“A Letter is a Paper House: Home, Family, and Natural Knowledge in Early Modern England”

Elizabeth Yale (University of Iowa)

In this contribution, I examine the role of paper in the household of the seventeenthcentury British naturalist John Ray, a buzzing, living laboratory. Naturalists came from London and other faraway towns to visit, and daily the post brought correspondence from across Britain and Europe. A consideration of the Ray household, and the roles that 5 John Ray, Margaret Ray, and their daughters played in natural history, the family business, leads us to a more expansive view of what counts as scientific labor in the early modern household. Even if they were not closely involved as researchers, women’s labor and presence were integral to the provision of scientific hospitality, which was the foundation of collaborative scientific work, particularly in natural history. Women’s roles in creating the spaces for natural philosophical endeavor were reflected in their representation in male naturalists’ correspondence. Looking beyond John Ray’s death, following naturalists’ papers into their afterlives, I find a second feature of the family contribution to science: widows catalogued, ordered, and made male naturalists’ papers available for archival preservation and posthumous publication. In the process of editing and publishing posthumous papers, a natural philosophical widow might become more publicly visible as a scientific actor. But women might also be made less publicly visible as scientific actors, their contributions obscured. Whether scientific widows became more or less visible as knowledge-makers, their cases ultimately make clear the stakes, for early modern men and women, in representing the pursuit of natural knowledge as a gendered, domestic enterprise.

“Papering the Household: Paper, Recipes and Everyday Technologies”

Elaine Leong (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

The early modern household was filled with paper. In kitchens and stillrooms, it lined cake tins and glass funnels, delivered ointments and salves to the body and preserved precious fruits, cakes and materia medica. In the library and the study, it not only served as the carrier for inscription practices but paper technologies such as notebooks and loose slips enabled householders to sort, categorize and express their ideas about the human body and delineate boundaries between areas of knowledge. The ubiquity of paper use across different spaces, labor sets and knowledge spheres within the household enables us to examine a wide range of quotidian practices, juxtaposing information management strategies with bodywork and food production. Following the paper trail, this talk investigates the interconnected epistemic and hands-on practices used by householders to shift and filter, contain and shape both knowledge and things. Based on analysis of early modern household recipe collections, the talk examines the various paper-based everyday technologies outlined in the texts whilst, at the same time analyze how paper technologies were utilized to codify recipe knowledge. The focus on 6 the household as the location of these practices offers the opportunity to consider anew the construction of gender hierarchies in the production of knowledge. By recovering these practices, I offer a fresh perspective on everyday technologies in pre-modern medicine and science.

“At-Home Census Compilation: Paper, Data, and Technologies of Orderliness”

Christine von Oertzen (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

In 1871, the Prussian census bureau introduced a new, movable paper tool, allowing for the sorting and compiling of data in highly complex ways. The census bureau incorporated homebound middle-class spouses and other relatives of their workers into the workflow of manual paper and data work, nurturing a workforce that required circulating tons of paper between the bureau and at times hundreds of different homes scattered across and beyond the city limits of Berlin. Von Oertzen explains why this laborious procedure was considered essential and valued necessary: Prussian officials commissioned the sorting and counting of data for the census to housewives keeping what they called an orderly home. The paper examines the spatial, social, and epistemic 7 implications of this assessment, showing that the state targeted the housewives’ mental skills and their technologies of orderliness in the parlors of private homes where such virtues were most vividly displayed. At the interplay between the micro- and macropolitics of everyday life and the workings of governance, the state’s paper technology and its skilled at-home applications show how gender principles were woven into the very fabric of the Prussian state.