This article attempts to think through the logic and distinctiveness of the early Royal Society's position as a metropolitan knowledge community and chartered corporation, and the links between these aspects of its being. Among the knowledge communities of Restoration London it is one of the best known and most studied, but also one of the least typical and in many respects one of the least coherent. It was also quite unlike the chartered corporations of the City of London, exercising almost none of their ordinary functions and being granted very limited power and few responsibilities. I explore the society's imaginative and material engagements with longer-established corporate bodies, institutions and knowledge communities, and show how those encounters repeatedly reshaped the early society's internal organization, outward conduct and self-understanding. Building on fundamental work by Michael Hunter, Adrian Johns, Lisa Jardine and Jim Bennett, and new archival evidence, I examine the importance of the city to the society's foundational rhetoric and the shifting orientation of its search for patronage, the development of its charter, and how it learned to interpret the limits and possibilities of its privileges through its encounters with other chartered bodies, emphasizing the contingent nature of its early development.
...MoreArticle Jim Bennett; Rebekah Higgitt (2019) London 1600–1800: Communities of Natural Knowledge and Artificial Practice. British Journal for the History of Science (pp. 183-196).
Similar Citations
Article
Anna Winterbottom;
(2019)
An Experimental Community: The East India Company in London, 1600–1800
(/isis/citation/CBB821547552/)
Article
Attie, Katherine Bootle;
(2013)
Selling Science: Bacon, Harvey and the Commodification of Knowledge
(/isis/citation/CBB001320085/)
Book
Kühn, Sebastian;
(2011)
Wissen, Arbeit, Freundschaft: Okonomien und soziale Beziehungen an den Akademien in London, Paris und Berlin um 1700
(/isis/citation/CBB001220514/)
Article
David C. Clary;
(2022)
Foreign Membership of the Royal Society: Schrödinger and Heisenberg?
(/isis/citation/CBB351320678/)
Chapter
Feingold, Mordechai;
(2009)
The Accademia del Cimento and the Royal Society
(/isis/citation/CBB001020804/)
Article
Boschiero, Luciano;
(2010)
Translation, Experimentation and the Spring of the Air: Richard Waller's Essayes of Natural Experiments
(/isis/citation/CBB001032188/)
Article
Bodmer, Walter;
(2010)
Public Understanding of Science: The BA, the Royal Society and COPUS
(/isis/citation/CBB001022761/)
Chapter
Iliffe, Rob;
(2009)
Making Correspondents Network: Henry Oldenburg, Philosophical Commerce, and Italian Science 1660--72
(/isis/citation/CBB001020803/)
Article
Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin;
(2019)
‘A Place of Great Trust to Be Supplied by Men of Skill and Integrity’: Assayers and Knowledge Cultures in Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century London
(/isis/citation/CBB737897913/)
Article
Mordechai Feingold;
(2022)
The Age of Academies
(/isis/citation/CBB303367292/)
Book
Dolnick, Edward;
(2011)
The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
(/isis/citation/CBB001033132/)
Chapter
Boschiero, Luciano;
(2009)
Networking and Experimental Rhetoric in Florence, Bologna and London during the 1660s
(/isis/citation/CBB001020802/)
Article
Despeaux, Sloan Evans;
(2011)
Fit to Print? Referee Reports on Mathematics for the Nineteenth-Century Journals of the Royal Society of London
(/isis/citation/CBB001220419/)
Article
Rebekah Higgitt;
(2019)
‘Greenwich Near London’: The Royal Observatory and Its London Networks in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB752672306/)
Article
Gay, Hannah;
(2008)
Science, Scientific Careers and Social Exchange in London: The Diary of Herbert McLeod, 1885--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB000931543/)
Article
Philip Beeley;
(2019)
Practical Mathematicians and Mathematical Practice in Later Seventeenth-Century London
(/isis/citation/CBB006065321/)
Article
Horrocks, Sally M.;
(2010)
The Royal Society, Its Fellows and Industrial R&D in the Mid Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001022751/)
Article
Tina Skouen;
(2020)
Brian Cox and the new enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB526278326/)
Article
MacLeod, Roy;
(2010)
The Royal Society and the Commonwealth: Old Friendships, New Frontiers
(/isis/citation/CBB001022760/)
Book
Steven Turner;
(2020)
The Science of James Smithson: Discoveries from the Smithsonian Founder
(/isis/citation/CBB562434087/)
Be the first to comment!