12. Cavendish, Life, 194; Cressy, England on edge, 337–8 (song).
13. Dell, Several sermons, 612–13 and 644–7, two sermons delivered in 1652–3 (Dell, once a chaplain of the New Model Army, was then Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge); Winstanley, The Law of freedom, 68–9. For more on anti-university sentiment, see ch. 18 above.
14. On the vigorous life of students at Leiden, see Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch, 34–70.
15. Ho, Ladder, 191–2. Mote, Imperial China, 863–4, gives much higher figures for those involved. Between 1677 and 1682, however, the emperor sold degrees to finance the repression of the Revolt of the Three Feudatories. For more on the civil service examination system, see chs 5 and 18 above.
16. Israel, Radical enlightenment, 3–4; Aubrey, The natural history of Wiltshire, 15 (the first paragraph of the Preface, written in the 1680s). The wonderful anecdote about Harvey losing patients as soon as he published a book reminds us that, besides being an acute observer of nature, Aubrey compiled scintillatingly wicked biographies of some 400 scientific luminaries, many of whom he had known personally, published posthumously in his Brief Lives. See also ODNB s.v. ‘John Aubrey’.
17. Hunter, John Aubrey, 41–2, quoting from notes made by Aubrey for his projected biography of Bacon.
18. ODNB, s.v. ‘Bacon’; Bacon's preface to the Novum Organum.
19. Bacon, Works, XIV, 120, Bacon to James I, 12 Oct. 1620.
20. McClure Letters of John Chamberlain, II, 339, to Sir Dudley Carleton, 3 Feb. 1623.
21. Scriba, ‘The autobiography’, 26–9 (italics added). See the similar contempt for mathematics as a matter for merchants and ‘something inappropriate for a king’ in France: ch. 10 above.
22. Scriba, ‘The autobiography’, 39–40; Birch, Works, I, 19–20, Boyle to Isaac Marcombes, 22 Oct. 1646, and to Francis Tallent (his Cambridge tutor), 20 Feb. 1647. Boyle's father was Richard, first earl of Cork. Villari, Baroque personae, 273–5, prints many similar statements by European scientists of their willingness to learn from anyone and anything.
23. Bacon, Works, XIV, 436, Bacon to Charles, prince of Wales, Oct. 1623, together with a Latin copy of The advancement of learning.
24. Weil, ‘The echo’. Harvey thus anticipated the celebrated 1953 paper in Nature by James Watson and Francis Crick, describing the structure of DNA, which reserved its revolutionary implications for the terse penultimate paragraph that began ‘It has not escaped our notice that …’.
25. Descartes, Discours, 51 and 22. Descartes praised Bacon (‘Verulamius’: the Latin version of St Albans, Bacon's title) to Mersenne, 23 Dec. 1630 and 10 May 1632: Oeuvres, I, 195–6 and 251.
26. Ganeri, The lost age, discusses the ‘new reason’ and its practitioners (quotations from Dara Shikoh at pp. 24–7). At pp. 16–17, Ganeri draws an explicit parallel between the approach of the ‘new reason’ philosophers and of Bacon.
27. Elvin, ‘The man who saw dragons’, provides a fascinating analysis of this work (quotations from pp. 12 and 34). Elvin also notes that, just as Galileo and Bacon had intellectual precursors, so did Xie (ibid., 3–7). See other common-sense quotations from Wa za zu in chs 1 and 5 above.
28. Miller, State versus gentry, 140, quoting Zhang Pu's declaration; Chen's ‘Rules of Compilation’ (fanli) to the Nongzheng quanshu by Xu Guangqui (1562–1633), one of the most prominent Chinese Christian converts of his day. Chen referred specifically to a treatise on hydraulics by Sabatino de Ursis, S.J., translated in Xu's work. My thanks to William S. Atwell for this reference.
29. Atwell, ‘Ming statecraft’, 68–9, on the Huang Mingjingshi wenbian of 1639, inspired by a similar compilation of political tracts from earlier periods published in 1635: Chang Pu, Memorials by famous officials through the ages. Chang and Chang, Crisis, 285–303, provide brief biographies of several Late Ming advocates of the new learning.
30. Details from Peterson, ‘Ku Yen-wu’ (quotations from p. 131, and 211, Gu's Advantages and disadvantages of the provinces and prefectures of the empire, completed in 1662). Gu's methods strikingly resemble those of English antiquaries of his day, such as John Aubrey. Pomeranz, ‘Without coal?’, 256–61, and Elman, From philosophy, ch. 2, offer excellent insights into Chinese ‘evidentiary research’.
31. Struve, Ming-Qing conflict, 30, quotes the edict; Spence, Emperor, 65–8, quotes Kangxi's own writings. Waley-Cohen, Sextants, 105–21, provides a perceptive discussion of the benefits and limits of the Western knowledge that the Jesuits decided to release in China – cartography, artillery, art and architecture as well as ‘science’.
32. Based on Cook, Matters, ch. 4, ‘Translating what works’, quotation from pp. 344–5 (Genshō, Kenkon bensetsu). Florentius Schuyle collated, translated and published Descartes's book as De homine in 1662.
33. Okada Takehiko, ‘Practical learning’, 270–1, quoting from the eight-volume complete works of Kaibara Ekken (1630–1714). This paragraph relies on the articles in de Bary and Bloom, Principle and practicality.
34. On Kumazawa (1619–91), and Zhu (1600–82), see McMullen, ‘Kumazawa Banzan’; Ching, ‘Chu Shun-Shui’; and idem, ‘The practical learning’.
35. McMullen, ‘Kumazawa Banzan’. Atwell, ‘Ming observers’, draws fascinating parallels between seventeenth-century arbitristas (from arbitrio, or ‘remedy’) in various countries.
36. Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, 291–2 (from the last chapter of the work, wherein ‘It is shown that in a free commonwealth every man may think as he pleases and say what he thinks’ – a quotation from Tacitus).
37. Drake and O'Malley, The controversy, xiii, Virginio Cesarini to Galileo, 1618 (the bite); other details from Drake, Galileo at work, and Redondo, Galileo.
38. Ciampoli, Lettere, 72–3, to Marcantonio Eugenii, 7 Dec. 1640. The Pope had asked Ciampoli to read Galileo's Dialogues, the book that contained the new passage on the heliocentric theory, and Ciampoli assured the Pope that it contained nothing against church doctrine, thus securing permission for its publication – and sealing his own fate.
39. Descartes, Oeuvres, I, 270–1 and 285–6, to Mersenne, Nov. 1633 and Apr. 1634 (in the original, the italicized words were Bene vixit, bene qui latuit, from Ovid, Tristia). Le monde, ou traité de la lumière only appeared in 1662.
40. Descartes made sure the first edition, published in Leiden, appeared anonymously; but the licence authorizing the French edition named him as its author. Descartes, Oeuvres, I, 338–41 to Mersenne, Mar. 1636, and 369, to someone involved in the licensing process, 27 Apr. 1637 (blaming Mersenne for naming him).
41. Spinoza, Ethics, 1–3 (from the introduction by Seymour Feldman).
42. Leffler, ‘From humanist’, 420, about François Eudes de Mézeray's Abrégé chronologique de l'histoire de France, 3 vols (Paris, 1668). For two prominent importers of contraband books (more than 1,700 of them) arrested in 1666 and condemned to the galleys, see Waquet, ‘Guy et Charles Patin’.
43. Lord, Poems, I, xxxvii, quoting testimony of George L'Estrange, the chief censor, to the House of Lords in 1677 (the measure failed).
44. Van der Heyden, A description of fire engines, 3. See ch. 21 above on the ill-fated fire engine. In his Essay of humane understanding (1690), John Locke also stressed how often humans get things wrong: ‘All Men are liable to Error’: Essay, Book IV, ch. 19 (a section entitled ‘Wrong assent or errour’), para 17.
45. Ganeri, The lost age, 248.
46. Elvin, ‘The man who saw dragons’, 22–3: Cook, Matters, 415. Elvin considers the examples of ‘scholarly communication’ presented in Elman, From philosophy, ch. 5, but rates them insignificant compared with Europe. He also notes that most of them occurred after 1700.
47. Berry, Japan, 51–2.
48. Merton, ‘Singletons and multiples’, 482–3. The argument between Newton and Leibniz, and between their disciples, over who first invented calculus is the best-known example of a seventeenth-century ‘contested multiple’. For another, see Hall
and Hall, ‘The first human blood transfusion’.
49. Bacon, Novum Organum, aphorism CXIII; idem, New Atlantis. A worke unfinished.
50. One of the Italian fellows was Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–84), the first woman to obtain a doctorate (at Padua, 1678), who was fluent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. She joined several academies, and ordered all her manuscripts to be destroyed at her death.
51. Scriba, ‘The autobiography’, 39–40.
52. Hartlib, Considerations, 46–8. Details on earlier attempts from Blome, ‘Office of Intelligence’, and ODNB, s v. ‘Samuel Hartlib’.
53. Sprat, History, 57–8; charters to the Royal Society, 15 July 1662 and 22 Apr. 1663; ODNB s.v. ‘Founder members of the Royal Society’.
54. Sprat, History, 84–5, 98. Wilkins oversaw the project and nominated Sprat, one of his own students, to write it p. 110.
55. Sorbière, A voyage, 49. See also the gushing account of the early meetings of the Royal Society by another French visitor: Balthasar de Monconys, Journal, II, 26–8, 37, 47–8 and 55–6.
56. Mormiche, Devenir prince, 329, 337.
57. Other scholars also served as ‘clearing houses’ for the exchange of scientific knowledge: 1,100 of Marin Mersenne's letters have survived for the years 1617–48, many of them accompanied by items sent by others which he forwarded as ‘attachments’; Nicholas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc exchanged well over 10,000 letters with some 500 correspondents between 1598 and 1637; Ismael Boulliau left an estimated 10,000 letters at his death in 1694.
58. Philosophical Transactions did not become the official journal of the Royal Society of London until 1752: Oldenburg took personal responsibility (as well as the profits) for his work as editor (or ‘author’ as Oldenburg called himself). The Journal des Sçavans, which first appeared a few weeks earlier in 1665, at first included mostly book reviews.
59. Israel, Radical enlightenment, ch. 7, offers an excellent overview.
60. Bots, ‘Le rôle des périodiques’, 49, quoting Abbé Jean-Paul de la Roque, Director of the Journal des Sçavans.
61. Skippon, An account, 433 (Heidelberg) and 607 (Naples); Ray, Observations, 271–2 (Naples).
62. Boix y Moliner, Hippocrates aclarado, prólogo, n.f. (the author claimed that Harvey had learned about the circulation of the blood from a commentary on Ecclesiastes by Padre Juan de Pineda in 1620; while Descartes had plagiarized a book by Dr Gómez Pereyra, published in 1554); Israel, Radical enlightenment, vi.
63. Camuffo, ‘The earliest temperature observations’. By a cruel irony, the records of this precocious experiment were severely damaged by an extreme climatic event: the Florence floods in 1966. When eventually processed in the twenty-first century, the data revealed winters more than 1°C cooler than in the twentieth century.
64. Sprat, History, I, 173–9, prints Hooke's proposal; Fleming, Historical perspectives, 34–7, provides an overview of this and other systematic attempts to collect weather data.
65. Goad, Astro-meteorologica; Baker, ‘Climate’, 428–32 (on Ashmole, Locke and Plot). Ashmole acquired the papers of other astrologers, including the ‘weather diary’ kept between 1598 and 1635 by Richard Napier (ch. 20 above). See also an interesting attempt in 1676 to compare the climates of Ireland and British North America in Vogel, ‘The letter’, especially p. 128.
66. In France, 56,000 people died in the first two weeks of August 2003, 15,000 more than usual, with particularly high mortality among women and those over age 45. One-third of that excess mortality occurred in Ile-de-France, with more than double the normal death rate in some areas: Hémon and Jougla, Estimation, 54–5.
67. Details from Gere, ‘William Harvey's weak experiment’ (Bacon and Harvey); Hunter, Robert Boyle, ch. 10 (entitled ‘Magic, science and reputation’ and mostly about Boyle's last book, Strange reports); Snobelen, ‘A time’ (Newton).
68. Lubienietski, Theatrum Cometicum, collected reports from all over Europe, accompanied by over 80 illustrations.
69. Robinson, The great comet, 120–6, and Álvarez de Miranda, ‘Las controversías’, list the works; Akerman, Queen Christina, 177; Fryer, A new account, III, 174–5, Fryer's letter from Surat, 25 Jan. 1681 OS; De Beer, ed., The diary of John Evelyn, IV, 235.
70. Lach and van Kley, Asia, III, 976; Tavernier, Travels, I, 309; Di Cosmo, Diary of a Manchu soldier, 57; Kangxi Shilu, XCII, pp. 14a and 20b (I thank Timothy Brook for this reference).
71. Mather, Heaven's alarm; idem, Kometographia, 118, 124 and 107.
72. Descartes, Oeuvres, I, 251–2, to Mersenne, 10 May 1632 (adding ‘as Tycho [Brahe] did with the three or four that he observed: a reference to Brahe, Liber de cometa, 1603); Schaffer, The information order, 36–44. See the sources listed in Book III, lemma IV, of Newton's Principia Mathematica.
73. Halley, A synopsis of the astronomy of comets (London, 1705), 19, 21–22, 24. See Alvarez, T-Rex, 145–6 and colour plate facing p. 101, on the collision of a fragment of Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994. It is possible that Halley knew that Cassini had seen something that looked like a comet hitting Jupiter in Dec. 1690, and had sketched it: Peiser, Natural catastrophes, 7. Halley was also lucky because the 1682 comet was the last one visible to the naked eye to appear for 60 years.
74. Rabb, ‘Introduction’, 149; Rabb, ‘The Scientific Revolution’, 509. I thank Mircea Platon for alerting me to the second item.
75. Skippon, An account, 607; Ronan, Edmond Halley, 124, Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed to Isaac Newton in 1691. Thirteen years later Halley became professor of geometry at Oxford, despite another critical letter from Flamsteed.
76. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I: 287–91, and the beginning of Book VIII (I thank Kate Epstein for pointing out these references); Mormiche, Devenir prince, 338–9. The theologians of the Sorbonne protested at the discussion of Galileo's theory, until the Dauphin's religious preceptor Bossuet instructed them to desist. Compare Descartes's reaction when he read the sentence on Galileo: page 654 above.
77. See Kessler, ‘Chinese scholars’, 181–4, and Struve, Ming-Qing conflict, 30–2. The Chinese system of giving dates according to regnal titles and years identifed loyalty just as unequivocally as tonsures, and for the period after 1644 the authors of the Ming History used both Ming reign titles and the personal names (not the regnal titles) of the Qing rulers – which the regents took as clear signs of sedition.
78. Brook, ‘Censorship’, 177, quoting the Qianlong emperor's edict of 11 Dec. 1774. For an example of anti-Manchu literature that survived even this purge, see Chang and Chang, Redefining history, 136–41: some of the popular Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi) written by Pu Songling in the 1670s.
Conclusion
1. Brinton, Anatomy, 237–8. I am particularly grateful to Rayne Allinson, Kate Epstein and Ken Pomeranz for their trenchant criticism of an earlier draft of this chapter.
2. Foster, The English Factories in India, 1630–1633, 218–19, letters from East India Company officials in Surat to London, 8 May 1632 OS; Smith, The art of doing good, 137, quoting Lu Shiyi's diary; Balfour, Historical works, III, 409; Howell, Epistolae, III, 26, letter of 10 Dec. 1647 to his nephew.
3. Ogilvie, A bitter living, 1, quoting Catharina Schill, ‘ein arme Frau’, in 1654. For the slaves see chs 5 (China), 12 (Britain) and 15 (Africa); for the serfs, see ch. 8. Examples of the enhanced impact of the crisis on women appear in chs 4–15 above.
4. Pepys, Diary, VIII, 337–414, narrates Elizabeth's revenge on him. See the brilliant summary in Capp, Gossips, 93–4, and his discussion of the arsenal of retaliation available to English wives and servants at pp. 84–126 and 166–81.
5. Cavaillé, ‘Masculinité’ para. 38, quoting Christina's ‘Maxims’. Note the similarity between Christina's view of nuns and that of Elena Cassandra Tarrabotti: page 97–8 above.
6. Balabanlilar, Imperial identity, ch. 4, provides a brilliant analysis of the powerful ‘begums and khanums’ of the Mughal dynasty. See ch. 6 abov
e for the power of the mothers of Ottoman sultans.
7. I thank Robert W. Cowley for suggesting the parallel between the quantitative and qualitative losses in the wars, revolutions and conquests of the seventeenth century and those of the twentieth.
8. Calculation by Nansen, Through Siberia, 283 (Nansen had just travelled around and across Siberia).
9. Wakeman, Great enterprise, 425–7 (notes on the careers of 23 senior Ming civil servants who surrendered first to the Shun and then to the Qing, and of 32 more who transferred their allegiance directly from Ming to Qing); and 1,129–33 (analysis of the origins and careers of the 125 men with an entry in the Er chen zhuan, ‘Biographies of ministers who served both dynasties’, and of members of the Han Chinese Banners).
10. D'Aubert, Colbert, 23 (quoting Lefèvre d'Ormesson); ODNB, s.v. ‘Monck’; Wheeler, The making, 212. English soldiers who fought in Ireland in the 1640s and 1650s also did well from their military service: they received their wage arrears mostly in lands confiscated from the vanquished (see ch. 12 above). Parrott, The business, 241–9, offers a masterful survey of fortunes made and lost by military and naval commanders in seventeenth-century Europe.
11. Mortimer, Eyewitness accounts, 88–90.
12. Cavaillé, ‘Masculinité’, provides an excellent discussion of Christina's behaviour, and her critics.
13. Pepys, Diary, VII, 122, entry for 12 May 1666 (Samuel also mentioned his wife's delight in the book on 7 Dec. 1660 and 21 May 1667). Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus is available on line, with its own website http://www.artamene.org/
14. Admittedly, both Scudéry and La Fayette disguised their gender on the title page of their books, which claimed they were written by a man. La Princesse can be read on line http://www.inlibroveritas.net/lire/oeuvre2472.html. M. Sarkozy recorded his cultural ‘suffering’ at http://blogs.rue89.com/mon-oeil/2008/07/25/nicolas-sarkozy-kaercherise-encore-la-princesse-de-cleves, accessed 2 Mar. 2012.
15. Ko, Teachers, 129–36. Her husband was the son of one of the Donglin martyrs (ch. 5 above). Note the similarity with the poem ‘The little cart’ by Chen Zilong, quoted at page 103 above. Widmer, ‘The epistolary world’, presents a sensitive survey of Chinese women writers during the Ming-Qing transition.
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