Fellows Among the Bookshelves: The Royal Society’s Book-Gifting Network of the 1660s

Abstract

The Fellows of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge bonded with one another in the 1660s, in response to external skepticism about their observation-based epistemology and practices, through an active book-gifting network that seeded their libraries with one another’s works. An examination of the way membership in the Royal Society was demarcated, negotiated, and cultivated vis-a-vis books and other archived properties serves to illuminate the contradictions inherent in the birthing of the hybrid identity of the gentleman-scholar as the ideal practitioner of the New Science in England during the Restoration period. The Fellows, in turn, rejected the upstart gentlewoman-scholar and poet, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and her efforts to participate in their book-gifting network, revealing the limitations on their ability to absorb challenges to the observation-based methodology of the New Science, and hence to truly embrace diversity of thought and identity at a time when the perimeters of scientific inquiry were being drawn.