, to find out the Nature of Eels in Vinegar, Mites in Cheese, and the Blue of Plums, which he has subtilly found out to be living Creatures. Miran: One who has broken his brains about the nature of Maggots ; who has studi’d these twenty years to find out the several sorts of Spiders, and never cares for understanding Mankind.150

As I have noted above, this dialogue on Mites in cheese, eels in vinegar et cetera refers explicitly to Micrographia. On mites, Hooke writes: Notwithstanding which minuteness a good Microscope discovers those small movable specks to be very prettily shap’d Insects, each of them furnish’d with eight well shap’d and proportion’d legs.151

On Eels in vinegar he has only a short text and a picture, this he explains by saying that: I shall add no other observations made on this minute , being prevented herein by many excellent ones already publish’d by the ingenious, Doctor Power, among his Microscopical Observations.152

But in Shadwell, the same observations that Hooke described as conducted by ingenious men are here described as made by “a Coxcomb, [who] has studi’d these twenty years about the nature of Lice, Spiders and Insects”153. It seems as if an action that can render a person ingenious in one context, can make him into the opposite in another context. The different genres and differing social settings of Micrographia and The Virtuoso transformed the experiment itself into two different actions: one worthy of praise and the other worthy of satire.

148 Ibid., 111. 149 For more on Baconianism, see for example: Stewart, The Rise of Public Science, 10-16. 150 Shadwell, "The Virtuoso," 113. 151 Hooke, Micrographia, 213-214. 152 Ibid., 217. 153 Shadwell, "The Virtuoso", 118.

49

What makes it possible for Shadwell to ridicule these actions that are praised within the experimental community? One answer could possibly be the genre of the work. The role of a satirical play is to make comedy in a carnivalesque manner, showing the high as low. Even though this is true – this replacement of high and low could not be carried out if there did not also exist something controversial in describing the study of small insects as something ingenious. When Shadwell lets the virtuoso himself legitimize his choice of study objects by saying that it is “below a Virtuoso, to trouble himself with Men and Manners. I study Insects”154, Shadwell’s satire does not only make the high into something low but also contains a deeper critique of the way the experimental society ranks its study objects. The source of the satire is the divergence between the social norms of the experimentalists of the Royal Society and the norms of the broader theatre audience of 17th century. A divergence between the experimentalist’s way of seeing the small things of nature as equal to the great ones and Shadwell’s refusal to value mediation of microscopic experience. When the Royal Society established means for communicating experimental experience, it was not sufficient to create literary techniques. To make a communication between author and reader possible, there was also a need for establishing a value in the communicated experiences. Without consensus that individual experimental experience was in someway important, it was not very likely that readers should care about the mediated experience. Furthermore, it would be even more unlikely that readers would replicate the experience and become authors themselves. Therefore, an important objective of Micrographia was to construct a moral framework through which it could mediate microscopic experience. This was done in many different ways and involved linking the author of the book to an experimental program for providence and utility.155 It was also argued that conducting experiments was a way for a gentleman to better himself. This view can be found in the preface of Micrographia where Hooke states that: The good success of all these great Men […] puts me in mind to recommend such studies […] to the Gentlemen of our Nation, whose leisure makes them fit to undertake, and the plenty of their fortunes to accomplish, extraordinary things in this way. And I do not only propose this kind of Experimental Philosophy as a matter of high rapture and delight of the mind, but even as a material and sensible Pleasure.156

Central to Hooke’s argument that experimental philosophy was something suitable for a gentleman was the argument that it could be seen as a “material sensible Pleasure” and not

154 Shadwell, "The Virtuoso", 142. 155 See for example Stewart, The Rise of Public Science, 31, 361. 156 Hooke, Micrographia, preface, xv.

50 only as a “matter of high rapture”. Through experimental philosophy, the gentleman, according to Hooke, could seek knowledge in a more down to earth way. Experimental philosophy was more suitable for the gentleman than rationalistic philosophy because it allowed him to keep contact with the senses and the material – that is the real world. Experimental experience mattered, therefore, because it was a way of seeing the grandeur of God’s creation, because it was useful and because it was more tangible and practical than other means of producing knowledge. In The Virtuoso, Shadwell questions the assumption of the practicality of experimental philosophy and in turn questions the value of the experience gained through it. The artificial organs, as Hooke calls his instruments, are meant to help the experimentalist to see more than other men. Shadwell’s satire in many ways turns Hooke’s argumentation upside down. Hooke’s argument that the microscope lets the experimenter see more, is in the hands of Shadwell made to imply that it actually makes him see less.157 Probably this is what made seeing Shadwell’s play into such an unpleasant experience for Hooke. Hooke put valour in the utility and the practicality of his philosophy and to be satirized as someone who was so far away from the real world must have hit a sensitive nerve in him.158 When Shadwell writes that it is “the Artificial folly of those, who are not Coxcombs by nature, but with great Art and Industry make themselves so, [that] is a proper object of Comedy”, he gives us a key to understanding his satire. The microscope, in Shadwell’s eyes, magnifies the small and unimportant and makes what does not matter matter. While the microscope magnifies the small objects, using experimental instruments also lessens the experimenter making him think that the small things are important. Through utilizing instruments the experimentalists loses sight of what experiences are really meaningful – the practical ones about mankind rather than about insects. It is this trust in experimental experience, that Shadwell sees as a folly, and which he finds worthy of comedy. Thus, in a way one can say that Shadwell carries out Sprats’s wish, that I mentioned in the beginning of this section, that the wits and writers should “reconcile their Opinions and Discourses to these Studies”. But Shadwell utilizes the experiences from Micrographia in a way that Sprat

157 Shadwell’s argument can be seen as addressed to both the social codes and the material technology of the experimenters. Socially, Shadwell argues, the experimenter stops caring about the world around him that really matters and instead cares about the small that he sees as grand. But if we turn to the experimental equipment, the microscope, in a literal sense not only magnifies but also narrows the experimenter’s vision. 158 See for example Stephen Inwood, The Man Who Knew Too Much (Oxford, 2002), 193.

51 certainly was not promoting in his History of the Royal Society, in a way that turns the experimental experience against the experimental community itself.

Conclusions: Whole Sentences and Large Pictures

At this point we might need a short recapitulation. As I wrote in the section “Setting the stage”, the mediation of experience in Micrographia and the responses to this mediation can be seen as a restoration drama. In the above sections, we have been introduced to the characters in the drama and how they related to Hooke’s book. When following Hooke’s microscopic experience, through the microscope and his reasoning to the various readings by his contemporaries, we see that the mediation of experience was not a straight forward and homogenous process. All communication did not adhere to the Royal Society’s norms of how virtual witnessing should be conducted. Actually, readings like those of Cavendish’s and Shadwell’s might not be characterized as virtual witnessing at all. As I wrote in the section on communicating experience above, the literary technology as described by Shapin sought to establish an image of the experimental situation in the mind of the reader – in the reader’s “laboratory of the mind” or his “mind’s eye”. By seeing this, the reader could claim to have seen what the experimenter himself had seen and therefore also verify the experimenters’ findings. But in Pepys’s, Cavendish’s and Shadwell’s accounts of how they related to Micrographia, we see some that the readings and responses to Hooke’s experimentalist prose were not as homogenous as Hooke wanted them to be. Through reading these accounts, we see how Alpers statement of 17th century culture as a culture where “seeing is believing”, simultaneously might be seen as the reverse. For the readers of Micrographia “believing is seeing”, just as much as “seeing is believing”. That is to say, the mediation of experience through Hooke’s images and words presupposes a relation between author and reader based on trust. Without this trust, the images could not be accepted by the reader as actual representations of experimental experience, and therefore looking at them could not be characterized as the kind of seeing that Alpers argues triggered belief in matters of fact. Shapin touches on this question when he describes of how experimentalists mobilized belief in their accounts of experience through the concept of the gentleman. But in my study I have seen that believing an experimental account was not as simple as identifying the author as a gentleman. The trust had to be gained through believable techniques of representation, as

52 well as from the creation of a believable author. Still, even when this was done, one experimental account was not believed and related to in the same way by all readers. The ambition to establish trust can be seen clearly in the writings of Hooke himself. For books to be used in the way Hooke sees as “sensible”, i.e. for books to mediate experience in a way so that the reader might accumulate the knowledge of its predecessors, the book has to mediate its knowledge in a way so that it is both considered a credible representation of experience and a credible representation of truth. In order to both represent experience and truth, the book has to mediate something linked to a particular event while at the same time it mediates a universal truth. Hooke’s critique of Power’s Experimental Philosophy (and Power’s feeling of his own shortcomings), is sprung from the view that Power’s book fails in mediating either credible experience or ideal truth. Power’s literary metaphors and crude schematic drawings are both too subjectively founded in the author and too unbelievable as representations of actual experience. Because of this, Hooke does not believe Power’s accounts to be truthful and representations of experience. A central objective of Hooke’s preface to Micrographia is for the reader to trust what Hooke is narrating to be true experiences. In order to accomplish this, Hooke uses common metaphors describing his work as discovering unknown worlds and the omnipotence of God. Further he argues for the utility of the instruments through which he gained his experiences. But in order to do what he believed Power could not, the most central part of Hooke’s strategy was to also use images in his book. These images were drawn as to both be seen by the beholder as naturalistic representations of what was seen through the microscope and to be representations of the true microscopic world created through the cyclical filtering of experience from Hooke’s senses, through his reason and back again. By seeing the object under the microscope under different perspectives and lighting conditions, Hooke thought he could get an idea of the objects true shape rather than just illusory impressions. Through this process, the images could in one way be seen as better than direct microscopic observation, as each image represented experience from series of micoscopical observations augmented into a single picture. By seeing how Hooke in Micrographia used both his own images and Christopher Wren’s representations of microscopic experience, we can see that Hooke himself trusted the images of Micrographia to be both representations of ideal truth and credible experience. We can see that he even trusted the images so much as to make no difference in the text between his own observations and the ones conducted by Christopher Wren. In a way, this example of Hooke’s own relation of the images of Micrographia can be seen as the ideal

53 way of how Hooke wanted his readers to trust the images of the book and him as an author and therefore use Micrographia in a disciplined way. But in order for Micrographia to work in the “sensible way” that Hooke wants it to, more people than Hooke have to consider the images of Micrographia to be credible. Through my study of various contemporaries of Hooke who has commented on Micrographia, we have seen that that was not always the case. One might object that the group studied in this essay is too heterogeneous. That the reactions to Micrographia from a curious gentleman like Pepys, a noblewoman and philosopher like Cavendish and a playwright like Shadwell on reading Micrographia do not tell us how the book mediated the experience of the Royal Society’s experimentalists. But I do not agree. Rather, it is through the heterogeneity of the examples above, that we get a very clear picture of the presupposed and untold techniques and relations that are needed in order for Micrographia’s text and images to be seen as mediators of experience and truth. Also, we can see the untold premises of how these experiences should be used. On one hand, we have Pepys, who trusts the authority of the text. By his own microscopic exercises he tries to replicate the findings of Henry Power in Experimental Philosophy and considers Micrographia one of the best books he has read in his whole life. In Pepys’s case, we can see a reading where his trust in the credibility of the mediated experience of Hooke and Power made him see their observations as superior to his own experience gained through the microscope. For him, the narrations of the books were a correct description of the microscopic world, descriptions which he could replicate through his own microscopic investigations. In this replication process Pepys sought to learn how to see through the microscope in the same disciplined way as the authors of his books on experimental prose did. In the case of Micrographia, the book itself and the pictures contained within it, might even have been sufficient for what Pepys sought so achieve. Through the images, Pepys could see what the author saw, therefore possibly even rendering the use of his own microscope unnecessary. Of the actors studied in this essay, Pepys is the one that conforms most to the ideal of the virtual witness, much due to his curiosity of and trust in the experimental philosophy. Pepys’s different reaction to Micrographia to that of Experimental Philosophy might be explained not with ideas like seeing in his “mind’s eye”, but with actual seeing. If “seeing was believing” in the English 17th century, it seems as seeing visual representations was a powerful tool for mediating experimental experience. A power exemplified by Pepys’s reaction to Micrographia and its full page plates.

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On the other hand, not all readers seem to have received Micrographia with the same sense of awe that Pepys did. The way Cavendish and Shadwell related to Micrographia strongly diverges from the norm of how a virtual witness should behave, so much that the concept of virtual witnessing seems rather misplaced in their cases. Cavendish and Shadwell might be seen as negative examples of the interconnectedness of the three technologies of the experimentalists that Shapin discusses. In their cases, the mutual trust between the reader and the author needed for the process of virtual witnessing was not there. Cavendish and Shadwell do not trust the experimentalists. Instead, their responses to Micrographia rather seem to undermine the groundwork of virtual witnessing. As we have seen in the sections above, they seem to have done so in rather different ways. The readers’ different applications of Micrographia show the need for the experimentalists to form an exclusive group of peers with a trust in the matter of fact, as Shapin and Shaffer has shown. This enabled the virtuosos to communicate experience in a way that was not always possible to other groups in the English restoration society. On the other hand, the exclusivity of this group and the divergence between its norms and the norms of other group in its contemporary society also created friction. When studying the responses to Micrographia, we see that there could have been a drawback to the group’s exclusivity formed around the concept of the gentleman and its collective organisation. The different readings of Micrographia and subsequently the different responses can in much be traced back to the reader’s different social contexts and the different genres in which the authors of the responses wrote. Cavendish’s philosophical undermining of Micrographia focuses on the problems of representing experience. She expresses both uncertainty whether the material lenses represent the microscopic world as it truly is and the uncertainty whether the pictures of Micrographia are faithful representations of what is seen through the lenses. Cavendish never looks through the lens herself to compare what is described with what she sees. At a first glance that might seem strange, as observations of her own surely would have made her argumentation stronger (especially in the eyes of the experimentalists she criticises). But while looking through a microscope of her own would have made her argumentation against Micrographia’s pictures stronger, it would have weakened her argument that the microscope itself provided untrustworthy pictures. Working in the tradition of a rationalistic philosophy, Cavendish seems to have been rather at ease with not using the experimentalists’ instruments. This ease is in glaring contrast to the unease of her social exclusion from the male intellectual and philosophical conversations that Cavendish expressed in her books. But she did not criticize the male experimentalist group as such; rather she wanted to be included

55 in its sphere. She did not want to be considered their “inconsiderable opposite” and the focus of her criticism was not the social group of experimentalists, but rather the methods for their experimental observations. Interestingly, the social criticism of the author constructed in Micrographia did not come from Cavendish’s excluded position, but rather from Shadwell. It is he who most clearly showed and dismantled the social mechanisms that were necessary for mediating Hooke’s experimental experiences through Micrographia. The comedy of his play The Virtuoso was drawn from the contrast between the perceived self glorification and justification among the experimentalists and a sceptical public. This point can already be seen in the title of Shadwell’s play, which hints at the concept of the virtuoso that was central for the experimentalists. When the language used by the experimentalists for managing dissent when mediating experimental experience was transferred to the sphere of an uncomprehending public, it was made into comedy. Shadwell neither accepted the social norms of the experimentalists, nor the way Micrographia was discussed by other participants in the intellectual conversation. And he did not have to – as he did not participate in that conversation. Instead of participating in a critical way (as for example Cavendish did), he showcased the whole conversation of the experimentalists on the London stage and made the audience observe the experimentalists in the same way that the experimentalists observed the microscopic world. Pepys, who considered Micrographia a beautiful book, nevertheless recognized its relation to an actual experimental situation. Pepys trust of Hooke’s and also Power’s accounts made him able too practice the techniques of disciplined seeing himself and eventually become a part of the group of virtuosos of the Royal Society that had created the books. But in the case of Cavendish, and possibly even more so Shadwell, the trust and therefore the relation between text and experiment got more or less severed. Large parts of Cavendish’s Observations on Experimental Philosophy were consciously aimed at criticising this relation – mainly through revealing Hooke’s untold dual ambition to show images that were both true and representations of experience. Cavendish considered the relation between Hooke’s text and actual experimental experience as illusory as the microscopic images provided through the lenses, while she also dismissed Hooke’s claims of the images to be true. In Shadwell’s play, the link between text and experiment was not even recognized at all. Shadwell did not use Micrographia as a scientific text, but as a source for his satire of science. To make a travesty of Dear, Shadwell saw Micrographia as referring to a socially defined region of gentlemen or virtuosos rather than a “spatiotemporally defined region of

56 clinking glassware”. That is, Shadwell treated the text as a text originating from a community of experimental philosophers, but he did not conform to the norms of how he should relate to the text to render it scientific. What Shadwell wanted to show was that the experimentalists fails in their art not because of lack of discipline, but rather because of a misguided effort to see something that was not there. It is this failing that makes the virtuoso experimentalists ridiculous. When Shadwell viewed the disciplined seeing of the experimentalists as a kind of prosopopeia, that they gave the voiceless a voice, he indicated that he trusted the experimentalists’ accounts to be neither representations of experience or accounts of truth. As a text’s scientific status cannot be understood by the author’s intentions alone, Micrographia cannot be definitely defined as an experimental philosophical text referring to an experimental situation. The relation between the text and images of Micrographia and the experimental situation are defined by a social context and is under constant renegotiation through the interaction between book and reader. Appreciating experimental prose as a virtual witness involves adhering to certain social norms, norms that are necessary in order to establish a relation between text and experimental experience. As seen in my study, not all 17th century readers related to the experimentalists’ texts in this way. Instead, they broke these norms in various ways, and thus in a way redefined the book into various different Micrographias. How can we understand the way Micrographia was redefined by the appropriation of these readers? Earlier, I described how Dear argues that a scientific text is defined by its relation to an actual experimental situation and that the account is a piece of social currency. But how is this relation established and how does the account gain social value? When studying the texts by Pepys, Cavendish and Shadwell and their relation to Micrographia, we can see that the relation between Micrographia and the microscopical observations it contains shifted as the text passed through the English 17th century society. As a writer, Hooke clearly sought to establish a close relation between his book, the microscope and his microscopical observations. But as the book leaved the author, this link seems to have weakened. An important reason for this weakening seems to have been the readers’ lacking trust in Hooke’s techniques of disciplined seeing. By the study of these readers of Micrographia we see that Peter Dears definition of a scientific text as an account (or a social currency), with an inherent reference to an experimental situation, should be developed to involve the reader of scientific text. By seeing Micrographia as defined through the interactions between the author and the readers, we see that this reference, and therefore a text’s scientific status, is defined by a relation between

57 author and reader based on trust. The reader has to trust both the author and the representational techniques used in the text. The appropriation of Micrographia by readers who do not possess this trust, results in the redefinition of Micrographia into other kinds of texts that fill different purposes defined by the readers. Hooke sought to make his text more worthy of trust, as I have shown above, through a variety means, both argumentatively and through various technical aids. Seen in this light – the Royal Society’s motto “nullius in verba”, to put trust in no man’s words but in actual experience, might seem as ironic as the “canonical mistranslation” of it as “nothing in words”. It is essential in writing accounts of experimental experience, like Micrographia, to make the reader put trust in the author in order for the reader to accept that the text mediates experience. When we study Micrographia, we see that Hooke invested much energy in acquiring this trust of his readers. Still, the motto is logical and understandable in its historical context. Seen as directed primarily against Aristotle, the motto can be understood more as a way of positioning the experimentalists against an earlier way of conducting and writing philosophy than a revolution in the way one saw authority in written text. The motto becomes a way of championing a new way of writing – where the author by gaining his readers trust can mediate experiences to them. Furthermore, neither the group of readers of texts in general, nor the readers of scientific texts specifically, can be seen as homogenous. To establish trust in an account of experience in respect to a certain group of readers is thus almost always associated with that of gaining the distrust of another group. Through drawing his images to be received simultaneously as mimetic naturalistic representations of experience and generalized drawings of truth, Hooke could mobilize the support of gentlemen like Pepys. But meanwhile, this strategy made Cavendish’s criticism of him possible. In the same way, the construction of a virtuoso gentleman identity and the argument that the small was as great as the grand was a way of getting an authority that was necessary to mediate experience in some circles, but also gave Shadwell fodder to his satirical play. All the readers’ responses thus show the different ways Hooke’s literary and artistic techniques could be appreciated by the book’s readers and how they could appropriate these techniques for their own agendas.

Finale: Further Research and Final Thoughts Before the curtains are drawn on this restoration drama revolving around Micrographia, we still have some time for a few thoughts on what has been shown and what has not.

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This study has been a synchronal one. While it has shown how the representational techniques and social relations necessary for Hooke to mediate his experimental experience to his contemporaries, it would be interesting to further study this in a diachronous way. By studying the different techniques of representation and different responses by readers to Hooke’s Micrographia and the edited and heavily shortened version, Micrographia Resturata (published in 1745), one could better understand how the relations between author and reader is shaped differently in different times. How is the status of a scientific text transformed as it grows old? How does a later time trust the author of a scientific text and the representational techniques that are used? Through such a diachronous study, we could highlight the historical status of scientific texts and images. But even though I think that the mechanisms that made it possible to mediate experimental philosophical experience have to be seen in a historical context, the different ways Micrographia was related to also resemble our contemporary academic discussion about science and language. Cavendish’s criticism that the microscopic images were only images and Shadwell’s criticism of the society’s social structure in many ways sounds like an echo (or rather like what precedes an echo) of the postmodern analysis of contemporary science. Likewise, Hooke’s efforts in making his scientific text a credible source of truth resemble an early modern predecessor of Sokal in the “Science Wars”. What we can see from the “Science Wars” and from responses to Micrographia, is that experiences from what today’s science and Hooke’s experimental philosophy are much more than the fundamental building block for scientific knowledge. When the experiences leave Hooke and the group of experimentalists around him, it is transformed from the of the experimentalists into a social commodity. Even those who did not trust Hooke or his representational techniques did use this commodity for their own purposes, purposes that could be opposed to Hooke’s own reasons for mediating microscopic experience. In a way, Hooke’s experiences were relevant whether you trusted and agreed with him or if you did not. This status of Micrographia as a text in various 17th century genres and social settings is what has made it such an interesting study object.

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