Lincoln Repository



Introduction:

An introduction to the letters (1662-1677)

Although the usual reaction to spiders is fear of their webs, revulsion at their eating habits, and worry at their spindly legs, some individuals think about spiders more benignly, their fear replaced by curiosity or awe. The Indians made the spider a symbol of liberty, “being the only creature that can raise itself up by its own bootstraps,”[1] and Victor Hugo stated, from sheer generosity of soul, that he loved both the spider and the nettle, “because they are hated.”

This edition concerns the correspondence of another lover of arachnids, a seventeenth-century virtuoso, natural philosopher, and keen empiricist named Martin Lister (1639–1712). Amongst other things, he was the first arachnologist and conchologist. A prominent fellow of the Royal Society, he served as an officer in the Royal College of Physicians, and was a Royal Physician to Queen Anne. A major benefactor of the Ashmolean Museum, he corresponded regularly on natural history and medicine with its first and second keepers, Robert Plot and Edward Lhwyd, and his unpublished papers were amongst the largest of his donations to Oxford’s fledgling museum of science, and attest to his remarkably wide expertise, from archaeology to Yorkshire antiquities, from studies of smallpox to the origins of kidney stones.

Although Lister had donated some of his works to Oxford, we have to thank William Huddesford, the perceptive eighteenth-century antiquarian and keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, for the bulk of this collection.[2] Huddesford had a long-held interest in Lister, his research providing him with an escape from town-and-gown politics. Huddesford had been conducting a long and frustrating campaign for Oxford’s streets to be lighted and cleaned properly, even publishing a tongue-in-cheek tract on the matter (appropriately, this was published in “Lucern” by “Abraham Lightholder”), in which he revealed that he had been fighting the public's prejudice that did “not know what Service the lamps were of, except to light a Pack of drunken Gownsmen home.”[3] His scholarly work was a tonic, however, and he remarked when “conversing with Lister and the old Nat[ural] Historians I scarce know who is minister of state.”[4]

The Keeper was engaged in writing Lister’s biography, having gone so far as to initiate correspondence with Lister’s descendents living in the family’s manor house in Burwell Park, Lincolnshire, as well as with the Gregory family of Harlaxton Hall (also in Lincolnshire), who had intermarried with the Listers; he had even contacted the President of St John’s College, Cambridge, Lister’s alma mater.[5]

One can imagine Huddesford's delight when he heard in 1768 that one Dr John Fothergill had bought at auction “put up in band boxes, confused like waste paper, several bundles of Dr Lister’s papers,” to save them from annihilation in the “pastrycooks oven” or as wrapping for purchases at the Grocers.[6] Fothergill (1712–1780) was an English physician, a Quaker, and F.R.S. who devoted his leisure time to studies of conchology and botany and had, thus, a logical interest in this manuscript collection. As Fothergill confessed to Huddesford that he should “never have the leisure to peruse them,” he wondered “what to do with them?”[7] He mused that he “had best give them to some public Body—either to the Universities or to the Royal Society,” closing his letter to Huddesford with the query “What dost Thee think?”[8] Huddesford replied quickly, “You ask Dr an interested Man. I say to the University of Oxford and to the Ashmolean therein. But I will give you a reason also—The Papers consist of letters to . . . Lister . . . a very great Benefactor.”[9] Fothergill agreed to the proposal, and Huddesford recorded gleefully:

. . . came down one large Box, near a hundred weight. The contents as followeth

1. 3 large Vols of letters to Lhwyd [Lister’s colleague Edward Lhwyd]

2. Several Bundles of Letters to Lister

3. Near 40 Books in 4to [ie. quarto] of MSS annotations on, and extracts from various Authors—Lister’s hand.

4. Several Private Pocket Books in which Lister kept an account of the Fees he received in Practice.[10]

In the course of the mid-nineteenth century, these collections passed from the Ashmolean to the Bodleian Library. Most of these papers were kept together, forming the bulk of what is known appropriately enough as MSS Lister.[11] MSS Lister 2–4, MSS Lister 34–37, and MS Ashmole 1816 make up the majority of the Lister correspondence from Fothergill's gift to the university.

While the Bodleian Library contains the bulk of Lister’s correspondence, totaling over 1100 letters, sizeable quantities are held elsewhere, chiefly in the archives of the Royal Society, the Natural History Museum (Ray letters), the University of Utrecht, and the British Library’s collection of Sloane manuscripts. Lister's correspondence illuminates, and is illuminated by, his many other scientific manuscripts, which, as Hudderford’s notes indicate, include a mass of unpublished works, drafts, notes, collections from other people’s papers, medical casebooks, and gardening plans.

As one of the most prominent corresponding fellows of the Royal Society, many of Lister’s letters from York, where he ran a medical practice, were printed in the Philosophical Transactions, the Royal Society’s journal. Lister would go on to contribute over sixty papers to the journal, and his letters demonstrate he was an innovator in archaeology, medicine, and chemistry, Robert Boyle considering him an investigator of “piercing sagacity.”[12] Although Lister is known to have discovered ballooning spiders and his work on molluscs was standard for 200 years, he also invented the histogram, provided Sir Isaac Newton with chemical procedures and alloys for his telescopic mirrors, pursued archaeological studies demonstrating that York’s walls were Roman, received the first reports of the Chinese smallpox vaccination, and donated the first significant natural history collections to the Ashmolean Museum. Like Darwin two hundred years later, to complete his scientific works Lister corresponded extensively with explorers and scientists who provided him with specimens, observations, and locality records from Jamaica, America, Barbados, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and his native England, making his research truly cross-cultural.

In 1683, he moved to London, where for a time he acted as Vice-President of the Royal Society and also as Censor of the Royal College of Physicians. From 1697 to 1698 he travelled abroad with Lord Portland, and retired finally to Epsom, where he continued to transact voluminous correspondence. Lister was consulted by the great and the good about their health, serving as a Royal Physician to Queen Anne, a post sanctioned by his niece, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and he was held in high regard by an unusually broad range of contemporaries. His letters provide a unique window onto early enlightenment cultures of medicine and natural philosophy throughout the British Isles, continental Europe, and the Atlantic World.

With the exception of those printed in the Philosophical Transactions and in the correspondences of friends such as John Ray, there has been no scholarly edition of Lister’s letters.[13] This has led to the neglect of this centrally important archive. To remedy such a state of affairs, this work comprises the first volume of what will be a three-volume set of annotated transcriptions of Lister’s correspondence. This volume consists of correspondence dated from 1660 to 1677. The period includes Lister's earliest correspondence as a fellow (via royal mandate in 1660) at St John’s College, Cambridge, his medical training in Montpellier from 1663 to 1666, and half of his years in practice as a physician in York (1670–1677).

Lister's biography (1639–1677): a summary[14]

Some of the first of Lister's extant letters were sent to him at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was a fellow in the 1660s, from his mother Susanna Lister, née Temple (1600–1669), who was living at the family estates of Burwell, Lincolnshire. The only daughter of Sir Alexander Temple of Etchingham, Sussex, Susanna was a widow when she met Lister's father, one Sir Martin Lister, a wealthy landowner and M.P. for Northamptonshire. In 1627 she had been married to Sir Gifford Thornhurst (1598–1627), Baronet, of Agnes Court, Kent, for all of two months before he died tragically young.[15] Despite their short union, she gave hope of further issue, already having had one daughter, Frances Thornhurst, whose daughter Sarah would attain eminence as Duchess of Marlborough. As a young lady, Susanna was a maid of honor for Anne of Denmark, wife of James I, and was considered “the most distinguished beauty of her time.”[16] Historian Jeffrey Carr speculates that Lister's father, Sir Martin Lister, may have met Susanna through his uncle Matthew Lister, who was physician to Anne of Denmark.[17]

There are numerous surviving portraits of Susanna, the earliest a charming image by painter Cornelius Johnson (1593–1661). Born in London to Flemish parents, Johnson trained in Holland, and his numerous portraits of court society and rich gentry are characterized by individuality and sensitivity.[18] One of Johnson’s earliest works, his portrait of Susanna is in a head-and-shoulders format set within an oval trompe l'œil opening, and painted to resemble a stone niche. She was twenty when she sat for Johnson, and wore a delicate and high lace ruff, a feather fascinator in her hair, with earrings that sported martlets, heraldic birds from the Temple coat-of-arms. Susanna’s frank appraisal of the viewer and the lovely youthful energy that emanates from the confines of the portrait made it a popular image, with Robert White reproducing her visage as an engraving. The engraving of Susanna appears in several collectors’ inventories, including Samuel Pepys’s library; Pepys was known to have an eye for court beauties and collected the early modern equivalent of “pin-up” girls.[19]

Lister's father, Sir Martin Lister, was born into a distinguished medical family connected to high office and royalty. His two uncles, Matthew and Edward, served as Royal Physicians to Charles I; Sir Matthew was a devoted royalist, and delivered Queen Henrietta Maria's last child amid the turmoil of the English Civil War. Sir Martin Lister had been at Trinity College, Oxford, taking his degree on 15 October 1619, and he was knighted by Charles I in 1625.[20] Shortly afterwards, he married his first wife the Honorable Mary Wenman (d. ca.1635) of Thame Park, Oxfordshire. Mary was the daughter of the local worthy Viscount Richard Wenman, and via her grandmother was distantly related to Edward III through his son Lionel Plantagenet.[21] Their first child, Richard, was born at Ambrosden, Oxfordshire, on 17 July 1628 and, perhaps because of his wife, Sir Martin remained in the general area for quite some time, relocating to the neighboring county of Buckinghamshire, settling somewhere near the manor of Radclive, and becoming one of the patrons of the living of Stoke Poges.[22] He entered also into an indenture agreement with the Wenmans for lands in Brackley, Northamptonshire, immediately over the Buckinghamshire border.[23] Martin became M.P. for Brackley in 1641.

Although Sir Martin and Mary had three more daughters—Mary, Dorothy, and Agnes—the marriage was destined to be a short one as Mary died in childbirth in 1635. With four young children to raise, Sir Martin did not appear to spend a protracted period of time grieving but looked for a suitable partner who would be a loving mother and bring a sufficient dowry into the bargain. Susanna Temple seemed to fit the bill.

During his second marriage, Sir Martin pursued a political career. Although his Uncle Matthew was a devoted royalist, Sir Martin was a parliamentarian, serving in the Long Parliament until August 1648. Whilst in Parliament, Sir Martin was on several financial committees involved in sequestering funds in 1643 and 1644 from imprisoned royalists, including his own uncle, although he shielded Matthew from the worst. In this capacity, Sir Martin often worked with Thomas Widdrington, who would serve later as Cromwell’s Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer and on the Council of State. Like Widdrington, Sir Martin refused to have any role in the trial of the king, although his brother-in-law, James Temple (1606–1674), was an Independent and one of the regicides. Sir Martin himself was also one of the Commissioners for raising troops in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1645. His son by his first wife, Richard, was colonel of the trained bands of Leicestershire for Parliament during the war, and was a Parliamentary commissioner. In addition, in 1639, Sir Martin’s cousin Frances had married John Lambert, the Parliamentarian general under Cromwell, with Cromwell witnessing their marriage in Thornton-in-Craven church.[24] This marriage continued a long-standing familial connection between the Lamberts and Listers that dated back to the early sixteenth century. Sir Martin’s father William had helped finance John Lambert’s education at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at the Inns of Court, and “the Lister network was essential to Lambert’s social and ideological development . . . not only at a personal level but in terms of his future standing and role in society.”[25] Through the Listers, Lambert was related to Lord Ferdinando Fairfax of Denton Hall, who commanded the Northern Association Army at the start of the Civil War, as well as to his son Sir Thomas Fairfax who, later, commanded the New Model Army.[26]

After he inherited the manor at Thorpe Arnold, Leicestershire, in 1656, Sir Martin settled there until the Restoration. At that point, he moved to his estate in Burwell to escape political vicissitudes. In the midst of all this political maneuvering and displacement, Sir Martin and Susanna managed to have ten children, their fourth child being the Martin Lister of this edition. Little is known about Martin Lister’s upbringing, but it is certain that, as a younger brother who would not inherit the bulk of the estate, he would receive an education to prepare him for a profession. Correspondence from his mother indicates that despite highly irregular spelling and spindly handwriting, she was quite literate, so it is entirely probable that she introduced Martin to the rudiments of reading and was responsible for his basic religious and moral education through the psalms and the testament.[27] It is possible also that Martin had a private tutor from an early age to help him “tackle reading and writing separately and in sequence”; the antiquarian Anthony à Wood stated that Martin’s great uncle Matthew, the Royal Physician, supervised his education closely and certainly he would have had the means to provide such private instruction.[28] After two to three years of reading and penmanship practice to learn to “lean softly upon his pen,” Martin went to the grammar school at Melton Mowbray, two miles down the road from Thorpe Arnold.[29]

After completing his education at Melton, at the age of sixteen Martin was admitted to St John’s College, Cambridge.[30] Melton School seems to have had a special link with St John’s, many of its graduates attending university there, and Martin was no exception. He was admitted as a pensioner in 1655, and his tutor was Henry Paman (1623–1695), the Linacre professor of “physick.” As an undergraduate, Martin would have received a general education in the liberal arts, attending lectures in classics, ethics, logic, metaphysics, divinity, mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy. In doing so, he received a “generous Education in all kinds of Learning, for improving the Mind and Understanding, and enabling of it to exercise such a piercing Judgment and large Comprehension of so subtile and numerous natures and things whereof is requisite to the Art of Physick.”[31] There was little or no formal instruction in medicine and, even as late as 1702, the University calendar noted that “A student of medicine in this University is not required to attend any lectures but is left to acquire his knowledge from such sources as his discretion may point out.”[32] As his interests in “physick” grew, Martin may have sought advice or informal instruction from Francis Glisson, who held the Cambridge Regius Professorship from 1636 to 1677, and who was one of the rare exceptions to the mediocrities who taught the medical course. The ten volumes of his papers that have survived testify to the care with which he taught his students, as well as to the innovative nature of his research, lectures, and formal disputations.[33]

Martin may also have received such an education informally from his tutor Henry Paman, the renowned physician and book collector. Paman’s bibliophilia and breadth of interests seem to have inspired Martin Lister, who also demonstrated virtuosity in a variety of fields, and who, in turn, collected books with fervor, eventually leaving his library, as had his tutor, to a variety of institutions.

In his correspondence and political behavior, Paman demonstrated an avowed loyalism to the Stuarts and was a devout Anglican. In his letters to Archbishop William Sancroft, Paman lamented the Calvinist religious services instituted at Trinity College, Cambridge during the Protectorate under the mastership of Thomas Hill. Subsequently Paman rejoiced when, by the late 1650s, “the religious atmosphere at Trinity had shifted away from sectarian Puritanism.”[34] Paman wrote, “After soe long banishment the common prayer last Thursday at night entered into Tr: Chappell, and has once more consecrated it. Dr. Hill next morning they say snuffed; Hee thought sure his incense would not ascend with strange fire, and presently swept the chappell with an exposition.”[35] Later, Paman would resign his professorship after Sancroft refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the newly installed William III.[36]

Like Paman, Martin Lister was also a royalist and an Anglican, and, though some of his beliefs may have been due to the influence of his great-uncle Matthew, it is possible that Paman may have shaped the thinking of his student; St John’s was the most avowedly royalist of all the colleges in Cambridge in the civil-war era.[37] During the Civil War, many Royalists at Cambridge had abandoned a career in the church or in government, pursuing scientific studies or medicine. In 1657, physician and natural philosopher Walter Charleton wrote “Our late Warrs and Schism, having almost wholly discouraged men from the study of Theologie; and brought the Civil Law into contempt: the major part of young Schollers in our Universities addict themselves to Physick.”[38] Another commentator, Robert Sparkling, wrote “For Cambridge can never forget, that when her Theology and Law lay bleeding and expiring by the Swords of Rebels and Usurpers, Physic alone praeserved her perishing fame alive.”[39] So, Martin may have pursued medicine not only out of personal interest; certainly through his great-uncle Matthew, Martin had the right connections and loyalties to be given by “his Majesties’ Command” a fellowship in physick at St John’s on 31 August 1660 on account of his “learning, civill behavior, and abilities.” Despite the fact that other candidates who had been ejected previously by Parliament in 1644–1645 and 1650–1651 were waiting to be restored to their fellowships, Lister’s appointment was made immediately “to the first voyd place.”[40]

Martin was a popular fellow at St John’s, forming several close friendships, his correspondence showing one in particular with Thomas Briggs, another fellow in physick.[41] Briggs, appointed in 1661, served as the junior bursar with Henry Paman that year, and was also of royalist persuasion. He published a Latin broadside poem in 1660 drawing a correlation between the reestablished rule of Charles II, the Restoration settlement, and natural order, commenting Natura fecit sceptra, moderatur Deus [Nature has made the scepters, God guides].[42] Briggs and Lister wrote frequently when Lister made his journeys to Burwell to visit family, as well as when Lister left Cambridge to study in France, Briggs handling his bills of exchange in his role as senior bursar.[43] Even several years later, in 1673, when both Lister and Briggs had long left Cambridge, his old friend continued to write to him, asking “I would fayne know whether yu can give mee any fresher hopes of seeing yu that wee might discourse our old storyes and bee once more happy againe.”[44]

Martin also kept an active correspondence with his family, the letters showing him as a lively young man who was cherished by his family and friends and who was often sent tokens of their esteem. Lister sent his younger sister Jane perfume and books, and a number of food parcels from his mother made their way from Burwell to St John’s, including a “goose pye with a ducke in the belly,” and “the best venison we can get you, for the keeper . . . is so weake and lasie that he can get no does killed so that my husband is out of patience.”[45] Venison was, perhaps, something Martin could not get readily in the dining hall, as it was a frequent request. A bit of an invalid herself at this stage in her life, Susanna also fussed over her son’s health; he was having trouble with asthma and hurt his arm, and her letters of motherly concern with their idiosyncratic spelling were frequent.

Susanna mentioned also in her correspondence that her “daughter Hamellton,” delivered a stillborn baby that was nine weeks premature and that “Sister Gregory” had given birth to a son.[46] “Daughter Hamellton” was Frances Jennings (1649–1731), Susanna’s granddaughter by her first marriage. Frances was the older sister of Sarah Jennings (1660–1744), who would become Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and who would exchange correspondence with Martin Lister throughout her exceptional life. On 30 May 1667, Martin received his first letter from the seven-year-old Sarah with a rather unusual gift—a red wax seal with several blue silks, which still survives attached to her note. The gift, described by her mother as a “bonde seal,” and as a “tockenne” from “litell Sarey,” would serve as a “wides” or widow's mite until she herself was able to pay her respects in a more substantive manner.[47]

Frances, for her part, married Sir George Hamilton (1621–1676), a count and Maréchal de Camp. Before her marriage, Frances was a maid of honor at court and described as “La Belle Jenyns”; Philibert, Comte de Grammont, compared her (rather disingenuously) to Aurora.[48] After such a notorious life at court, of course Frances managed to get married but, by 1676, she was widowed with three children after Sir George was killed while serving under Luxembourg at Zebersteeg. When Charles II heard of her plight, his sympathy was such that he created her Countess of Bantry.

“Sister Gregory”, on the other hand, had a rather more typical, quieter, and financially comfortable life as a member of the landed gentry. She was Lister’s sister Susanna who married George Gregory, who would become the High Sheriff of Nottingham in 1668.[49] Her marriage settlement shows she brought a dowry of £1,500, paid by Sir Martin to Gregory at £100 per year for fifteen years.[50] The only letter from her to Lister that survives described the death from smallpox of their sister Barbara and her interment at Burwell; Jane was apparently visiting and had escaped the disease.[51] Susanna then noted “Mr Gregory has promised me that I shall see you this summer which doe please me very much.”[52]

Lister's interest in medicine necessitated a long period of study away from home. Under the ancient statutes of the university, a medical student was required to take an arts degree before beginning medical studies. The Elizabethan statutes of 1570 removed this requirement; students were allowed to take the M.B. as their first degree after six years residence, or they had the choice of taking their B.A. and M.A. before proceeding to medical studies. Both Oxford and Cambridge “demanded a total of approximately fourteen years of study from the time a young man matriculated, seven in the arts course, and seven in medicine.”[53] Many candidates realized it was cheaper and more efficient to travel to Europe where medical training and the degree could be obtained more quickly, usually with a comparable or even superior medical faculty.[54] Medical education at Oxford and Cambridge, despite advances by Sydenham, Harvey, and Willis, also remained resolutely conservative, concentrating upon the dictates of Hippocrates and Galen. Frank stated that:

with few exceptions, the Regius Professors of Medicine at both universities during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were mediocre occupants of a recognized sinecure. Under such circumstances . . . the statutory lecture course for medicine was distinctly less innovative than it could have been.[55]

It is little wonder that, as Axtell has noted, of the “255 fellows and candidates of the College [of Physicians] for whom the College historian William Munk has information from 1632 to 1688 . . . a little more than half, received their M.D. from Oxford (58) or Cambridge (78).”[56]

The rest did their medical training abroad. Martin took this option. In 1663, he decided to continue his studies in Montpellier, although he never formally received his degree at the University there. In doing so, he was part of a time-honored tradition in the early modern period, as medicine was the subject for which foreign travel was most valuable; students brought back new techniques, knowledge, and materia medica to their homeland. Indeed, Thomas Bartholin in the 1670s when recalling his own peregrinatio medica noted, “Today there are many travellers; indeed, it seems as if the whole of Europe is on the move.”[57] During his three years in France, Lister kept a detailed journal in an almanac published as Every Man’s Companion: Or, A useful Pocket-Book [58] and another twenty-five pages of memoirs about his time in Montpellier are extant.[59] These sources give valuable context to Lister’s letters from the period, as he not only noted letters he received and sent, but indicated which books he read and recorded some of his daily activities. As a foreigner and a Protestant, Lister could not enroll formally at the university, but, together with other foreign students, he belonged to an academy and could observe closely what was taking place in studies in medicine and natural philosophy at the university. The course attracted students from across the Continent and England and was “considered at that time to be the best for preliminary medical studies.”[60]

Montpellier was a popular choice for English medical students, not only affording the chance to learn the French language and politesse, but possessing also a fine university and renowned academies for foreign students in a beautiful setting. Montpellier’s reputation rested to some degree on its facilities, especially its Jardin des Plantes, founded by Henry IV in 1593 and first directed by Pierre Richer de Belleval, the chair holder in anatomy and botany from 1593 to 1632. The oldest in France, these gardens would be reorganized eventually by the great botanist Pierre Magnol (1683–1715), who had received his M.D. shortly before Lister’s arrival. Magnol was the first to publish the concept of plant families as we know them, and he separated the garden into the eighteen known medical and “therapeutic duties” of plants.[61] Clearly, at Montpellier, medical professors were “eager to show students examples of the simples used in their medicines, a knowledge that doctors had previously been expected to learn on their own.”[62]

Montpellier was known also for the diverse arrangements established in the town for clinical, pharmacological, and anatomical instruction. When visiting Montpellier in the 1660s, John Ray noted the “number of Apothecaries in this little City is scare credible, there being 130 shops, and yet all find something to do.”[63] Many offered private lessons to aspiring medics. Indeed, as usual for medical students at the time, Lister’s correspondence reveals he lodged with an apothecary, one Monsieur Jean Fargeon, arriving on 18 January 1664 to the shop in the Grande Rue, which was across from the Traverse des Grenadiers and adjacent to the Cheval Blanc.[64] Jean Fargeon was an “apothecary and performer of royal privilege.” As Elizabeth de Feydeau stated, by “1668 he had perfected the recipes of a large number of products, classed according to usage as either ‘compositions for health’ or ‘perfumes for embellishment’.”[65] Under the instruction of Fargeon, Lister could thus see the plant in vivo in the garden, and in vitro in the apothecary’s shop. This hands-on approach was typical of education in Montpellier. Montpellier was unusual in having “no arts faculty to serve its propedeutic needs,” and there was a long tradition there of “practical medicine which did not lay great stress on the Aristotelian logic behind medical precepts.”[66]

In addition to the traditional medical texts by Hippocrates and Galen, and Dioscorides’s De Re Medica, students at Montpellier were exposed to the new theories of chemical medicine, vitalism, and Cartesian philosophy. Lister was in the midst of an intellectual transition between traditional and non-Galenic medicine, learning the ancient principles of humoral medicine, sympathy, and antipathy, as well as reading revolutionary works in physiology and philosophy. In December 1665, he met the Danish physician Nicholas Steensen (1638–1686), known as Steno, who had published treatises on muscle contraction[67] and was known already for his discovery of the duct of the parotid salivary gland (Steno’s duct). Steno and Lister performed a dissection of an ox head in the study of Robert Bruce, the first Earl of Ailesbury and second Earl of Elgin. Ailesbury evinced interest in natural philosophy throughout his life and was made a member of the Royal Society in 1685. As Iliffe has noted, Lister secured the introduction to the Earl as a result of his family connections to Sir Matthew Lister; in a manuscript entitled “Adversaria,”[68] Lister wrote “I made my reverence to my Lord of Alsbury, who was infinitely civil to me upon my Unkle Sr. Matth. Listers memory.”[69] Lister would assist Steno in four dissections in the Earl of Ailesbury’s study; he praised Steno’s technique that was “neat and clever” and stated “I observed in him (very much) of the Galant and honist Man as the French say, as well as of the Schollar.”[70] Lister was especially fascinated by Steno’s dissections of the lacteals in the intestines of a dog and by his experiments with the passage of blood and chyle through the digestive system; in the 1680s Lister would repeat these experiments collaborating with William Musgrave, the secretary of the Royal Society.[71]

It was also during his time at Montpellier that Lister met John Ray (1627–1705), the eminent naturalist and botanist, and Ray’s pupil, the wealthy Francis Willughby (1635–1672) of Trinity College Cambridge, who was undertaking his own Grand Tour. Willughby’s observations would result later in the first scientific work of ornithology which organized species according to their physical characteristics—Ornithologia libri tres (1676).[72] Although Lister and Ray were at Cambridge at the same time, Ray being a fellow and tutor in Greek, Mathematics, and Humanities at Trinity College from 1649 to 1662, there is no evidence to suggest that they had met before Lister was in France. Previously Ray had taken three different journeys throughout the greater part of Great Britain to botanize, two of them accompanied by Willughby and, in 1660, Ray published the result of their research in his Catalogue of English Plants.[73] In December 1665 Lister recorded a series of conversations with Ray who informed him he had not found any plant in France that he could not find in England, “soe that he knew not scarce any one plant which he could call properly English.”[74] Lister noted that Ray did seem “pretty well satisfied concerning the Plants of Europe and that he beleeved he had seen the greatest share of them growing in their natural soiles and places of birth.”[75]

Lister also mingled with Ray’s other friends and colleagues in Montpellier. These included Dr. William Croone; Sir Thomas Crew; Philip Skippon, one of Ray’s former students, Gilbert Havers and Peter Vivian, fellows at Trinity College, Cambridge; Francis Jessop from Sheffield with whom Ray stayed in England in 1668 and with whom Lister would subsequently correspond; and Samuel Howlett, a fellow of St John’s with whom Lister was acquainted previously.[76] Lister noted that he and his colleagues discussed with a Montpellier physician and Huguenot, one Dr Joly, the relative merits and disadvantages of English and French medicine, and that the virtuosi met to perform a variety of chymical experiments.[77] With these companions, subsequently Lister went on a natural-history tour in Languedoc and Rousillon, and formed an especially close friendship with John Ray. Skippon related that they rode a short distance outside Montpellier, to Frontignan, where they dined and enjoyed the rich muscat wine of the region, and “then rode along the beach between the estang and the sea to a cape . . . where rare plants grow, viz, Uva marina, Alypum M. Ceti, etc.” [78] Uva marina is ephedra distachya or, as the French called it, “raisin of the sea.”

Their idyllic travels to sample wine and to collect specimens came to a sudden end. On 1 February 1666, Louis XIV, in preparation for the War of Devolution, ordered all Englishmen to leave France within three months. In this way Lister’s studies at Montpellier were peremptorily finished, and he left for Lyon, accompanied by Francis Jessop, physician Henry Sampson, Peter Vivian, and Sir Thomas Crew. Lister met Ray and Skippon and “Dr Moulins” (or Du Moulin, the Scotsman James Milne from Aberdeen) there before they all proceeded on horseback from Lyon to Paris. Later Lister would correspond with Du Moulin concerning his French translation of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.[79] Arriving on 16 March, they stayed two weeks, catching a glimpse of Louis XIV en promenade to Versailles—the Sun King was in an open chariot.[80]

While in Paris, the group of young naturalists met Dionys Joncquet, a professor in the Jardin des Plantes, who wrote a magisterial catalogue of the 4,000 plants grown there. Founded in 1626 as a garden primarily dedicated to medicinal plants, the Jardin Royal hosted courses on botany, zoology, and forestry, nearly “all branches of natural history.”[81] Along with the garden at Montpellier, it was considered an essential stop for any botanical explorer, part of a network of collections and curiosity cabinets that genteel collectors and natural historians would visit. Lister and Ray met Guy Crescent Fagon (1638–1715), a court physician described by Ray as “a very ingenious person and skilful herbarist who had the greatest hand in the editing of the Catalogue of the Physic Garden then put forth and was employed in the laboratory and apothecary shop.”[82] Later, in 1693, Fagon would be appointed to be keeper of the Montpellier Botanic Garden by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, expanding it immensely, and growing and distributing the first coffee plants in France.

Before he left France, Lister still had one final thing to accomplish and, as with the Swede, it had to do with a woman. In Lyon he wrote a letter addressed to a mademoiselle who seems to have been his first significant love; the draft copy survives in his papers.[83] Lister wrote: "Mademoiselle, I did not know how to leave France without saying farewell to you once again in writing. I have you so much in my heart and your courtesies will be forever in my memory in whatever country I dwell. I may be returning home, but I will eagerly await news of you there. Cursed war! How you give me pain as I tear myself from my delights. This is for you and for everything beautiful in Montpelier. Do not be content with sharing my [affections] with such a beautiful town. Pray do me the honor of your remembrance from time to time. I will see if there are means by which you may have my letters. I end, Mademoiselle, your very humble very obedient and very [devoted] servant.” We do not know whether he sent the letter or if she ever replied, but we do know that he kept this draft until his death.

Upon his return to England in 1666, Lister remained as fellow at Cambridge for a further two years. It was in this period that Lister began a long correspondence with John Ray, who became his mentor in matters of natural history. Not only indicative of a warm friendship— Lister acted as consulting physician when Ray suffered from sexual dysfunction in the early months of his marriage— their letters are a treasure trove of locality records for flora and fauna, as the two naturalists exchanged sightings and specimens; Ray completed his Cambridge Catalogue of Plants in 1660, and was working on a larger flora for England. As Oswald and Preston have noted, Ray “tried hard to improve the treatment of some of the groups which are clearly inadequately covered in the Cambridge Catalogue.”[84] In June 1667, Ray wrote to Lister “I could wish you would take a little pains this summer about grasses, that so we might compare notes, for I would fain clear and complete their history.” Lister provided Ray with several Cambridgeshire plant records for his catalogue, and the correspondence reveals that by December 1669 Ray was able to send the text of his catalogue to Lister for comments.[85]

In this period, Ray was working also with Francis Willughby on a combined work of ornithology to which Lister made several contributions. Lister provided a definitive identification of “heath throstles” (ring ouzels), which he spotted in Carleton-in-Craven, Yorkshire, and Ray provided in the preface to the Ornithology “two or three Observations communicated by Mr. Martin Lister of York, my honoured Friend,” which included the feeding habits of Buntings and Robins, and an experiment for which Lister “subtracted daily” a Swallow’s egg, spurring her to lay “nineteen successively.”[86]

The Ray-Lister correspondence also revealed the tropes of polite discourse about natural philosophy in the late seventeenth century as well as the shifting boundaries between private epistles and public discoveries within the republic of letters. As Robert Hatch has indicated, the republic of letters was based upon group virtues taken from the ethos of early modern gentlemanly behavior, serving in theory to “minimize competition, conflict, and threats of external control,” but in reality, epistolary discourse exposed unequal relations and the disputes over the priority of scientific discovery.[87] In the course of their written exchange, Ray inadvertently caused a priority dispute over spider gossamer between Lister and Dr. Edward Hulse. In the Lister-Ray correspondence, as Lister developed into a significant natural philosopher in his own right, we find that, between the two, standards of truth, friendship, and power were re-negotiated continually.

In the course of the spider gossamer dispute, Lister published a paper—his first—in the Philosophical Transactions concerning sinistral snails and spider ballooning (1669) and by doing so he established a long and voluminous correspondence with the Royal Society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg (1619–1677). Ultimately Lister would publish over sixty papers in the Philosophical Transactions well as several books under the Royal Society’s imprimatur. As his letters reveal, Lister’s paper was followed by another containing his taxonomy of spiders, the first dedicated to English arachnids, which differed substantially from that of Renaissance naturalists. He placed arachnids in a larger scheme of nature, ordering spiders not just in lists according to external appearance, but also in detailed hierarchical schemes, which related their behavior to their classification, something quite new. Lister’s spider taxonomy considered how they spun their webs and how they reproduced (either with penis or palp), characteristics used by modern entomologists. He also discovered and classified the subspecies of ballooning spiders that use their silk to fly, describing them in his letter to Ray as, “shooting forth a thread in exactly the way a lusty lad expels urine from his swollen bladder . . . bearing themselves over tall trees.”[88]

In 1669, Lister resigned his fellowship to marry Hannah Parkinson the following year. Hannah was related to the royal herbalist John Parkinson (1567–1650), a friend of Lister’s great uncle and court physician Matthew Lister. Lister's correspondence indicates that he became the head of a large and growing family, with Ray often asking when Hannah was “in the straw” or about to go into labor.

Subsequently Martin Lister established a medical practice in York, and pursued natural history, medical, and antiquarian studies, which would lead to his election as a Royal Society Fellow in 1671. Until 1683, Lister practised medicine in York, and his correspondence from this period demonstrates that he was at the center of a group of fellow natural philosophers, artists, and antiquarians known as the York Virtuosi. They met at glass painter Henry Gyles’s home on York’s Lendall Street, and the group included (amongst others) the antiquarians and collectors John and Ralph Thoresby, the artists and early scientific illustrators William Lodge and Francis Place, as well as instrument makers Thomas and Joshua Mann. Lister and his fellow virtuosi distilled formic acid from ants, attempted to recreate Chinese porcelain, produced some of the first mezzotints, and reported their results to the Philosophical Transactions. Their correspondence demonstrates that one member, Thomas Kirke, provided Lister with descriptions of the flora and fauna of Scotland and Ireland during his travels there, and some members of the virtuosi, such as the artist William Lodge, provided scientific illustrations and publishing expertise for Lister's early scientific publications. Another northern virtuoso, Francis Jessop of Broom Hall, used Lister as a go-between for a dispute about cycloid curves he was having with the renowned mathematician and F.R.S. John Wallis (1616–1703).

Lister’s correspondence in historical context

Through his correspondence, Lister became connected with natural philosophers of both peripheral and central importance. Lister’s full participation in the Republic of Letters was at first mediated by Henry Oldenburg. As Royal Society secretary, he patiently encouraged the work of “isolated provincials” like Lister, “bringing London and Royal Society values to isolated clergymen, medical men, and gentlemen.”[89] Oldenburg prompted Lister to contribute his work in natural history to the Philosophical Transactions, particularly his theories about the circulation of sap in plants.

Work on the circulation of the blood by William Harvey (1578–

1657), and Marcello Malpighi’s (1628–94) experiments with capillaries further encouraged botanists to speculate if plants circulated sap as animals circulated blood. Although the writings of Aristotle and Theophrastus claimed that plants only had an insensitive vegetative soul, and thus exhibited only passive responses of nutrition and reproduction, Lister believed that plants were more analogous to animals physiologically and admitted the possibility of plant sensation. Lister’s argument resulted from his typical integration of natural history and medicine. The burgeoning

numbers of studies in plant and animal anatomy and taxonomy in the seventeenth century suggested such a correspondence, as several species imported from the New World seemed to transverse boundaries between animal, mineral, and vegetable. An example was the discovery in South and Central America of the “sensitive plant,” or mimosa pudica whose compound leaves fold inward and droop when touched, re-opening within minutes; in fact, one of the first tasks given to the Royal Society by King Charles II was to understand why the sensitive plant responded to touch.[90] As the topic was of central importance to the Royal Society’s research programme, Oldenburg thus encouraged Lister in his microscopic observations of plant anatomy, and in his work with Willughby and Ray in ligaturing plants at different seasons and temperatures to measure sap flow.

To keep him informed about the most recent research findings, Lister’s friend Sir John Brooke (ca. 1635–1691), first Baronet, F.R.S., and M.P. for Boroughbridge, North Yorkshire, and a member of the York Virtuosi, also included in his letters to Lister abstracts of the minutes of Royal Society meetings and enclosed copies of the latest scientific books from the continent. And Lister repaid the favors he received In 1674, Lister wrote to Henry Oldenburg about a new method of making glass of antimony for telescopic mirrors, using Derbyshire cawk or barite as a flux. His findings were published, and subsequently Sir Isaac Newton requested samples of the cawk and antimony from Lister through the latter’s fellow York virtuoso Nathaniel Johnston. An analysis of Lister’s paper and Johnston’s correspondence and its context reveals insights not only about Newton’s work with telescopic specula but also about his alchemical investigations using unrefined metallic ores.[91] Thus, although Lister's cawk proved “not proper for mirrors”, his correspondence network resulted in him performing experiments in York that inspired chymical work by more exalted peers in Cambridge. In fact, Brooke remarked in a letter to Lister, “my Frend told me yesterday (a member of the Society), Mr Oldenburg, is frequently oblig’d to Dr Lister, for the best Remarks, that his Philosophical Transactions affords.”[92]

This state of affairs is not surprising. Anne Goldgar has demonstrated that in the early modern period, a reputation for virtue was accumulated through an individual’s status as a man of learning, and the farther afield he was known, the greater his personal credit at home.[93] Although some travelled distances to establish reputations in the “commerce” of scholarship where exchange of information was paramount, others, like Lister during his years in York, wrote many letters instead. Having large numbers of far-flung social contacts also engendered scientific creativity. In their studies of scientific networks and innovation, Bruno Latour, Hal Cook, and David Lux have demonstrated that “new information and ideas . . . tend to come from people with many weak social bonds.”[94] In particular, Cook and Lux have demonstrated that Royal Society virtuosi of the late seventeenth century collected and verified new “matters of fact” by establishing contacts that created a “minimal level of personal relationship” yet provided important information.[95] This was the strategy, with far-flung correspondence to collect and interpret information about the natural world, that Lister used when he was in York; it was also the strategy that Newton used when requesting cawk to accomplish his rather more important investigations. Thus, Lister’s letters from the first part of his career assist our understanding of the nature of networks in the early “scientific revolution” in England within and beyond the confines of the fledgling Royal Society, something Lister himself well recognized. In 1698, more than twenty years after Oldenburg’s death, Lister wrote a tribute to the Royal Society secretary, commenting on his contributions to the success of the Philosophical Transactions as a “register” of scientific observation:

I heard Mr Oldenburgh say, who began this Noble Register, that he held Correspondence with seventy odd Persons in all Parts of the World, and those be sure with others: I ask’d him what Method he used to answer so great variety of Subjects, and such a quantity of Letters as he must receive weekly; for I new he never failed, because I had the Honour of his Correspondence for Ten or Twelve Years. He told me he made one Letter answer another, and that to be always fresh, he never read a Letter before he had Pen, Ink and Paper ready to answer it forthwith; so that the multitude of his Letters cloy’d him not, or ever lay upon his hands.[96]

Lister’s comments, as well as his own correspondence also point to the larger importance of the Republic of Letters in the early modern scientific community, particularly in the development of natural history and taxonomy. Lister’s techniques to classify spiders and molluscs involved novel taxonomic methods and information retrieval which served as a conceptual bridges between Renaissance naturalists and eighteenth-century investigators like Linnaeus and Buffon. To assist him with his work, live snails were sent to him in strawberry baskets lined with damp moss for safekeeping, ores were carefully wrapped in papers and put in the post, sketches and copper plate engravings of hummingbirds, spider webs, and fossils crowded his correspondence. In creating his own small natural history museum, Lister was participating in a widespread “culture of collection” and acquisitiveness in the early modern period.[97] His acquisitions, however, were inseparable from the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters; his work, education, and correspondence represented a cross-cultural exchange of knowledge and specimens between English, French, and colonial natural historians. Lister’s correspondence thus serves as an especially apt case study for the Republic’s norms and systems of patronage.

A note on the Ray letters

There are several extant letters in this volume between Lister and his mentor John Ray. The Ray-Lister letters themselves have a rather fraught history. The Reverend William Derham (1657–1735), antiquarian, natural philosopher, and clergyman, succeeded Ray's close associate Samuel Dale (1659-1759) as the custodian of Ray's manuscripts.[98] Derham used these primary sources in his first edition of Ray's correspondence, the Philosophical Letters between the Late Learned Mr Ray and Several of his Correspondents . . . (1718). After Derham's death in 1735, the letters were also subsequently utilised by the nephew of Derham's wife, George Scott, of Woolston Hall, to publish the Select remains of the learned John Ray in 1760.[99] The Ray-Lister correspondence gives ample evidence of their editors' handiwork. Unfortunately Derham adhered to the standards of his day, crossing out sections he considered irrelevant in red pencil, and suppressing and discarding letters of a personal nature.

After Scott's death in 1780, the provenance of the Ray-Lister correspondence becomes more complicated. The bulk of it is now in MSS Ray 1 in the Botanical Library of the Natural History Museum, and the volume's inscription is as follows: “MSS. Correspondence from and to John Ray from 1663 to 1686 found at Netherton, Devonshire, among the papers of Lady Prideaux, by C.G. Prideaux Brune, Esq. and given by him to John Davies Enys in January 1884. Presented to the Botanical Department by J.D. Enys.” It is possible that Lady Prideaux received the papers from George Scott, where they were subsequently discovered by Charles Glynn [C.G.] Prideaux Brune (1821-1907).[100] C.G. Prideaux Brune matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford in 1838, and his family's seat was at Prideaux Place, Padstow, Cornwall where he served as Justice of the Peace and High Sheriff. Prideaux Brune received the papers from another member of the family, Lady Prideaux, who lived in Netherton Hall, Devon; several of the family papers and Ray ephemera are still extant in the Cornwall Record Office and the Hampshire Record Office, including some of Ray's travel journals.[101] Prideaux Brune subsequently gave John Davies Enys (1837-1912), a plant collector and geologist from New Zealand, his collection of Ray correspondence. In July 1884, the Natural History Museum agreed to purchase 88 Ray letters from Enys for the sum of £40; 43 pieces of the correspondence were between Lister and Ray.[102] Enys did not sell all of his Ray manuscripts, but he did make handwritten copies of some of Ray's correspondence that he retained. These copies are in the MSS Ray 1 folio, in some cases the only extant copies available to the public.

In an attempt to provide a comprehensive edition of Lister's correspondence, this editor has taken into account that some of the “lost” Ray-Lister letters are in private hands, having been sold from his personal collection. These documents appear irregularly in auction-house catalogues. For example, in the Bonhams auction of 28 March 2006, six autograph letters by Ray to Samuel Dale from Derham’s personal collection were for sale, among a collection of Derham’s working papers for his life of Ray, including a twenty-four-page booklet by Derham entitled “Notes, for Mr Ray's Life.”[103] Enys' collection of autograph manuscripts was sold at Bonham’s on 28 September 2004. Three Ray-Lister letters dating from 31 October 1668, 13 February 1669/70 and 22 August 1670 were in this auction.[104] Most recently, a letter from Ray to Lister of 19 December 1674 appeared at the 23 March 2010 Bonhams auction, also from the Enys Collection. As this editor was unable to secure comprehensive digital images of these materials from Bonhams, transcriptions for these volumes are based on extant images in the auction catalogues and on earlier editions of Ray's correspondence.[105]

Other Ray-Lister letters only exist in snippets. At the back of the folio of MSS Ray 1 in the Natural History Museum is a lengthy list of briefly abstracted letters to and from Ray in Derham’s hand. Although these letters were available to Derham, many have been lost since then, and now this abstract-inventory is the only clue to their existence. These thirty-eight abstracts in difficult handwriting provide a date and between one to four lines of the each letter’s content. Although some of the letters are extant in MSS Ray 1, fourteen of them included in this volume exist only in this abstracted form.

Lankester’s edition of Ray’s Correspondence, published by the Ray Society in 1848, did not include these abstracts, and took its transcriptions largely from Derham’s edition. Gunther’s Further Correspondence of John Ray (1928) does include, however, a portion of the abstracts, as well as some of Derham’s omitted text. Yet, rather than do a fresh transcription of the letters, Gunther chose to transcribe only the sections of the letters that Lankester omitted, referring the reader to the Lankester edition for the incomplete passages. This present edition rectifies that rather unwieldy situation, bringing the fully annotated and translated Ray-Lister correspondence into one place together with all the relevant abstracts.

Stylistic Considerations

The aim of this edition is to provide transcriptions and translations (where necessary) of the texts of letters between Martin Lister and his correspondents, reproduced accurately to consistent standards and accessible to the modern reader. [106]

Dates are in the Julian Calendar, unless otherwise specified, with use of the double date when necessary (from 1 January to Lady Day, 25 March). Undated letters have been dated as precisely as possible with the editorial date in two square brackets in the heading and an explanation of how the date has been deduced. If the identity of the author or recipient of the letter is not definite or based on context, the name is placed in square brackets.

For ease of use, the document reference of the text reproduced has been provided (that is, the reference used to call up the document in the relevant repository), consisting of repository name, collection name and reference number, item number, or inclusive folio numbers. Abbreviations for frequently used repository names are as follows:

BL British Library, London

Bodl. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Durham Durham Cathedral Library, Durham

NHM Botany Library, National History Museum, London

RS Royal Society, London

TCD Trinity College, Dublin

Utrecht Utrecht University Library, Netherlands

YAS Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Leeds

Full addresses on the letter wrappers are provided with use of the vertical line [ | ] to show line-breaks in following the original. Where they exist, postmarks are delineated, and the terminology has been drawn from the comprehensive work by R. Alcock and F. Holland, The Postmarks of Great Britain and Ireland, Being A Survey of British Postmarks From 1660 to 1940, published in 1940.

a. Bishop Marks: Henry Bishop invented the first Post Office stamp used in the British Isles, and he farmed the office of Postmaster-General from 1660 to 1663. In its earliest form, the London bishop stamp consisted of a thirteen-millimeter diameter circle with the month in the upper semi-circle and the day in the lower one. The months were abbreviated, IA=January, FE=February, MR=March, AP=April, MA=May, IU=June, IY=July, AV=August, SE=September, OC=October, NO=November, DE=December.

b. Receiving House: There were also Receiving House stamps that were used from the 1670s until the 1780s. As the experts have not identified all postmarks, we have only indicated the occurrence of receiving house marks.

c. Dockwra Penny Post: In 1680, a London merchant by the name of William Dockwra set up a Penny Post for London and its suburbs. These stamps, with triangular marks at first, indicated the sorting offices, for instance L and W in the centre indicated the Chief Office in Lyme Street, and the Westminster Office. Later, the day of week was added to the Dockwra mark. The sorting office and day of week for the postmark for the end user is indicated in brackets in this volume where appropriate.

The existence of copies or published versions has been noted, including facsimiles, transcripts, or printed editions. Abbreviations used for these editions, manifestations, or frequently used reference works are as follows:

Birch Birch, Thomas. The history of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge, from its first rise.
London, 1756–1757, 4 vol. An extended minute book, giving a summary of the matters discussed, motions put and proposals and reports tabled at each meeting.

Derham (1718) Derham, William. Philosophical Letters between the Late Mr. Ray and Several of His Ingenious. Correspondents, Natives and Foreigners. London, 1718.

Derham (1728) Derham, William, ed. Miscellanea Curiosa. Containing a Collection of Curious Travels, Voyages, and Natural Histories of Countries as they have been Delivered in to the Royal Society, Vol III, 2nd edn. London, 1728

Letter Book Letter Book Original, Royal Society. The Letter Book contains copies of letters received by the Society, the originals of which are in the Early Letters collection. The Letter Books were copied, as were the Journal and Register Books, for security reasons.

Philosophical Collections Hooke, Robert, ed. Philosophical collections. London, 1679–1682.  These substituted for the Philosophical Transaction when it was in hiatus during Hooke’s secretaryship.

Phil. Trans. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Related Works: (post-1800):

Beeley Beeley, Philip, ed. The Correspondence of John Wallis. Oxford, 2003--.

Brighton (1984) Brighton, J.T. “Henry Gyles, virtuoso and glass painter of York, 1645–1709,” York Historian 4 (1984), pp. 1–62.

Carr (1974) Carr, Jeff. “The Biological Work of Martin Lister (1638–1712).” University of Leeds: PhD thesis, 1974.

Lankester (1848) Lankester, Edwin. The Correspondence of John

Ray, Consisting Of Selections From The Philosophical Letters Published By Dr. Derham. London, 1848

Dandy (1958) Dandy, J.E. The Sloane Herbarium, an annotated list of the Horti Sicci composing it; with biographical accounts of the principal contributors. London, 1958.

Davy (1953) Davy, Norman. British Scientific Literature.

New York, 1953.

Ewan (1970) Ewan, Joseph and Nesta. John Banister and his Natural History of Virginia 1678–1692. Urbana, 1970.

Gunther (1928) Gunther, R.T., ed. Further Correspondence of John Ray

London, 1928.

Goulding (1900) Goulding, Rev. W. “Martin Lister, M.D. F.R.S.”

Associated Architectural Societies Reports and

Papers, xxv, part II (1900), pp. 329–370.

Hake (1902) Hake, H.M. “Some contemporary records relating to Francis Place, with a catalogue of his engraved work.” The Walpole Society, 10 (1902), pp. 39–69.

Harley (1992) Parker J. and B. Harley, ed. Martin Lister’s English Spiders 1678. Colchester, 1992.

Lyster–Denny (1813) Lyster–Denny, R.H. Memorials of an Ancient House: A History of the Family of Lister or Lyster. London, 1813.

Munks’ Roll Munks’ Roll, Royal College of Physicians.

Nichols (1815) Nichols, John. Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century. 9 vols. London, 1815.

Oldenburg Hall, A.R. and M.B. Hall, ed. The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg. 13 vols. Madison and Milwaukee, 1965-86. When the abbreviation “Hall and Hall” is utilized, it refers to the same edition, but to their footnotes. In this manner, a distinction is made between the transcribed text of Oldenburg's letters, and scholarly interpretation by the Halls of his correspondence

Raven (1986) Raven, Charles. John Ray, Naturalist: His Life and Works . Cambridge, 1986. 2nd Edn.

Roos (2011) Roos, Anna Marie. Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639–1712): The First Arachnologist. Leiden, 2011.

Stearns (1970) Stearns, Raymond P. Science in the British Colonies of America. Urbana, 1970.

Thoresby (1832) Letters of Eminent Men addressed to Ralph Thoresby. 2 vols. London, 1832.

Tyler (1971) Tyler, Richard. Francis Place 1647–1728. York, 1971.

Unwin (1995) Unwin, R.W., “A Provincial Man of Science at Work: Martin Lister, F.R.S., and His Illustrators, 1670–1683.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 49 (1995), pp. 209–30.

Valle (2004) Valle, E. “Let me not lose yr love & friendship: The negotiation of priority and the construction of a scientific identity in seventeenth-century natural history.” In Discourse Perspectives on English, ed. Risto Hiltunen and Janne Skaffari Philadelphia, 2004, pp. 197–234.

Venn, Alum. Cantab Venn, J. Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates, and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest times to 1900, 2 pts in 10 vols. Cambridge, 1922–54.

Woodley (1994) Woodley, J.D., “Anne Lister, Illustrator of Martin Lister’s Historiae Conchyliorum (1685–1692),” Archives of Natural History 21 (1994), pp. 225–29.

The text of the letter is then reproduced, including the writer’s address, salutation, and signature, and any postscripts. The text is presented in the sequence in which it was meant to be read by the recipient, regardless of how it is fitted to the letter-paper, with marginalia indicated. Where necessary, a note to the reader has been included in italics in square brackets, along with any other additions on the letter. These additions, for example, could include notes by the recipient or marginalia by someone handling the letter on its journey.

Original orthography, punctuation, and capitalization have been reproduced, although the thorn (y) is expanded to “th,” “Sr” has been expanded to “Sir” and modern practice is used for long “s” where there is no ambiguity. “i”/ “j”, “u”/ “v” have been retained, as well as accents in Latin and other languages. Diphthongs in Latin or other ligatures have been replaced by two vowels or consonants. Titles of works published at the time or later (if the titles can be identified as such) referred are italicized, and where the original has underlining this has been replaced with italics. In some cases where there was no punctuation in the letter, full-stops (periods) or paragraph breaks are placed between sentences for clarity, and these changes are indicated in the letter heading.

For alterations to the letter, illegibility or loss of text through damage to the document, we are using the following editorial interventions:

• [ ] = editorial comments or emendations

• [roman] = author errors

• [italic] = editorial insertions; examples might include [sic] or words necessary for sense but omitted in the manuscript

• strikethrough = followed by words struck through (crossed out) by the letter writer or recipient

• [[ ]] = illegibility or damage: in short instances one may be able to indicate by

• xxx (using Arial for xxx) how many letters are illegible; in longer instances [[several words]] was used

• \ / = insertions above the line by the writer. A footnote records insertions

made by someone other than the writer

• \\ // = insertions in the margin by the writer.

Translations have been provided for Latin, French, Greek, and Italian correspondence. For entire letters, the English translation follows the text of the original letter. For passages, the English translation follows the original letter in a footnote. Original illustrations with an intended purpose in the letters have been scanned and placed appropriately in the text; non-substantive doodles have been omitted.

The original nomenclature for a species is preserved in the transcription of the letter, the footnotes indicating its Linnaean equivalent when possible. Footnotes have been used also to explain points in the letters, identifying such things as individuals, places, events, subjects, and works cited, as well as providing a short biography for people who appear frequently. When, to date, a person has proved to be unidentifiable, this has been indicated in the footnote.

Although we have provided a full index and calendar for the edition, this editor has also provided a fully searchable index and calendar for the entire Lister correspondence at Early Modern Letters Online, part of the Cultures of Knowledge project hosted at the University of Oxford:

A guide to early modern abbreviations is below.

Glossary of words commonly abbreviated

| | |

| | |

|7bris |Septembris, e.g., 1 7bris = 1 September |

|8bris |Octobris, e.g., 21 8bris = 21 October |

|9bris |Novembris, e.g. 9 9bris = 9 November |

|abt |about |

|acct |account |

|affect |affectionate |

|agt |against |

|Bp |Bishop |

|cant |cannot |

|certn |certain |

|cozn |cozin (cousin) |

|endeavr |endeavor |

|Engd |England |

|esqr |Esquire |

|favr |favor |

|Frd, frd |friend, friend |

|gt |great |

|honble |Honorable |

|hond, honed |Honored |

|Kt |Knight |

|Ld |Lord |

|Lp |Lordship |

|Lr, lr |letter |

|Majties |Majesties |

|nt |not |

|nure (line above |nature |

|or |our |

|p’ish |parish |

|p’sent |present |

|p’usal |perusal |

|paymts |payments |

|pforme |perform |

|prsume |presume |

|recd |received |

|satisfacon (with tilde over 'o') |satisfaction |

|sd |said |

|servt |servant |

|shd |should |

|Sr |Sir |

|sume (with line over 'm') |summe (sum) |

|Vicechancr |Vice-chancellor |

|wch |which |

|wd |would |

|wn |when |

|wo |who |

|wth |with |

|xbris |Decembris, eg 2 xbris = 2 December |

|xtmas |Christmas |

|ye |the |

|ym |them |

|yn |than/then |

|yr/rs, yor/s |your/s |

|ys |this |

|yt |that |

|yu |you |

-----------------------

[1] Zeldin, Intimate, p. 192.

[2] MacGregor, “Huddesford,” pp. 47–68.

[3] Huddesford, An Address to the Freemen, p. 4.

[4] William Huddesford to William Borlase, 31 July 1770; Borlase Papers, Morrab Library, Penzance, MOR/BOR/3, f. 62.

[5] Lister held a fellowship by Royal Mandate at St John’s College, Cambridge, granted in 1660. For Huddesford’s letters, see Additional MSS 22596, British Library, London.

[6] Nichols, Illustrations, vol. 4, p. 458; MacGregor, “Huddesford,” p. 58.

[7] MacGregor, “Huddesford,” p. 59 and p. 66.

[8] Nichols, Illustrations, vol. 4, p. 458, as quoted in MacGregor, “Huddesford,” p. 59.

[9] MacGregor, “Huddesford,” p. 59.

[10] MacGregor, “Huddesford,” p. 59. These documents comprise MSS Lister at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

[11] Huddesford separated four boxes of Lister ephemera from the main collection; Huddesford was using them to complete another edition of Lister's Historiae Conchyliorum (1685-92; 1770). See Roos, “Discovery,” p. 127.

[12]Bodl.MS Lister 34, 99r. 12 April 1683 from Tancred Robinson to Martin Lister. Robinson was relating Boyle’s comments to Lister about his recent publication on spa waters, De Fontibus (1682).

[13] See The Correspondence of John Ray, ed. Edwin Lankester (London: The Ray Society, 1848) and The Further Correspondence of John Ray, ed. R. W. T. Gunther (London: The Ray Society, 1928). Helen Watt and Brynley F. Roberts have provided transcriptions of Lister's correspondence with Edward Lhwyd, although these are not annotated. See .

[14] For his complete biography, see Roos, Web of Nature from which this material is drawn.

[15] Lyster-Denny, Memorials, pp. 215–216.

[16] Britton, Beauties, vol. 9, p. 777.

[17] Carr, “The Biological Work,” p. 6.

[18] Hearn, “Cornelius Johnson.”

[19] Latham, Catalogue, pp. 95–96, entry no. 2979/176b.

[20] Foster, Alumni Oxoniensies, vol. 4, p. 918.

[21] For Mary Wenman’s pedigree, see Lyster-Denny, Memorials, p. 206.

[22] Diocese of Lincoln Presentation Deed, 1630, n. 37, Lincolnshire Archives, Lincoln.

[23] E(B) 672,  20 October 1643, Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton.

[24] Parish Register of Kirkby Malhamdale, p. 89.

[25] Farr, “Education,” pp. 8–23; Farr, “Kin, cash,” pp. 44–62. See Farr, John Lambert, p. 16.

[26] Farr, John Lambert, p. 17. The kinship was through a branch of the Listers in Westby in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

[27] Mendelson and Crawford, Women, p. 82.

[28] Cressy, Literacy, p. 20. Wood, Athaenae Oxonienses, vol. 2, p. 308.

[29] Hoole in his A New Discovery, p. 22, states “for thus learning to read English perfectly I allow two or three years time so that at seven or eight years of age a child may begin Latin”; cited in Cressy, Education, 75.

[30] Mayor, ed., Admissions, p. 122.

[31] Goddard, Discourse, p. 12.

[32] Winstanley, Unreformed Cambridge, p. 61. See also Rolleston, Cambridge Medical School, p. 17.

[33] BL MS Sloane 3306–15. See Frank, “Science, Medicine,” p. 208.

[34] Feingold, Before, p. 31.

[35] “Letter from Henry Paman to William Sancroft, 2 March 1653,” BL MS Harley 3783 f. 90 r. For an analysis of the religious atmosphere at Trinity in the 1640s and 1650s see Hammond, “Dryden and Trinity,” pp. 35–57.

[36] Moore, “Paman, Henry,” rev. Bevan, Oxford DNB.

[37] Gascoigne, Cambridge, pp. 61–62.

[38] Feingold, Before, p. 33.

[39] Feingold, Before, p. 33.

[40] “Cartularies and registers of college lands and goods, 1250–1841,” St John’s College Archives, Cambridge, C7.16, f. 420. The letter of royal mandate in the archives is a copy made for the college’s letter books. Leedham-Green, A Short History, p. 84.

[41] Le Neve and Hardy, Fasti Ecclesiae, p. 638.

[42] Briggs, Primaeva, frontispiece. Literally, nature has made the sceptres, but God guides or moderates. Monarchical power (represented by the sceptre) though conferred by nature via the accidents of birth is moderated and guided by God.

[43] Briggs was junior bursar from 1661–1662, and then senior bursar from 1662–1668. My thanks to Malcolm Underwood, the archivist at St John's College, Cambridge, for this information.

[44] Bodl. MS Lister 3, fol. 23r.

[45] Bodl. MS Lister 4, fol. 93r.

[46] Bodl. MS Lister 4, fol. 84r.

[47] Bodl. MS Lister 4, fols 47–48.

[48] Hamilton, Memoirs, p. 171.

[49] See Lyster-Denny, Memorials, p. 217.

[50] “Settlement on the marriage of George Gregory, Esq. with Susanna Lister,” 21 April 1662, 1. PG. 3/5/1/3, Lincolnshire Archives, Lincoln.

[51] Bodl. MS Lister 4, fol. 37.

[52] Bodl. MS Lister 4, fol. 37.

[53] Frank, “Science, Medicine,” p. 207.

[54] Axtell, “Education and Status,” p. 144.

[55] Frank, “Science, Medicine,” p. 208.

[56] Axtell, “Education and Status,” p. 144.

[57] Bartholin, On medical travel, p. 47.

[58] Bodl. MS Lister 19.

[59] Bodl. MS Lister 5. The editor has transcribed MS Lister 19 and MS Lister 5 with full scholarly apparatus at: .

[60] Mellick, “Sir Thomas Browne,” p. 432.

[61] See Magnol, Hortus Regius and Bertrand, “Les herbiers,” pp. 271–292.

[62] Cook, “Physicians and Natural History,” p. 96. See also Lewis, “Debt of John Ray,” pp. 323-29.

[63] Ray, Observations Topographical, p. 454.

[64] The master apothecary Henri Verchant arranged Lister’s stay with Fargeon. See his letter to Lister of 31 May 1664. The Protestant Verchant hosted many Englishmen; both John Locke and Hans Sloane stayed with him in Montpellier. See Whittet, “Apothecaries,” pp. 5–6.

[65] De Feydeau, A Scented Palace, p. 9. By the eighteenth century the Fargeons would reorient their family business, and Jean-Louis Fargeon would become the official perfumer for Marie Antoinette.

[66] Maclean, Logic, Signs, and Nature, p. 30.

[67] Kardel, “Introduction,” Steno on Muscles, p. 26.

[68] Iliffe, “Foreign bodies,” p. 300. Adversaria is Bodleian MS Lister 5.

[69] Bodl. MS Lister 5, fol. 223v.

[70] Bodl. MS Lister 5, fols 224v–226v.

[71] Bodl. MS Lister 5, fol. 225; Lister, “An Extract of a Letter,” pp. 6–9; Musgrave, “A Letter,” pp. 812–819. Chyle is a milky bodily fluid consisting of emulsified fats and lymph formed in the small intestine during digestion of fatty foods. The fat is then transported to the blood and lymph where it is deposited in the liver and in adipose tissue.

[72] Willughby’s manorial home, Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire, is still extant and houses, appropriately enough, a fine natural-history collection. The University of Nottingham Archives holds Willughby’s personal papers and notes in the Middleton Collection. For a short but comprehensive biography of Willughby, see the introduction to Cram, Forgeng, and Johnston, eds, Willughby’s Book of Games.

[73] Derham, Select, p. 24.

[74] Bodl. MS Lister 5, fols 215r-v as quoted in Iliffe, “Foreign bodies,” p. 360.

[75] Bodl. MS Lister 5, fols 215r–v as quoted in Iliffe, “Foreign bodies,” p. 361.

[76] Raven, John Ray, p. 137. Most of the accounts of their journey are taken from Skippon, “An Account of a Journey,” vol. 6, pp. 714–735. Skippon lists the English expatriates in Montpellier on p. 714.

[77] Bodl. MS Lister 5, fols 221–223, fols 225–226.

[78] Skippon, “Account,” p. 714. Skippon is describing the Étang de Thau, a string of lakes or étangs that stretch along the Languedoc-Roussillon French coast. Alypum montis Ceti is better known as gutwort or globularia alypum, a purgative and diuretic. It can grow in Europe, but it is far more common in Northern Africa, particularly Tunisia.

[79] Skippon, “Account,” p. 733. For more on Moulin, see Morris, “Identity of Jacques du Moulin,” pp. 1–10.

[80] Stearns, ed., Journey, p. xxiii.

[81] Schiebinger, Plants, p. 36.

[82] Raven, John Ray, p. 138.

[83] Bodleian MS Lister 2, fol. 178, Lister's letter of February 1666. transcribed and translated in this volume.

[84] Oswald and Preston, ed. Cambridge Catalogue (1660), p. 67.

[85] Oswald and Preston, ed. Cambridge Catalogue (1660), p. 20.

[86] For the reference to health throstles, see Bodl. MS Lister 5, fol. 113r; Ray and Willughby, “Preface,” to Ornithology, pp. 6–7.

[87] Robert Hatch, “The Scientific Revolution: Correspondence Networks,” [accessed 2 December 2012]. See also Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment” pp 367-386.

[88] See Lister’s letter to Ray of 22 November 1668.

[89] Hall, Oldenburg: Shaping the Royal Society, p. 131, p. 133.

[90] Webster, “Recognition of Plant Sensitivity,” p. 6

[91] Roos, “A speculum.”

[92] Bodleian MS Lister 34, f. 63v.

[93] Goldgar, Impolite learning, 134.

[94] Lux and Cook, “Closed circles,” p. 182; Latour, Science in action.

[95] Lux and Cook, “Closed circles,” p. 182.

[96] Lister, Journey to Paris, 78.

[97] The literature on the history of museums and collecting in the early modern period has grown vast, so the following are a select few of the works that have influenced my research. Kenneth Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).

[98] Raven, John Ray, 204-6. See also Dale, “A Letter from Mr Samuel Dale to Dr Hans Sloane.”

[99] Gunther, Further Correspondence of John Ray, 110.

[100]As I was completing this volume, the following paper concerning Ray's journals was published: Michael Hunter, “John Ray in Italy: Lost Manuscripts Rediscovered,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 68, 2 (20 June 2014) pp. 93-109. In footnote 14, Hunter indicated: “For the statement that the Ray MSS passed from Scott to the Prideaux family, that they were discovered by Charles Prideaux Brune among the papers of Lady Prideaux at Netherton c. 1880 and were given by Prideaux Brune to J.D. Enys in 1884, some then going to the botanical department of the British Museum, see R.W.T. Gunther (ed.), Further Correspondence of John Ray (London, 1928), p. vii; this information is derived from a note by G.S. Boulter published in Journal of Proceedings of the Essex Field Club, vol. 4 (1885-6), p. clxiv.”

[101] Prideaux-Brune of Rowner (1663-1960), Hampshire Record Office, Shelfmark 19M59/5-6; In his article, “John Ray in Italy,” Hunter explained the Hampshire connection to the family: : “The Prideaux Brune family, whose seat is Prideaux Place, Padstow, Cornwall, acquired their Hampshire connection following the death without heir of Charles Brune in 1769; his estates devolved onto his grand-nephew, the Rev. Charles Prideaux Brune, including the manor and advowson of Rowner, near Portsmouth, which long remained in the possession of the family.”

[102] Enys' offer letter is preserved in NHM MSS Ray 1 (unfoliated), as are the committee minutes that indicate the agreed sale.

[103] Bonhams catalogue, 28 March 2006, Printed Books and Manuscripts: Science and Medicine including the Hooke Folio, lot 186. [accessed 13 November 2012].

[104] Bonhams catalogue, 28 September 2004, The Enys Collection of Autograph Manuscripts, lots 298, 299, 300. [accessed 13 November 2012].

[105] Bonhams catalogue, 23 March 2010, Printed Books, Maps and Manuscripts, lot 119. [accessed 13 November 2012].

[106] My thanks to Richar(.: ................
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