Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677) had many things to be afraid of. He was perpetually short of money, he was once imprisoned on spurious grounds as a potential spy, and like most seventeenth-century people he lost numerous friends and family to communicable diseases. One other fear, though, recurs in the many letters he sent throughout his life: “I fear to miss the post.”
Oldenburg was one of the most prolific and widely connected scientific communicators of his day and claimed never to have opened a letter without pen in hand to answer it. He became an important communicator of the scientific method, the first secretary of the Royal Society, and the founding editor of its journal, Philosophical Transactions. On that basis, he already has a secure place in histories of science that concentrate on individual accomplishments. Marie Boas Hall, an expert on early British science, wrote a biography of him entitled ‘Shaping the Royal Society’, and Peter Burke included Oldenburg in his recent survey of major historical polymaths.
Oldenburg’s place in accounts which privilege systematic and structural change in the history of science is less clear. With his unusual biography – a polyglot German diplomat with a background in academic theology, who did very little scientific experimenting himself and expressed minimal interest in natural philosophy before the age of forty, and kept up a long friendship with the poet John Milton alongside his scientific contacts – he was typical neither of the English academic establishment, nor the intellectual currents of his birthplace. However, as Carlo Ginzburg and the Italian microhistorians long ago understood, an anomalous case is often just as revealing as a more straightforwardly generalizable one.
So, let us look again at what “this curious German” can tell us about communication and culture in the world of seventeenth-century science.[1] Perhaps the most widely familiar account of seventeenth-century scientific communication is the one put forward by Steven Shapin in The Social History of Truth (1994). Shapin describes a system of ‘epistemological decorum’ in which early English scientists used existing social and cultural systems of trust to produce new knowledge. Groups like the ‘invisible college’ around the aristocrat Robert Boyle repurposed the existing social circles of the British gentry into communities of intellectual inquiry. By considering a figure like Oldenburg, who came from outside that community but fulfilled a key role within it, we can refine our notions of how epistemological decorum functioned.
How the son of a schoolmaster from Bremen would become a key intellectual communicator amongst the English gentry is not immediately obvious. Oldenburg’s association with the Royal Society, therefore, highlights one of the apparent contradictions of early modern scholarship: on the one hand, it was a deeply international affair, with similar ideas, practices, and institutions emerging in parallel across the continent. Yet, on the other, Oldenburg’s occasional difficulties with his Royal Society colleagues show that reliance on political patrons and ties to particular institutions also made English scholarship an intensely localist affair at times, especially when shared cultural and social perspectives were relied upon to underpin trust in new information.
As much as ‘epistemological decorum’ relied on closely interconnected groups with established social ties, Oldenburg’s career shows that scientific communication of this kind also relied on a smaller number of individuals with more specialized cultural skillsets, who could communicate between those groups. His success as a communicator is all the more striking if you consider his relative lack of success in his other professional endeavors. He was a teacher, but produced no notable students; a diplomat, but signed no significant treaties; an experimenter, but made no important discoveries; a philosopher, but never completed a major intellectual project; a publisher, but was always disappointed by the sales of his publications.
Despite this lack of substantive success in the many roles he inhabited, Oldenburg accrued experiences from each one, which turned out to have a uniting theme: communication across boundaries, be they between cultures or between fields of knowledge. From middle-age he began to apply them with increasing sophistication to the art of transcultural scientific communication, giving rise to his idiosyncratic but extremely important role at the Royal Society.
The most straightforward of his communicative skills was a gift for languages. Before he had left his childhood home in Bremen he had mastered classical Latin and Greek in the schoolroom, and through means that remain unclear, he also developed a mastery of English and French. He even corresponded with fellow Germans in other languages, once puzzlingly claiming that he ‘chose to write in French for the sake of speed.’ Early in their friendship, the poet John Milton complimented him that he spoke English ‘more accurately and more fluently than any other foreigner [he had] ever known.’[2]
This talent led Oldenburg to his first career, tutoring a series of rich, young, mainly English men. He was friendly with his students and many continued to exchange letters with him later in life, in which he would evaluate their Latin style and suggest further reading in the classics. While he never mastered the mother tongues of all his correspondents, Oldenburg’s technical facility with language cannot be overlooked as a tool of communication.[3] Not only did it allow for the precision of the scientific translations which he published in Philosophical Transactions, but also enabled him to win the trust of new correspondents from different countries and cultures, a process reliant on his capacity to adapt his manners and put his correspondents at ease.
Oldenburg’s strategies for negotiating the complex world of early modern manners were more elaborate than simple charm, however, and they bear further examination. As Boas Hall noted, the tone of his letters can make him seem by turns pompous and obsequious to the modern reader. Even though it was common for the period, the remarks revealed in a close study of his letters, for example ‘my humble and obedient services are yours at all times,’ or ‘I earnestly beg you to present my most affectionate greetings to both your parents,’ fit awkwardly with the image given by the correspondence as a whole of a lucid, insightful, communicator and linguistic talent fully in control of his network of correspondents.
This style of profuse supplication, though, was a subtle skill and one that took practice. One of the only letters to survive from his twenties reveals the same kind of language but deployed far less carefully. Appealing to the Dutch scholar Gerhard Vossius for support in his academic career, Oldenburg stumbles about trying to simultaneously show respect, elicit sympathy, demonstrate his intellect, and make demands. The letter sometimes rambles at length in praise of its reader (‘I retain in mind that profuse testimony of [the] benevolence that your excellency showed me’), sometimes lapses into over-familiarity (‘I promise myself much from you’), digresses into irrelevant subject matter (‘the Syntagma of Mr. Crocius has been refuted in some private college’), and ends suddenly and inconclusively (‘lest my prolixity offend I shall break off my discourse’).
In his mature correspondence Oldenburg brought these tendencies under control, no longer overwhelmed by correspondents’ status but rather a close and competent observer of it. His flattery was calibrated exactly to the recipient of each letter. The Queen of Sweden was ‘The Most Serene and Powerful Princess, the Lady Christina, Queen of the Swedes, Goths, and Vandals, Grand Princess of Finland, Duchess of Estonia, Karelia, Bremen, Werden, Stettin, Pomerania, Kassuben, Vend Syssel, Princess of Rugen, Lady of Ingria and Wismar, My Most Merciful Lady.’ His friend and colleague Samuel Hartlib was just ‘Good Sir.’
His mastery of early modern manners, across cultures and across languages, was an important part of his achievement as a scientific communicator. In an era deeply conscious of social distinctions, Oldenburg was able to navigate a narrow path of neither causing offense nor permitting high-handed disengagement. He almost always got replies out of even his haughtiest correspondents and appears to have been genuinely friendly with Robert Boyle despite their differences in rank. Indeed, the only conflict he was never able to repair was with Robert Hooke, a man roughly his social equal, but who was deeply distrustful of foreigners and uncommonly sensitive about receiving credit for his inventions.
For Boas Hall, this ability to manage conflict was Oldenburg’s most consequential achievement as a communicator, and it is one of the central themes in her biography. If one focuses on his role in building the Royal Society as an institution, then that is almost certainly true. His ability to defuse tensions among the possessive, thin-skinned, and occasionally paranoid innovators of early science was integral to the durability of the early Royal Society. Perhaps the most valuable use of this skill being his coaxing a young, uncommunicative Isaac Newton into publishing in the Philosophical Transactions. Moreover, Oldenburg’s ability to elicit communication internationally helped the society to establish itself at the front rank of the many similar institutions founded around the same time.
To stress his ability to facilitate contact and prevent conflict between early modern scientists, however, is to miss a wider significance of Oldenburg’s life for the history of scientific communication and knowledge production. His personal importance within the institutional set up of the Royal Society notwithstanding, he showed little interest in institutionalizing the particulars of the secretary’s role, and none of his successors diversified its obligations as he did or cultivated a similarly extensive network of contacts.
As much as Oldenburg’s career tells us about the Royal Society, it is more valuable as an indicator of the degree to which contingent personal relationships and competencies shaped pre-modern knowledge production outside such institutional settings. Oldenburg’s conflict management strategies, while relying on this secretarial office to put him in the position of mediator, depended for their success not on the office or the institution, but on his personal connections with the parties involved. That explains his lack of success with Hooke, who, despite strong institutional incentives for them to cooperate, had problems with Oldenburg on a personal level.
This is also clear in Oldenburg’s attitude knowledge production more broadly. As a product of what Peter Burke characterized as ‘The age of Monsters of Erudition,’ his attitude to knowledge was less experimental than his compatriots. He was little interested in the particulars of empiricism and focused instead on projects which aspired to universal explanations. On the one hand, this could be an intellectual advantage. It drew him to innovative theorists of the social and natural worlds, like Newton and Thomas Hobbes, and deterred him from publishing crank theories about niche subjects in the Philosophical Transactions. On the other hand, it contributed to his own lack of experimental work, and to his frustration with his output.
Oldenburg aspired to create a unified treatise which could be left for posterity. He struggled for years to synthesize the observations amassed through his correspondents, which spanned all the natural sciences and a good deal of theology and political thought. Ultimately, he succeeded only in embodying that mass of knowledge, holding it in his person for as long as he survived, and growing it through the connections that he facilitated in his personal relationships.
Attention
to the careers of individuals like Oldenburg, challenge accounts of knowledge
production which concentrate too much on either particular local intuitions and
social groups, or on straightforwardly global developments. Instead, in microhistorical
accounts of atypical cases like this one, we may benefit from drawing more
attention to contingency. Not only acknowledging it, as most historians already
do, but developing a method through which we can consider how contingencies at
the human level interact with our more systematic accounts of the history of
science.
[1] The description is by Samuel Sorbierre, a physician and translator who met Oldenburg when he travelled to Paris
[2] All quotations from Oldenburg’s correspondence given here are taken from: A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (eds.), The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, Volume I: 1641-1662, (Amsterdam, 1965)
[3] He had contacts on the Iberian Peninsula and throughout Eastern Europe, but does not appear to have known any of the languages of those regions. In addition to the Latin, German, English, and French which make up the bulk of his correspondence he is also believed to have known Italian and Dutch.