Matthew Daniel Eddy

A beautifully illustrated argument that reveals how notebooks were extraordinary paper machines that transformed knowledge on the page and in the mind.

Information is often characterized as facts that float effortlessly across time and space.  But before the nineteenth century, information was seen as a process that included a set of skills enacted through media on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these mediated facts and skills learned? Concentrating on the manuscripts created by students in Scotland between 1700 and 1830, Matthew Daniel Eddy argues that notebooks functioned as workshops where notekeepers learned to judge the accuracy, utility and morality of the data they encountered.  He explores how notekeepers transformed information gleaned from the arts and sciences into knowledge and shows that, in an age preoccupied with ‘enlightened’ values, the skills and materials required to make and use notebooks were not simply aids to reason—they were part of reason itself.

Covering a rich selection of material and visual media ranging from hand-stitched bindings to watercolored pictures, the book problematizes John Locke’s comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa. Although one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment, scholars seldom consider why it was so successful for those who used it. Eddy makes a case for using the material culture of early modern manuscripts to expand the meaning of the metaphor in a way that offers a clearer understanding of the direct relationship that existed between thinking and notekeeping. Starting in the home, moving to schools, and then ending with universities, the book explores this argument by reconstructing the relationship between media and the mind from the bottom up. Eddy’s book is early awaited by those drawn to book history, manuscript culture, history of education, history of childhood, Scottish philosophy, and the Enlightenment broadly understood.

'Matthew D. Eddy succeeds in making a significant contribution to [the] recent and more nuanced approach to post-Kuhnian history of science… Students of eighteenth-century Scottish culture and medicine will find much of value here, as will students of eighteenth-century geology and chemistry.’  -- Arthur Donovan, American Historical Review

Summary
Classification is an important part of environmental science, yet the specific methods used to construct Enlightenment systems of natural history have proven to be the bête noir of studies of eighteenth-century culture. One reason that systematic classification has received so little attention is that natural history was an extremely diverse subject which appealed to a wide range of practitioners, including wealthy patrons, professionals, and educators. In order to show how the classification practices of a defined institutional setting enabled naturalists to create systems of natural history, this book focuses on developments at Edinburgh's medical school, one of Europe's leading medical programs. In particular, it uses the career of the influential naturalist Rev Dr John Walker, the school's professor of natural history, to reconstruct the cultural and scientific basis of early environmental science.

Walker was a traveller, cleric, author and advisor to extremely powerful aristocratic and government patrons, as well as teacher to hundreds of students, some of whom would go on to become influential industrialists, scientists, physicians and politicians. This book explains how Walker used his networks of patrons and early training in chemistry to become an eighteenth-century naturalist. Walker's mineralogy was based firmly in chemistry, an approach common in Edinburgh's medical school, but a connection that has been generally overlooked in the history of British geology. By explicitly connecting eighteenth-century geology to the chemistry being taught in medical settings, this book offers a dynamic new interpretation of the nascent earth sciences as they were practiced in Enlightenment Britain. Because of Walker's influence on his many students, the book also provides a unique insight into how many of Britain's leading Regency and Victorian intellectuals were taught to think about the composition and structure of the material world.

A Cultural History of Chemistry in the Eighteenth Century covers the period from 1700 to 1815. Setting the history of science and technology in its cultural context, the volume questions the myth of a chemical revolution. Already boasting a laboratory culture open to both manufacturing and commerce, the discipline of chemistry now extended into academies and universities. Chemists studied myriad materials - derived from minerals, plants, and animals - and produced an increasing number of chemical substances such as acids, alkalis, and gases. New textbooks offered opportunities for classifying substances, rethinking old theories and elaborating new ones. By the end of the period – in Europe and across the globe - chemistry now embodied the promise of unifying practice and theory.

The last twenty-five years have witnessed some provocative transmutations in our understanding of early modern chemistry.  The alchemist, once marginalized as a quack, now joins the apothecary, miner, humanist, and natural historian as a practitioner of “chymistry”.  In a similar vein, the Chemical Revolution of the eighteenth century, with its focus on phlogiston and airs, has been expanded to include artisanal, medical, and industrial practices.  This collection of essays builds on these reappraisals and excavates the affinities between alchemy, chymistry, and chemistry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.  It reveals a rich world of theory and practice in which instruments, institutions, inscriptions and ideas were used to make material knowledge.  More generally, the volume will catalyze wide-ranging discussions of material and visual cultures, the role of expertise, and the religious and practical contexts of scientific inquiry.

William Paley's Natural Theology is the classic statement of the argument for the existence and goodness of God based on examples taken from science, medicine and technology.  Although Paley died two hundred years ago, his book is frequently mentioned by modern authors. It is even sometimes supposed that Paley invented the argument from design to a designer; and that when Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859 Paley's book became obsolete. In fact, he was part of a long, successful tradition of British natural theology that stretched from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. But his approach did have critics, within the churches as well as from opponents of organised religion: the book was always controversial.

In this new edition based on the original 1802 text, Matthew D Eddy and David Knight consider what made the book so effective, and tie it to key issues in evolutionary science, theology, and philosophy. It provides a helpful introductory essay that explains the relationship between nature and religion with reference to the social, literary, scientific and theological context of the Enlightenment and Victorian era. It also contains a chronology of Paley’s life, a bibliography of critical studies and over 20,000 words of explanatory notes that identify and unpack key concepts, authors, and publications that Paley used to build his argument.

On a wintry day in 1780 the first meeting of the Baptist’s Head Coffee House Philosophical Society was called to order. Its members included some of London’s most eminent experimentalists. Over the next seven years the club would meet to discuss a wide range of topics, many of which related to cutting-edge chemical discoveries in medicine, natural history, and industry. The members were eminently sociable, discussing the most recent news communicated to them from across Europe and its colonies. They treated chemistry as a bold new science that was directly relevant to society and the economy. They discussed topics relevant to various forms of patronage and, although they avoided political topics, their views of chemistry were shaped by ideological commitments (Levere and Turner 2002). The members of the Society also demonstrated a growing awareness of the ways in which the processes and cycles of the material world could be used to understand the environment and ecology. Yet, although the biographies of the Society’s members were impressive, their scientific interests were not unique to London. Indeed, from Berlin to Bombay chemistry was discussed in clubs, shops, surgeries, parlors, and even kitchens. Whether in Amsterdam or Aleppo, chemistry became increasingly relevant to society and the environment over the course of the long eighteenth century. This chapter charts this phenomenon and emphasizes its importance to social, cultural, and environmental history

John Locke’s comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa,
was one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment. Though
scholars embrace its impact on the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, they seldom consider why the metaphor was so successful. Concentrating on the notebooks made and used by the schoolchildren of Enlightenment Scotland, this essay contends that the answer lies in the material and visual conditions that gave rise to the metaphor’s usage. By the time students had finished school, they had learned to conceptualize the pages, the script, and the figures of their notebooks as indispensable learning tools that could be manipulated by scores of adaptable folding, writing, and drawing techniques. In this article, I reveal that historicizing the epistemology and manipulability of student manuscript culture makes it possible to see that the success of Locke’s metaphor was founded on its appeal to everyday note-keeping activities performed by British schoolchildren.

What kinds of evidence can we use to historicise childhood? In this essay I answer this question by summarising and then problematizing the kinds of books, art and objects used by scholars since the eighteenth century to understand the lives of children. One of the points that I wish to underscore is that a profound evidentiary shift has occurred in recent decades. The shift, I suggest, is motivated by a rising scholarly interest in childmade evidence, that is, objects definitively used and made by children on an everyday basis. When viewed in light of a child's historical context, such evidence can be used to gain insight into the developmental foundations of the modern world. Henriette Browne, A Greek Captive, 1863, Tate Modern, Photo © Tate, Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND.

In recent years the historical relationship between scientific experts and the state has received increasing scrutiny. Such experts played important roles in the creation and regulation of environmental organizations and functioned as agents dispatched by politicians or bureaucrats to assess health-related problems and concerns raised by the public or the judiciary. But when it came to making public policy, scientists played another role that has received less attention. In addition to acting as advisers and assessors, some scientists were democratically elected members of local and national legislatures.  In this essay I draw attention to this phenomenon by examining how liberal politicians and intellectuals used Darwinian cognitive science to conceptualize the education of children in Victorian Britain.

How did students learn to think like a Calvinist during the Scottish Enlightenment? More specifically, in an age when printed or written words were seen as the ultimate artefacts of human rationality, was there a difference between how one learned and what one was learning? In this paper I suggest that there was indeed a difference. Focusing on the philosophies of mind promoted by Scottish Calvinists, I argue that, though the theological commitments of Scot-land’s educators differed during the Enlightenment, the cognitive models that they used to understand the operations of the human mind were similar if not the same. In short, their theological diversity was underpinned by a cognitive unity.

The story of Enlightenment literacy is often reconstructed from textbooks and manuals, with the implicit focus being what children were reading.  But far less attention has been devoted to how they mastered the scribal techniques that allowed them to manage knowledge on paper.  Focusing on Scotland, I use handwritten manuscripts to reveal that children learned to write in a variety of modes, each of which required a set of graphic techniques.  These modes and skills constituted a pervasive form of graphic literacy. I first explain how children learned to write for different reasons in diverse domestic and institutional settings.  I then explore how they acquired graphic literacy through the common techniques of copying, commonplacing, composing, book-keeping, scribbling and drawing.  In the end we will have a more detailed picture of how children used writing as an indispensible mode of learning during the Enlightenment.

Concentrating on the rich tradition of graphic culture that permeated Scotland’s universities during the long eighteenth century, this essay reveals that student lecture notebooks were a sophisticated form of scribal media. I show that they were inscribed, assembled, bound, bought, sold, disassembled, edited, annotated, pirated, plagiarised and circulated in a manner that transformed them into tools through which students learned to interactively manage knowledge on paper.  In following this path, I transform student note-taking into a dynamic activity that played a central role in shaping the knowledge economy so characteristically associated with the Scottish Enlightenment.

It is widely known that Joseph Black's late eighteenth-century chemistry lectures were extremely popular for the hundreds of  students who studied science, medicine and the arts at the University of Edinburgh.  When his students attended his lectures  they had to learn how to use his figures and tables as diagrams, as visualisations that could be read in a number of ways.  This means that these pedagogical images consisted not only of a visual form, but also of a set of practices used to learn, make and understand that form.  They were visualisations that students were taught to think with, things that shaped what they knew and what they thought they knew.  It is this active view of an image that I use to unpack Black’s diagrams in this essay, especially the notion that they were visual forms that gained meaning and value as they moved through time and space in the notes kept by professors and students.  My intent is to gain deeper understanding of the role they played as learning tools and informatic devices that made chemistry easier for students to understand.

In 1766, Thomas Cochran entered the Edinburgh classroom of Joseph Black (1728-1799) to learn chemistry for the first time.  Cochran was studying medicine and, like so many of Black’s students, he dutifully recorded several diagrams in his notebooks.  These visualisations were not complex.  They were, in fact, simple.  One of them was a single ‘X’, a chiasm, and Black used it to illustrate ratios of chemical attraction [Figure 1].  This diagram is often held to be the first chemical formula and, as such, historians have endeavoured to explain why it was unique and how Black invented it. 

In this essay, I wish to turn the forgoing premise on its head by arguing that Black’s chiasm was neither visually unique nor invented by him.  I do this by approaching the diagrams via a visual anthropology that allows me to examine how students learned to attach meaning to patterns that were already familiar to them.  In the end, we will see that Black’s diagrams were successful because their visual simplicity and familiarity made them ideally suited to carry the chemical theories that he so skilfully attached to them.

In 1787 an anonymous student of the Perth Academy spent countless hours transforming his rough classroom notes into a beautifully inscribed notebook. Though this was an everyday practice for many Enlightenment students, extant notebooks of this nature are extremely rare and we know very little about how middle class children learned to inscribe and visualize knowledge on paper. This essay addresses this lacuna by using recently located student notebooks, drawings and marginalia alongside textbooks and instructional literature to identify the graphic tools and skills that were taught to Scottish children in early modern classrooms. I show that, in addition to learning the facts of the curriculum, students participated in educational routines that enabled them to learn how to visually package knowledge into accessible figures and patterns of information, thereby making acts of inscription and visualization meaningful tools that benefitted both the self and society.

The tables and figures for this essay can be downloaded at: http://www.dur.ac.uk/m.d.eddy/SHAPE.pdf""

Natural theology came in different varieties during the nineteenth century. It functioned both as a way of seeing nature but also as a way of being in the world. This essay explores the intellectual and experiential facets of design arguments by focusing on who promoted them and, just as important, why they appealed to so many people on a daily basis. In short, we learn that natural theology was a way of knowing and doing. The essay is structured around three kinds of natural theologians: philosophers and theologians, savants and scientists, priests and pedagogues. Whilst I take care to address well-known names like William Paley and Charles Darwin and classical disciplines like physics and theology, my larger aim is to show the appeal of design to middle class readers and authors (especially women) and to the founders of the emerging human sciences like biomedicine and evolutionary anthropology.

On 8 July 2010 the front page of The Guardian newspaper featured an attractive colour drawing by the artist John Sibbick. It was entitled ‘Meet the Norfolk relatives’ and it depicted a pastoral scene of farmers and hunters going about their daily routines. However, the image was not included to illustrate a gargantuan sum recently paid for an impressionist painting. Nor was it a taster for an article about a long-lost work of art. This drawing was slightly different from the kinds that one would normally see on the front of a leading British newspaper. Its subjects were naked. Their bodies were hairy. They were, in fact, an artist’s impression of the early humans who lived on the Norfolk coast a million years ago...

Recent studies on commonplacing have shown that it flourished as an important information management tool and, in some cases, it functioned as a method (methodus) that facilitated the ordering of natural history systems. In what follows in this essay, I wish to extend this point by examining the role played by heads in the work of Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné). I address two core questions. First, what were the economies of attention that guided his commonplacing techniques? Second, what type of impact did his note-taking skills have upon the way that he spatially arranged information in texts? Whereas intellectual historians sometimes tend to focus on the role that he played as the unique originator of modern botanical and zoological classification systems, I approach his work merely as one example in a long tradition of commonplacing and graphic design that originated in the Renaissance, but which had become an indispensable organisational tool used to create knowledge systems in the leading research centres of Enlightenment Europe.

This essay examines the kinds of textbooks that were used to teach natural knowledge to children in eighteenth-century Scotland. Following Roger Chartier’s belief that the forms and uses of print can be employed to categorise the content of texts, I focus on three groups of books that were used in specific settings: (1) homes, academies and parish schools; (2) social and professional settings where adolescents worked; (3) and high schools. I do not take these groupings to be definitive, but more as a preliminary categorisation. Along the way I treat various historiographic points relevant to the canon of Scottish pedagogy and I comment on some issues relevant to the instruction of girls. I conclude by calling for more studies that address how and where children’s books were used during the Enlightenment.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, words were seen as artefacts that afforded insights into the mental capacities of the early humans. In this article I address the late Enlightenment foundations of this model by focusing on Professor Hugh Blair, a leading voice on the relationship between language, progressivism and culture. Whereas the writings of grammarians and educators such as Blair have received little attention in histories of nascent palaeoarchaeology and palaeoanthropology, I show that he addressed a number of conceptual themes that were of central relevance to the ‘primitive’, ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ typology that guided the construction of ‘prehistoric minds’ during the early decades of the Victorian era. Although I address the referential power of language to a certain extent, my main point is that the rectilinear spatiality afforded by Western forms of graphic representation created an implicitly progressivist framework of disordered, ordered and reordered minds.

In recent decades historians have devoted a notable amount of research to the economic, social, and experimental relevance of the mineral water available for consumption in the spas that appeared across Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Although studies have shed light on the links between tourism and commodification, the role of patient authority, and the isolation of chemical substances, they have not offered a clear account of how the composition of the wells connected with the medical theory that legitimated their commodification and use as a remedy. In this chapter I address this gap by focusing on Peterhead Well, a provincial spa located on the northeastern tip of Scotland. In particular, I focus on several authors who wrote about the well, including Rev. Dr. William Laing, the local Episcopal priest who composed two pamphlets that used chemical analysis, personal testimony, and local case histories to substantiate the tonic power of the spa's water. Using Laing's work as well as the testimony of others who drank the well's water, I explore the complex world of pharmaceutical commodification at the dawn of of the nineteenth century. More specifically, this essay unpacks why spa water was seen as a pharmaceutical commodity and how Laing acquired the necessary skills that allowed him to be a local medical authority. It also explains how chemistry was used to isolate substances that were widely thought to cure nervous complaints arising from the stress of daily life. The final section reveals how socioeconomic factors influenced the interpretation of the water’s therapeutic efficacy and its popularization in Scotland’s print culture.

In 1792 Dugald Stewart published Elements of the philosophy of the human mind. In its section on abstraction he declared himself to be a nominalist. Although a few scholars have made brief reference to this position, no sustained attention has been given to the central role that it played within Stewart's early philosophy of mind. It is therefore the purpose of this essay to unpack Stewart's nominalism and the intellectual context that fostered it. In the first three sections I aver that his nominalism emanated from his belief that objects of the mind--qualities, ideas and words--were signs that bore no necessary relation to the external objects that they were meant to represent. More specifically, it was these signs that were arranged into systems of thought by the 'operations of the mind'. The next three sections suggest that his treatment of words as signs most probably originated in his views on language and medicine and that his nominalistic philosophy of mind could also be extended to systems that sought to classify the natural world. I conclude by suggesting several avenues of enquiry that could be pursued by future scholars interested in excavating Stewart's thought.

This article is a practically minded reflection that uses the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to examine the ways in which British doctoral students can transform their research interests into academic capital that connects to a viable network of like-minded scholars.

Towsey’s fine book will certainly serve as a reference point for my own work for years to come. The bibliography of notebooks alone significantly raises the standard for any future works seeking to identify trends in early modern Scottish commonplacing and journal writing. The same can be said for his bibliography of library catalogues. In short, Towsey deserves to be congratulated for producing such an informative and well-researched book. It teaches us the value of paying attention to the ephemera of bookishness and the fact that, as noted by an anonymous note-taker cited by Towsey, Enlightenment thinkers took great pains to heed the following injunction of the Edinburgh orator Hugh Blair: ‘Study to acquire the habit of attention to thought – let your thoughts be made the subject of thought, & review.’

"From day-to-day objects like 'the Excitor', needle-worked grammars and the ‘small marks’ of marginalia, to necessary routines like recitation, memorisation, writing and reading, the connections between beliefs and practices in educational communities abound throughout the entire volume. This is a work that would indeed warm the heart of John Dewey. Its focus on ‘persons with their personal interests’ signals a welcome change that is slowly starting to pull the history of education into the wider orbit of
cultural history."

Life in the Ottoman Empire was a subject of interest to the readers of the many periodicals that were published in Enlightenment Britain.  During the middle of the eighteenth-century, for example, James Porter, Britain’s ambassador in Istanbul, contributed a number of widely-read articles about Turkey to the cosmopolitan Gentleman’s Magazine and newspapers regularly carried accounts of Ottoman intrigue.  But most of these accounts were largely anecdotal and often written by travellers who had spent only brief periods time in the Ottoman Empire. In 1756, however, this situation changed with the publication of The Natural History of Aleppo, an extraordinary book that focused on the natural history and medicine of one of biggest cities in the Ottoman Empire. Aleppo was located in Syria and had been a centre of trade for centuries.  The book was the product of Alexander and Patrick Russell, two vigorous brothers from Scotland who served as Levant Company physicians in Aleppo...

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is often remembered as the brilliant mathematician and rationalist who possibly invented calculus before Isaac Newton and who was suspicious of John Locke’s empiricist epistemology. But, as Claudine Cohen and Andre Wakefield’s new translation of Leibniz’s Protogaea elegantly reveals, he had many other tantalizing interests...

In 1716, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, the Swiss polymath and physician, published Helvetia historia naturalis. In seeking to highlight the natural wonders of his beloved Switzerland, he created a text that became a popular reference work for European naturalists. While such nationalist motivations were on the rise at the time, longitudinal studies on the forms of print that gave birth to such large projects are hard to find. In Inventing the Indigenous, Alix Cooper addresses this gap in scholarship and gives an original account of how local knowledge moved through texts that addressed local, regional and national natural history...

The story of Enlightenment literacy is often reconstructed from textbooks and manuals, with the implicit focus being what children were reading. But far less attention has been devoted to how they mastered the scribal techniques that allowed them to manage and produce knowledge on paper in a way that helped them pursue a trade or which allowed them to keep track of the everyday observations they made at home or as travellers. Focusing on Scotland, handwritten student manuscripts are used to reveal that children learned to write in a variety of modes, each of which required a set of graphic techniques. These modes and skills constituted a pervasive form of graphic literacy that underpinned the social, intellectual and economic success of the Scottish Enlightenment.

British Academy Conference: 'Co-operative Inter-regional Worlds: Productions, Markets, Travel and Trade.'  Held at the Institute of Historical Research, London

In her influential essay ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, the feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young argued that boys and girls are often taught to inhabit space through different kinds of bodily movement. Using the example of throwing a ball, she transformed the act of throwing into a learned performance by showing that girls were taught to move their bodies less and that boys were taught to move their bodies more.  Less movement was feminine.  More movement was masculine. Young made this point to illustrate the phenomenological (and, hence, learned) foundations of gender, and to counter the claim that gender was a naturalistic or essential category that emanated from a child's sex. Young's work also showed that bodily acts like throwing a ball are epistemic things to which children learn to attach meaning through performative experiences and routines.  In short, bodily modalities carry meaning.

Drawing from Young's work, as well as the research of Judith Butler, this paper uses 18th- and 19th-century girlhood notebooks to argue that the act of writing and copying – a bodily modality – can be used to study the historical relationship between gender and natural knowledge.  To accomplish this task, I treat notebooks as visual technologies that can be used to investigate how girls employed the act of inscription to associate feminine virtues with various forms of natural knowledge that they encountered on a daily basis.  Put another way, I wish to explore how girls learned to gender science through the kind of graphic interface facilitated through various scribal performances required to make and use a notebook and other graphic objects.

The paper will focus on manuscript sources made and used by girls during the Scottish Enlightenment.  It begins with a brief summary of the availability of such sources and the merits of treating them as artefacts, that is to say, as paper tools.  The rest of the paper will be devoted to establishing two points, outlined below, relevant to the ways in which the relationship between female bodily movement and knowledge acquisition were conceived through paper tools during the Enlightenment. My reflections are encapsulations of larger arguments that I am formulating in the final chapters of a book that I am finishing. 

Firstly, I wish to show that movement, particularly the movement of the eye and hand across and around the space of the written page, played a core role in the theories of mind learned by girls. This mental model, I propose, treated writing as an act that profoundly shaped the self and, if approached through Butler’s work on citation, provides an interesting way to historicize how girls learned to gender their thoughts and observations about the natural world.  Secondly, I wish to explore how girlhood manuscripts can be employed to reconstruct how girls used movement, writing and drawing, to attach gendered meanings to the way that they inscribed information graphically on the page.  Following Young’s work, I suggest that girls were taught to move ‘less’ around the page in a manner that affected how they used tables and figures to represent natural knowledge.  Throughout the paper I treat writing as a knowledge-making activity and I approach girlhood manuscripts as artefacts that can be used to gain deeper insight into what it meant to write like a girl during the Enlightenment.

In this paper I would like to explain why the scribal artefacts created by early modern children is important historical objects – objects which are directly relevant to how children learned to make and use lines. Drawing from my expertise as a historian of the British Enlightenment, I focus my analysis upon the writings produced by children who were educated in Scotland during the long eighteenth century.  I show that investigating the graphic abilities of young learners can help historians see the act of writing as a form of graphic knowledge.  One of my central contentions is that, when it comes to understanding the historical relationship between rationality and visual culture, we risk losing a major part of the story when we fail to engage with the various kinds of meanings and values attached to linear inscriptions made in educational settings.  In short, the history of link-making is directly relevant to how rationality was conceived during the Enlightenment.

In the summer of 1810 the nine-year-old Marjory Fleming was particularly vexed about her unvirtuous conduct.  In addition to refusing to do her multiplication lessons, she stamped her feet and threw her new hat on the ground when her teacher asked to do the rest of her homework.  Rather than being an exceptional occurrence, this kind of behaviour was not rare for her.  Indeed, her temper often prevented her from completing her writing and reading exercises, leading her sometimes to shout at her tutor and, on one occasion, to even throw her book down the stairs.  After each outburst Marjory asked her teacher for forgiveness, going so far on one occasion to admit that she had acted ‘like a little young Devil.’  How are we to interpret this form of self-assessment? 

Using instruction manuals and manuscript notebooks made and used by children and adolescents living in Scotland during the long eighteenth century, I argue that young learners used the material act of writing to acquire a form of self-knowledge that was framed by utility, sociability and morality, that is to say, core principles that played a central role in shaping the ideologies of learning that guided the Scottish Enlightenment.  Instead of focusing primarily on what adult writers thought children should be writing, I give equal weight to the extant evidence of what children were actually writing, thereby revealing an inextricable link between graphic culture, the science of childhood and the origins of self-knowledge.

How did students learn to be a Calvinist during the Scottish Enlightenment? More specifically, in an age when printed or written words were seen as the ultimate material artefacts of human rationality, was there a difference between how one learned and what one was learning?  In this paper I argue that there was indeed a difference.  Focusing on the graphic culture of Scottish Calvinists, I argue that, though the theological commitments of Scotland’s leading educators differed, the cognitive model that they used to understand the operations of the human mind was the same. In short, their theological diversity was underpinned by a cognitive unity.  The paper will pay special attention to the pedagogical principles articulated, both in print and manuscript, by Scotland’s leading university professors.  In the end we will see that the foregoing cognitive unity motivated educators to install an ability and desire to evaluate, dissect and create diverse systems of knowledge whether they be Calvinistic or otherwise.

Student notebooks were prized possessions during the Enlightenment and they were widely recognised as valuable objects in the colonial economy of information.  In this paper I want to explore how these highly valued artefacts shed light on the ways in which different kinds of libraries were used by a community of readers, listeners and writers.  My observations are based on the hundreds of extant notebooks made by Scottish university students from the 1750s to around 1810. 

Instead of arguing for a community based around one place, I argue for what might be seen as a community based around an object.  In other words, instead of focusing on a community centred in or around an immobile library reading room, I argue for a community centred around a mobile object, that is, the student notebook.  Focusing on notebooks allows me to treat libraries as important parts of virtual networks of communication based on multiple acts of interactive inscription.  We will see that libraries were important, but only to the extent to which they served the needs of a larger scribal community of teachers and learners that interacted over time and space.

How did parliamentary facts travel?  In this paper I address this question in relation to the information processed by select committees from the 1780s to the 1820s.  During this time select committees played a leading fact-finding role within parliament – a role that processed information relevant to the management of important environmental, industrial and agriculture concerns.  In order to understand how this information was managed, I argue that select committee reports were part of a sophisticated parliamentary information network, the structure of which, to best of my knowledge, has not been reconstructed by historians.  Using documentation produced by over sixty committees that met between 1780 and 1820, I treat the report as a genre of information transfer in which facts were commissioned, collected and then circulated in and outside parliament.  I then conclude with reflections on how such an informatic approach to the committees opens doors for investigating the role played by expert scientific witnesses.

In 1809 several London industrialists and politicians proposed a bill in the British Parliament to establish a Gas and Light Company that could supply London with the new technology of gas streetlights.  Its proposers argued that the wording of the bill created clear boundaries for the industry, thereby allowing the government to regulate it and oversee its activities. After being examined by a select committee and being debated through three readings in the House of Commons, the bill failed.  This paper examines the role played by chemical experts in this political process.  It is part of a larger project I am formulating about the role played by chemistry in politics and governance.  Part of the project seeks to analyze how scientific evidence became evidence in parliamentary select committees, that is to say, within groups charged with providing reliable facts to the government.

The bill was a direct governmental response to the new technology of gas streetlights that had been developed primarily in the factories of the North, outside the London Establishment.  The gas in question was an unexpected byproduct of the process used to make coke from coal.  The bill was arguably an attempt by London-based interests to create a government sanctioned monopoly for a nascent industry based on a recycled chemical material.  The meetings of the select committee, therefore, necessitated the testimony of twenty witnesses that were experts on chemical experimentation and/or management.  Concentrating on the Gas and Light Company Select Committee, in this paper I want to examine the evidentiary preconditions that framed the interactions between chemistry and governance by asking:  Who counted as chemical experts? Why were they selected? What kinds of testimony did they provide?  Who benefitted from the testimony?  In answering these questions I hope to shed light on the political consequences of recycling, the relationship between chemistry and industrial governance, and the role of scientific expertise in the evolution of early 19th century states.

"In 1824 the editors of a new weekly periodical called The Chemist compared chemistry to a religion.  In attempt to attract the attention of general readers, the preface asserted that, ‘As in Religion, however, most men have their opinions fixed by the place of their birth, so in chemistry they seem settled by the same circumstance, and by their education and occupations.’  When compared to the tense journalistic climate that surrounded British politics for the past three decades, the open acknowledgement of the nationalistic or radical views of chemists seemed to signal a bold era in which ideological commitments could openly influence the way that scientists and the general public viewed science. But if this was the case, when and where were the seeds for this kind of symbiosis between science and ideology sewn?

Taking this question as a starting point, this paper explores the relationship between chemistry and several prominent ideologies that dominated pubic and political life from time of the French Revolution to the end of the Napoleonic Wars.  Throughout the essay I take ‘ideology’ to mean the historical ‘patterns of political beliefs that introduce normative visions into political life’.  I begin looking at the views of the King’s government, that is, the conservative leaning politicians that ran Parliament on behalf of King George III.  We will then move to the opposition and we end by examining the sentiments of the public, particularly those who were chemically educated.  At each stage we will see that chemistry was firmly linked to various ideological positions which, like the sects described by The Chemist, ranged form peculiar to opportunistic."

"In 1785 the eighteen-year old Alexander Coventrie left his home in the Clyde Valley of Scotland to begin his studies at the renowned medical school of the University of Edinburgh.  He fell quickly into the common regimen of writing and rewriting his lecture notes on a daily basis until one or two in the morning.  Looking back on his studies near the end of his year at university, he wrote in his diary that ‘my late hours revising my notes taken at the lectures, wore on my constitution, and I longed for the approach of May and the end of the lectures.’ 

Keeping a student notebook during the late Enlightenment was a serious business for children and adolescents.  Inscription was seen as a knowledge-making practice that imparted facts and abilities that strengthened the self and society. Yet, despite the centrality of note-taking in many schools and universities, we know relatively little about the modes of writing that allowed university students like Coventrie to learn through inscribing knowledge in a notebook.  Taking this lacuna as a starting point, this paper uses an anthropology of inscription to unpack the scribal skills and routines that functioned as knowledge-making practices during the early modern period.

Studies on early modern educational settings tend to use student notebooks as windows to the kinds of facts that were being taught through the curriculum.  In this paper I take another approach.  Drawing from the hundreds of bound notebooks kept by students like Coventrie in Scottish universities, I show that, in addition to such facts, students also learned to treat their inscriptions as pictorial devices – as paper tools that required flexible skills and routines that carried practical and epistemic values.  In following this path I showcase a scribal regimen of knowledge acquisition that underpinned the production and dissemination of information when students became adults."

Within the history of chemistry Joseph Black is perhaps best known for his isolation of fixed air in the 1750s.  But to his students he was also known as a skilled teacher and a gifted communicator.  Crucial to his teaching was a carefully curated assemblage of diagrams that depicted chemical affinity.  In a forthcoming Osiris article I argue that these diagrams were pictures that collectively visualised Black's affinity theory.  In this paper I extend this thesis and excavate several principles of visual representation that Black used to construct images that were useful manuscript learning tools. I do this by building on the work of the philosopher and historian Hans Jorg Rheinberger, particularly his notion that an image is something that consists not only of a visual form, but also of a set of practices used to learn, make and understand that form.  Like the philosophers with whom Black conversed, Rheinberger suggests that diagrammatic images are things we think with, things that shape what we know and what we think we know.  It this active view of an image that I use to approach Black’s diagrams in this paper, especially the idea that they were visual forms that gained meaning and value as they moved through time and space through the notes kept by professors and students.

""In 1766 Thomas Cochran entered the Edinburgh classroom of Joseph Black for the first time to learn chemistry.  Cochran was studying medicine and, like so many of Black’s students, he dutifully recorded several diagrams into his notebooks.  These visualisations were not complex; in fact, they were simple.  One of them was a single X, a chiasm, and Black used it to illustrate ratios of chemical attraction.  This diagram is often held up to be the first chemical formula and, as such, historians have endeavoured to explain why it was unique and how Black invented it. 

In this paper I wish to turn the forgoing premise on its head by arguing that Black’s chiasm was neither visually unique nor did he invent it. I do this by approaching the diagrams via a visual anthropology that allows me to examine how students learned to attach meaning to patterns that were already familiar to them.  When viewed from this perspective, two important points emerge.  First, Black's conscripted diagrams had been used in mathematics for a long time.  This was especially the case for his chiasm, which was used in schools as a calculation tool.  Second, Black's diagrams operated collectively as a visual system, a assemblage of pictures that all worked to explain the forces that held compounds together. 

Throughout the paper attention will be given to the ways in which diagrams circulated between notebooks and textbooks in a manner the blurred the line between print and manuscript culture. in the end we will see that Black’s diagrams were successful because their visual simplicity and familiarity made them ideally suited to carry the chemical theories that he so skilfully attached to them.

This paper will be giving in the following conference:

Printing mathematics in the early modern world
All Souls, Oxford

Provisional programme

"Authors and readers"
Richard J. Oosterhoff, Notre Dame: "Printing Proofs in Paris c. 1500: Communal Authorship, the Typography of Enunciations, and the Point of Demonstration".
Leo Rogers, Oxford: “Printing Mathematical Texts in England in the 16th Century”.
Katherine Hunt, Birkbeck: tba.
Dagmar Mrozik, Wuppertal: "Mathematical authorship and its display in the Society of Jesus: Between individual and Jesuit".
Gregg De Young, The American University in Cairo: "Early printing of mathematics in Arabic".

"Collections and collectors"
Renae Satterley, the Middle Temple Library: "Robert Ashley (1565–1641): collecting and using mathematical books at the Middle Temple"
Tabitha Tuckett, London: tba.

"Diagrams"
Renzo Baldasso, Arizona: "The Technical Dimension of Early Printed Mathematical Diagrams, 1474–1482".
Stephen Boyd Davis, Royal College of Art: "'If an idea bear any relation to quantity of any kind' - devising and printing historical time in the eighteenth century".
Matthew Eddy, Durham: "Appropriation or Invention? Chemistry, Ratios and the Visual Anthropology of Matter".

"Space and aesthetics"
Robin Rider, Wisconsin: "The power of negative space: 18th-century French mathematics in print".
Travis Williams, Rhode Island: "Managing Notational White in Early Modern Printed Mathematics".
Alex Marr, Cambridge: "The Aesthetics of Early-Modern Printed Mathematical Instruments".

"Error and correction"
David Bellhouse, Western Ontario: "Errors in mathematical tables".
Richard Kremer, Dartmouth: "On Printing 'Meaningless' Numbers, or Controlling Errors in Incunable Astronomical Tables".
Benjamin Wardhaugh, Oxford: "Error and its handling in Georgian mathematics books".""

In 1768 Dr Andrew Turnbull arrived on the east coast of Florida to establish the Smyrnea plantation, the largest British colony founded in North America during the eighteenth century.  Plagued by mosquitoes, drought and fever, over one thousand settlers worked to create an infrastructure of interconnected canals and indigo vats which recycled agricultural and industrial substances in the settlement. The goal was to produce large quantities of the ‘Devil’s Dye’, that is, the lucrative deep blue dye of indigo.  Rather than emerge out of desperate necessity, the environmental knowledge that underpinned this system was in fact a shrewdly calculated implementation of cutting edge science that had been imported by Dr Turnbull from Scottish universities.  The principle aim of this paper is to answer three questions: How do plantations like the New Smyrnea settlement fit into recent studies on Enlightenment environmental thought?  What were the ecological models that Turnbull was using? To what extent did the production of indigo advance or challenge these models?  Drawing from archaeological reports and recently located manuscripts, this paper uses these questions to investigate the limits of environmental knowledge on a colonial plantation.

During the 1780s the fiery Scottish engineer and journalist William Playfair published a book that reduced the economic data of the world's largest nations into ‘charts’.  Many scholars treat these images as the first modern graphs.  Yet, rather than concentrating on the uniqueness of his graphs, Playfair stressed that his aim was to ‘abbreviate and facilitate the modes of conveying information from one person to another, and from one individual to the many.’ In other words, he wanted to visualise information in a manner that was simple and which utilised the graphic ‘modes’ – the skills and routines – already possessed by his readers.

In order to see the clever ubiquity of the visual structure evinced in Playfair’s graphs, I argue that we need to treat the pages of early modern books as pictures that were built from a shared palette of patterns and visual skills that were commonly used to ‘abbreviate’ and ‘facilitate’ information in school textbooks. Taking this developmental observation as a starting point, I identify visual patterns and practices by treating the pages of children’s textbooks and notebooks as informatic maps that were learned through repetitive acts of graphic iteration.  By the end of the paper we will see that the everyday world of learning was a distinctly pictorial affair that laid the graphic foundation for Playfair’s innovative visualisations.

********
This paper is part of the following panel:


Texts as Tools: 
Rethinking the Cognitive Routines of Early Modern Learners

Participants: Margaret Schotte (Princeton), Hansun Hsiung (Harvard), Matthew Daniel Eddy (Durham) and Ann Blair (Harvard).

Recent decades have witnessed a rise in studies seeking to examine the cognitive role played by texts in learning environments.  Within historical studies, new digital databases have ushered in a flood of printed textbooks and manuscript notebooks that provide deep insight into the making and remaking of knowledge in educational settings.  For the early modern period, studies that concentrate on the education of the poor or professional classes focus more on timeless 'facts' and less on the day-to-day skills of learning and literacy, thereby framing knowledge as a set point and not as a collection of processes. Consequently, rather than focusing explicitly on the facts being taught, this session concentrates on how facts were being learned and how print and manuscript texts facilitated this active process. Treating texts as tools, our questions are developmentally and cognitively orientated. While recognizing that facts were important, we are more interested in identifying the core skills and routines that allowed students to interface with texts in a memorable, but useful, manner.  The foregoing practices will be investigated in relation to the interface skills and routines required by students learning navigation (Schotte), translation (Hsiung) and literacy (Eddy). Using these topics as case studies, we wish to rethink how early modern teachers and learners actually used textual material as cognitive tools during the learning process. Further developing the notion of user-engagement, the panel will encourage the audience to interact with these texts and the panel’s themes by means of a digital image repository.""

In 1870 Parliament introduced compulsory elementary education to England.  Over the next decade it passed several acts that provided funding and resources for schools founded to educate the working class.  The acts were introduced by the Gladstone government and were fiercely debated by liberals and conservatives. Despite the disagreements between politicians, however, the cognitive model that underpinned their view of education was the same.  This model drew a direct analogy between the mental capacities of children and the mental capacities of uncivilised or even prehistoric ‘savages’.  The core difference between the moral minds of adults and the amoral minds of children, therefore, was the presence of literacy and numeracy.  Consequently, education was treated as a form of cognitive conditioning that fostered the kind of morality that had produced democracy, capitalism and Christianity. One of the champions of this quintessentially Victorian conception of cognition was the liberal politician Sir John Lubbock, who was elected Member of Parliament in 1870.  His expertise in the fields of economics, scientific education and prehistory made him a uniquely qualified cultural commentator on educational issues.  This aspect of his career has received little attention and this paper investigates how he used his scientific expertise in conjunction with Victorian notions of cognition to frame his views on the utility of establishing primary and secondary schools for the working class.

In 1710 the Scottish teenager James Dunbar opened his notebook and began to draw a table. The task proved to be difficult and he failed to draw straight lines across the page.  His disorderly hand rendered his last two columns useless and led him to write: ‘I am angry that I left a blank [space] here and wrote filthy Scribble Scribble.’ What factors motivated a child like Dunbar to have an emotional reaction to such a simple act of writing?  Although the Enlightenment was an age that cherished polite forms of inscription, we still know very little about the ways in which children were taught to value systems of knowledge they were asked to iterate on the page.  We know even less about how the experience of learning affected the ways in which they were encouraged to express or control their emotions through repeated and ordered acts.  In this paper I argue that there was a strong experiential link between the perceived order of educational ephemera and the inculcation of moral virtues. I do this by focusing on inscription as a form of anger management.  I begin by noting that anger was seen as a problematic passion or sentiment and that acts of inscription were treated as psychiatric therapy.  More specifically, early modern inscriptions were seen as graphic pictures that inculcated order in the mind – an order that then could be used to resist an emotional reaction like anger.  Drawing from paintings, prints, textbooks, marginalia, notebooks, drawings, scribbles and more, the paper addresses three core questions.  Why were inscriptions believed to cure an emotion like anger? Do contemporary paintings and prints provide adequate evidence of the emotional relevance of such inscriptions? How can the graphic tools of education be used to reconstruct an accurate picture of graphic therapy as a form of anger management?  I end the paper by exploring how the link between morality and inscriptions like Dunbar’s ‘Scribble Scribble’ made the pursuit of knowledge an emotionally relevant activity that contributed to the larger order of society.

"Of all the graphic tools used to teach children and adolescents before the dawn of steam printing, the humble word table was arguably the most ubiquitous.  It is perhaps this ubiquity that has allowed it to remain hidden in plain sight from many historians of education, informatics and visual culture. As shown in the work of digital artists like Juan Osborne words can be pictures.  Word pictures have always been with us, but their importance for the world of New Media makes the time ripe to ask more pressing questions about their history. 

Today it is second nature for computer users to treat collections of words as pictures.  They appear regularly as word clouds in search engine optimisers like Wordsheep, Wordshift and Tweetascope, as well as in the verbal montage of websites.  Indeed, we save backup ‘screenshots’ of such word pictures as well as those that are sent to us as digital receipts.  Many of these word pictures contain images that are used more as information finding aids and less as representations of objects that we might find in the world around us.  But they are pictures nonetheless and their rising importance signals the need for historians to recognise the difference between seeing words as signs that point to images and seeing words as images themselves.  Nowhere is this distinction more important than in the history of predigital informatics where word images were used on a daily basis to manage both simple and complex systems of knowledge. It is this connection to the function, meaning and use of longstanding pictorial practices that makes the history of the word table an appropriate subject matter for the questions raised by the visual anthropology of graphic artefacts promoted in the works of social anthropologists like Jack Goody and Tim Ingold.   

If sometime in the future this paper is published in a journal, it will most likely be found by scholars through a technology of search like Google and accessed through a technology of storage like a PDF.  The mechanics of such information management tools are largely hidden from us today, both in terms of the algorithms that guide the search and in terms of the programming languages that transform millions of binary characters into an image on a computer screen.  Yet, to the early modern reader, this invisible world of informatics would have been an utter enigma because most graphic tools of search and storage were one in the same and were fully visible as a single entity on the pages of most forms of print and manuscript culture.  Put another way, both the stored facts and their system of storage were available at a glance.  In this essay I would like to examine this visual aspect of early modern information technologies by looking at the pictorial nature of the common word table.  Whereas there were many kinds of tables employed throughout the early modern world, I wish to focus on those which were used explicitly as a visual learning tool, that is to say, those which were commonly used over and over again by students sitting in school or university classrooms...

To listen to this talk, click on the SMS Cambridge link below."

This paper is part of a session that I co-organised with Carin Berkowitz:

The Sense of Things: Perception as Practice in Educational Settings

Chair/Commentator: Lynn K. Nyhart, University of Wisconsin

1. “The Mind on Paper: The Shared Visual Order of Science and the Humanities during the
Late Enlightenment,” *Matthew D. Eddy (co-organizer), Durham University

2. “The Surgeon’s Seeing Hand: Teaching Anatomy to the Senses in Britain, 1750‐1830,”
*Carin Berkowitz (co-organizer), Chemical Heritage Foundation

3. “‘Things Familiar’: Object Lessons in Victorian Science and Literature,” Melanie Keene,
Cambridge University

4. “Drawing Mathematical Theories, Illustrating Points: The History of a Topological
Atlas,” Alma Steingart, MIT