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“I Resolved to Throw Aside All Manner of Hypotheses … and to Attend Wholly to What the Appearances Themselves Would Teach Me”

Matthew C. Hunter

in Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London

Micrographia (1665) is not only Robert Hooke’s most famous work; it was a totemic project for the early Royal Society of London. Published when its author was not yet thirty years old, Micrographia ... More

Micrographia (1665) is not only Robert Hooke’s most famous work; it was a totemic project for the early Royal Society of London. Published when its author was not yet thirty years old, Micrographia manifests the pronounced influence of lessons Hooke had learned in the painting studio of Peter Lely and from collaborative work with Oxford’s experimental-philosophical elites. Yet, as this chapter argues, the confident pictorial strategies and robust epistemological value that Hooke theorized for Micrographia’s stunning images also depart massively from the fragmentary, tortured visual forms of his later draftsmanship, particularly his astronomical drawings of the early 1680s. That late graphic work has been much less well known because it was actively suppressed by Hooke’s posthumous editor—this despite the fact that Hooke assigned it even stronger cognitive force than Micrographia’s plates. How do we account for these strange shifts and discrepancies between graphic form and cognitive function? Working between these paired groupings of drawings from the 1660s and 1680s, the chapter shows how Hooke’s weird pictorial project effectively explodes a sequence of carefully-crafted observational protocols and models of the experimental-philosophical self, as well as the narratives by which recent, interdisciplinary interpretation would bind them.Less

Knives Out: Thinking On, With, Through, and Against Paper in the Mid–1660s

Matthew C. Hunter

in Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London

This chapter focuses upon a single artifact: the paper model of Richard Towneley’s telescopic micrometer that Robert Hooke fashioned in the fall of 1667. Cut, pasted, patched and apparently wounded, ... More

This chapter focuses upon a single artifact: the paper model of Richard Towneley’s telescopic micrometer that Robert Hooke fashioned in the fall of 1667. Cut, pasted, patched and apparently wounded, Hooke’s fragile model needs to be seen, I argue, as positively kaleidoscopic in its philosophical generativity. The chapter shows how Hooke’s model began as a picture and then matured as an object at a nexus of technological competition, artistic skill, and frankly wild speculation among leading French and English experimentalists, before giving birth to varieties of conceptual shape-shifting that targeted and liquidated nothing less than art itself. Having set out its micro-historical backstory and conflicted relations with art, I then elaborate the philosophical force of the procedures by which Hooke drafted, cut apart, and pasted his paper micrometer while fantasizing about machines, the machine-like bodies of animals he was then dissecting in landmark anatomical experiments, and the genesis of those animal bodies he was modeling through studies of paper-making. The chapter concludes by showing how Hooke attempted to theorize the cognitive agency of artifacts like his paper micrometer by redeploying his own pivotal ideas on celestial mechanics and attraction at a distance.Less

Robert Hooke: “The Armed Eye”

in Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century

This chapter examines Robert Hooke's books Micrographia and An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth. It explains that in Micrographia Hooke illustrated confidence of the Royal Society in the ... More

This chapter examines Robert Hooke's books Micrographia and An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth. It explains that in Micrographia Hooke illustrated confidence of the Royal Society in the achievements of natural philosophy by means of instruments and he shifted scientific discourse from a poetics of the probable to a poetics of proof. In An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth, Hooke indicated that we had somehow found the means to reach and see what had hitherto remained inaccessible.Less

Cascade, Copper, Collection: Constellations of Images in 1670s Experimental Philosophy

Matthew C. Hunter

in Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London

By necessity, the philosophy of experiment was to be a collaborative project. As Royal Society Fellows repeatedly emphasized, images were often much more useful for conveying information to fellow ... More

By necessity, the philosophy of experiment was to be a collaborative project. As Royal Society Fellows repeatedly emphasized, images were often much more useful for conveying information to fellow experimentalists than words alone. But, how was such a scientific collectivity to be organized? And by exactly what means were images to serve the advancement of experimental knowledge? Centered around Philosophical Collections (the scientific periodical Robert Hooke edited between 1679-82), this chapter reads the evidence of how these diverse visual materials were made, used, and understood to be susceptible to incorporation as scientific knowledge. Tracing micro-histories of the journal’s contributors and placing them against Hooke’s contemporaneous writings on the ideal organization of the experimental community, the chapter explores how the management of diverse agents and information became a pressing problem for Royal Society Fellows in the later 1670s. The chapter stresses what Hooke’s contributors keenly recognized: that his vision for a vertically-integrated “philosophical army” was often at cross purposes with the individual interests they aimed to pursue with and through his periodical’s images.Less

Collective Note-taking and Robert Hooke's Dynamic Archive

Richard Yeo

in Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science

This chapter examines the challenge of collective note-taking in the service of collaborative projects, such as those of John Ray and Martin Lister on the description and classification of plants and ... More

This chapter examines the challenge of collective note-taking in the service of collaborative projects, such as those of John Ray and Martin Lister on the description and classification of plants and animals. It considers the influence of Francis Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum as a model for the preliminary collection of data under tentative topics, and one that might guide additional collection. It underlines Henry Oldenburg's role as the Royal Society's information manager and the challenge of storing and arranging its paper archive. The main figure in this chapter is Robert Hooke, whose views on note-taking are closely interwoven with his ideas about the nature of memory, the philosophy of science, and his vision of an institutional archive.Less

“Very Able, Very Sordid, Cynical, Wrong Headed and Whimsical”

Matthew C. Hunter

in Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London

This chapter introduces the book by placing Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and their experimental colleagues amidst a recent, interdisciplinary conversation that has stressed the direct, strongly ... More

This chapter introduces the book by placing Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and their experimental colleagues amidst a recent, interdisciplinary conversation that has stressed the direct, strongly symbiotic relations between early modern science and visual art. Seventeenth-century experimentalists needed visualizations acutely, it is claimed, since so few contemporaries possessed the expensive instruments and specialized skills required for performing the experiments privileged by the “new science” of the Royal Society of London. Reciprocally, we read, by appropriating techniques of detail-laden depiction perfected by early modern painters, experimental philosophers helped to disenchant visual art, which had long labored underdeveloped and shrouded in Protestant suspicion in the early modern British Isles. Mapping the concept of “wicked intelligence” and the book’s contribution to histories of art and architecture, science and visual studies, my introduction challenges this influential, amicable story of mutual reinforcement between scientists and artists. Instead, I thematize their testy, precarious crossings through a tale of cunning, cruelty and cold-blooded skulduggery told by Hooke—a figure then described as “very able, very sordid, cynical, wrong-headed, and whimsical.Less

“The Wonderful Elaboratory of the Animal Body”: The Royal Society's Repository at Work

Matthew C. Hunter

in Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London

This chapter focuses on the Royal Society’s early museum at Gresham College in London where objects from the institution’s far-flung contacts were put on public display. Examining the ways in which ... More

This chapter focuses on the Royal Society’s early museum at Gresham College in London where objects from the institution’s far-flung contacts were put on public display. Examining the ways in which these valuable artifacts were physically disassembled, reconfigured and recoded with meaning (often many times over) in the Royal Society’s meetings, the chapter demonstrates how the museum collection came to serve as a powerful model for the faculties of cognition particularly for Robert Hooke, Keeper of the museum itself. Hooke’s writings on cognition from the early 1680s, I argue, articulate this epistemological geography. Distributed networks of informants became the senses of the experimental body which would deliver ontologically-fragile, unreliable objects to the centralized laboratory of the mind. There, the countervailing agency of what Hooke would call (through engagement with Elizabethan philosopher John Dee) “Archietonical Power” brings them to stable, rational order and feeds intelligence back out to the periphery. By shifting between the Royal Society’s constant bricolage of museum artifacts and Hooke’s conception of reason, the chapter sheds raking light on the darker textures of experimental intelligence.Less

Between Observation and Image: Representations of Insects inRobert Hooke’s Micrographia

Janice Neri

in The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700

Robert Hooke is an English scholar who published the historic book Micrographia, a compilation of illustrations of insects, plants, mechanical objects, and astronomical bodies that highlights his ... More

Robert Hooke is an English scholar who published the historic book Micrographia, a compilation of illustrations of insects, plants, mechanical objects, and astronomical bodies that highlights his skills as an illustrator and observer. This chapter narrates the progression of events leading to the production and publication of the book. It begins by recounting the Micrographia’s origins as microscopical insect drawings of Christopher Wren. It then explains Hooke’s techniques in creating the specimens and images to display “natural” appearances, an act of transforming chaotic observations into a comprehensible and orderly realm of wonders.Less

Troubled Numbers

Jed Z. Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold

in Newton and the Origin of Civilization

This chapter demonstrates how Isaac Newton’s emerging attitudes toward perception, and the very process of measurement itself, were different from those of his contemporaries. It discusses the ... More

This chapter demonstrates how Isaac Newton’s emerging attitudes toward perception, and the very process of measurement itself, were different from those of his contemporaries. It discusses the Hooke–Hevelius controversy. In 1673, Hevelius published the first part of his Machinae coelestis, which provided verbal descriptions and elaborate plates of the naked-eye devices that he had constructed for determining stellar coordinates. The very next year Hooke took umbrage at the publication and attacked it in print in a series of Animadversions. Hooke was not only certain that naked-eye observations could not possibly match those performed with a telescope equipped with cross-hairs, and had urged Hevelius to adopt the new apparatus. Hevelius nevertheless published the Machinae, and Hooke was incensed. The chapter also details Huygens’ and Boyle’s attitudes toward perception and measurement.Less

Pictorial Intelligence Peter Lely, Experimental Culture, and the Parameters of Painting

Matthew C. Hunter

in Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London

When he first came to London in the late 1640s, Robert Hooke was apprenticed in the studio of Peter Lely, a Netherlandish artist who would become Restoration London’s leading portrait painter. This ... More

When he first came to London in the late 1640s, Robert Hooke was apprenticed in the studio of Peter Lely, a Netherlandish artist who would become Restoration London’s leading portrait painter. This chapter proposes that just as Lely and his period commentators can disclose fundamental concerns shared among Hooke’s circles, so the experimental archive provides valuable resources for rethinking Lely. I begin by using Lely’s historical “subject pictures” to surreptitiously illuminate the contours of the Restoration-era philosophical beholder who stood over and against experimental objecthood. The chapter’s second section turns the interpretive direction around, using the Royal Society’s experimental research on the visible, bodily effects produced by exotic intoxicants to re-examine a defining stylistic feature of Lely’s Restoration portraiture: the so-called “sleepy-eyed look.” The chapter concludes synthetically by considering Lely’s pictures as made things whose complex, collaborative studio production presages problems and strategies central to the experimental community especially in the 1670s-early 1680s.Less

The Emergence of Baroque Mathematical Natural Philosophy: An Archeology of the Inverse Square Law

Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris

in Baroque Science

This chapter examines the history of the emergence of mathematical natural philosophy in the context of the inverse square law during the baroque period. It discusses how Isaac Newton established ... More

This chapter examines the history of the emergence of mathematical natural philosophy in the context of the inverse square law during the baroque period. It discusses how Isaac Newton established baroque mathematical philosophy with the use of the inverse square law as a means to reduce complex phenomena into approximate local order and describes how he unified heaven and earth under one system of physical laws. It also considers Johannes Kepler and Robert Hooke’s opinion that the notion of force acting at a distance to affect motion was much easier to conceive on the grand scale of the celestial realm than down on earth.Less

Conclusion: The Great Controversy

Robert S. Westman

in The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order

Nicolaus Copernicus's problematic involved several major areas of concern—planetary modeling, the ordering of the planets, the consequences of such ordering for natural philosophy, and the prediction ... More

Nicolaus Copernicus's problematic involved several major areas of concern—planetary modeling, the ordering of the planets, the consequences of such ordering for natural philosophy, and the prediction of future configurations of the heavens and their influences. Unlike theologically motivated fourteenth-century flirtations with the possibility of the Earth's daily rotation, Copernicus's revision of the planetary order occurred at a juncture with the emergent fifteenth-century cultures of print and prognostication: the mobilization of print in the service of both the theoretical and the practical literature of forecast, the creation of new conditions of prognosticatory authorship, the appropriation of resources of humanist rhetoric and dialectic, and the upsurge in apocalyptic expectation. This chapter discusses the Copernican question, prognostication in astrology and revolution in astronomy, world systems and comparative probability, the emergence of natural philosophy, the via moderna versus the via media at the point of mid-century, the Copernican question after the mid-century, and the works of Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton.Less

The Architecture of Science and the Science of Architecture

Matthew C. Hunter

in Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London

This chapter explores how thinking about the “archietonical” powers necessary to experimental-philosophical cognition evolved in and as London’s built environment. I position the plans of Wren, ... More

This chapter explores how thinking about the “archietonical” powers necessary to experimental-philosophical cognition evolved in and as London’s built environment. I position the plans of Wren, Hooke, John Evelyn and others for rebuilding the City after the Great Fire of 1666 within a broader conversation about the capital’s peculiar intelligence—a discourse significantly contested by enterprising property developers like Dr. Nicholas Barbon. As I argue, Barbon looked upon London’s post-Fire built environment not as a boon to “wit”, but as a speculative market, a breeding ground for consumer desire. These conflicts between mind and heart, between civic governance and emergent consumer culture fell directly upon Surveyor General Christopher Wren who was charged with enforcing property laws and building codes. I argue that in the 1670s Wren came to understand architecture as a socially-distributed, vertically-integrated project commanded by a polymathic intelligence—an enterprise for counteracting social problems generated by excessive consumption. As the innovative fabrication and collaboratively-built form of St. Paul’s cathedral enable us to see that model put into practice, I suggest that they also reveal instructive clefts between Wren and Hooke whose conception of philosophical architecture remained in dynamic evolution as the walls of the cathedral rose.Less

Literary Knowledge

Tita Chico

in The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment

Natural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of ... More

Natural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the individual who produces them.Less

The first professors

Allan Chapman

in Oxford Figures: Eight Centuries of the Mathematical Sciences

The first part of this chapter describes the foundation of the Savilian Chairs of Geometry and Astronomy and the Sedleian Chair of Natural Philosophy, and describes some early holders of these ... More

The first part of this chapter describes the foundation of the Savilian Chairs of Geometry and Astronomy and the Sedleian Chair of Natural Philosophy, and describes some early holders of these Chairs, such as Henry Briggs. The scene then moves to Wadham College after the Civil War and the development of experimental science under the Wardenship of John Wilkins, an.d describes his contributions and those of Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Christopher Wren to Oxford science and mathematics.Less

In Search of Lost Designs

Alexander Wragge-Morley

in Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720

The design argument is usually interpreted simply as an apologetic strategy, used by members of the early Royal Society such as John Ray to deflect accusations of irreligion. This chapter, however, ... More

The design argument is usually interpreted simply as an apologetic strategy, used by members of the early Royal Society such as John Ray to deflect accusations of irreligion. This chapter, however, uses a comparison between antiquarianism, architectural criticism, and natural history to show that the design argument was no mere polemical tool, but rather an aesthetic assumption that played a crucial role in the investigation and interpretation of nature. Comparing Robert Hooke's efforts to interpret the ruins of Snowflakes with contemporary attempts to do the same with the ruins of Stonehenge, this chapter shows that naturalists and antiquarians employed a strikingly similar set of approaches to the interpretation of objects they thought had been designed. Taking in a range of further examples and comparisons, including previously overlooked exchanges of correspondence between the naturalists Martin Lister and Nehemiah Grew, the chapter reveals that the empiricism of the early Royal Society was not as empirical as has been assumed. Instead, it was an empiricism shaped by aesthetic assumptions about the appearance of objects thought to have been designed. Naturalists such as Hooke aimed to generate for their readers an aesthetic experience of ease and pleasure.Less

Language Reform and the Lens of Simile in Experimentalist Texts

Erin Webster

in The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England

This chapter sheds new light on the ‘plain style’ movement associated with the experimental philosophy of England’s Royal Society by demonstrating that our critical understanding of this movement as ... More

This chapter sheds new light on the ‘plain style’ movement associated with the experimental philosophy of England’s Royal Society by demonstrating that our critical understanding of this movement as inherently anti-figurative has been hampered by an anachronistic understanding of how early modern Europeans understood figurative language to function. Drawing upon philosophical and experimentalist writings by Francis Bacon, Thomas Sprat, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke, this chapter shows that, rather than being against the use of metaphor and simile outright, experimentalist writers conceived of textual ‘similitudes’ as literary analogues to the mechanical technology of the lens. As such, they, like lenses, could serve both to clarify and to distort the objects they were used to describe and therefore must be carefully chosen and applied. The chapter concludes with an exploration of how readers responded to Hooke’s use of simile in his 1665 treatise on microscopy, Micrographia, by analyzing contemporaneous critiques of his work by Andrew Marvell, Samuel Butler, and Margaret Cavendish that target his literary style in addition—and relation—to his optical science.Less

“Pictures … in time petrify’d”

Matthew C. Hunter

in Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object

This chapter surveys research into artificial phosphorus conducted in the 1670s by leading figures in the early Royal Society of London. Mastered by itinerant chymists from German-speaking lands, ... More

This chapter surveys research into artificial phosphorus conducted in the 1670s by leading figures in the early Royal Society of London. Mastered by itinerant chymists from German-speaking lands, artificial phosphorus could be synthesized from human waste, then rubbed onto visual art to make it glow in the dark. But, it also spoke to broader interests: studies of light and combustion, production of organic vitality, and other problems of central interest to Restoration experimentalists. Tracking phosphorus research through those networks, the chapter centers on a spectacular lecture read twice before the Royal Society in summer 1682 by Robert Hooke. The final installment of his lectures on light, Hooke’s text used competing preparations of artificial phosphorus to model the ontology of time and to explain key features of human temporality. Examining how Hooke’s controversial claims about time would be reconfigured by contemporaries such as Nehemiah Grew, the chapter concludes by examining the ways in which the phosphorus research theorized by Hooke would later be claimed in larger chemical genealogies of photographic image-making.Less