“Reconnecting Sloane” is an inter-disciplinary and multi-institutional project exploring the vast collection of the physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). This review surveys recent scholarship within the different but overlapping methodological and conceptual approaches used by the collaborative team to understand early modern cultures of natural history collecting. Starting with the global geography of Sloane's botanical collections and material studies of natural objects, it then considers sociable practices of science and issues of trust and authenticity. Finally, it explores scholarship surrounding the organization of natural objects and its role in knowledge formation, before discussing how we might best approach current museum collections.
The poor state of the Royal Society's Repository in the eighteenth century has been seen as a symbol of the institution's decline. This article contributes to recent reinterpretation by putting this collection within its historical contexts of use and understanding, exploring the ambiguous relationship between private and 'public' resources by examining the collections alongside other spaces of discursive inquiry and institutional improvement. It argues that specific approaches towards scientific administration during this period helped change the perception and purpose of the Repository, from 'a physical storehouse of knowledge' to the icon and tool of a successful and faciliatory scientific society.
This article uses the records at the Royal Mint to explore how Isaac Newton worked with metal beyond his alchemical and natural philosophical pursuits. It demonstrates how institutional paperwork can be used to think in new ways about the management of working resources as well as the relationship of material and mental practices across the linked urban worlds of state, science and finance. It reveals how Newton negotiated artisanal and administrative skills through a learned ‘practical objectivity’, unable to rely wholly upon his scientific reputation or mathematical ability when working with men and metals within a government department. Finally, it illuminates how Newton's activities at the Mint intersected and influenced a growing interest in the pursuit of scholarly antiquarianism as well as commercial geology, mining, metallurgy and metrology in the early eighteenth century.
This article explores how medical collections, representing repositories of knowledge and prestige, were used in the communication and representation of medical education and provincial identity in Manchester in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It charts the changing ways in which medical collections and knowledge were represented as both pedagogical and promotional devices, demonstrating the importance of a localized approach to medical culture and, particularly, collecting in the long eighteenth century, and a sensitivity to how different generations inherited their recent past. It argues against any assumption of the easy transmission of scholarly cultural codes from metropolitan ‘centres’ to provincial ‘peripheries’.
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