Thomas Sprat’s “Mixt Assembly”: Association and Authority in The History of the Royal Society

“The History of The Royal Society is now read not with the wish to know what they were then doing, but how their transactions are exhibited by Sprat.”

(S. Johnson 185)

Samuel Johnson, in celebrating The History of the Royal Society for its elegant writing, initiated a persistent trend to separate Thomas Sprat from the subject of his 1667 publication. Subsequent literary criticism generally focuses on the form of the History, most often its contributions to the modern English prose style. ¹ Recent historians of science identify the History as propaganda: Sprat, they suggest, promoted the Society in inaccurate terms that nonetheless proved amenable to a Restoration audience. This assessment relies upon the commonplace that Sprat as a young literary figure was elected to the Royal Society solely to pen a defense for the association. ² Not a leader in the group and never an active practitioner of natural or experimental philosophy, he did not—perhaps could not—accurately explicate the Society’s early methodologies. As Johnson’s verb exhibit might suggest, Sprat’s History was outward looking, and historians purport that Sprat worked on the book almost entirely outside the Society.

Recent literary scholarship beckons a return to what historians of science may consider a worn-out concern: the accuracy of Sprat’s History or the relationship between what the Society was doing and Sprat’s exhibition of it. ³ Erin Mackie cautions against positivism(s) in scholarship of the public sphere, whose “production was figurative and rhetorical-discursive—at once invested in the concrete and historical existence of its representative institutions (coffeehouses, newspapers) and simultaneously, as a function of this representation, abstracted from them” (87). Similarly, Joad Raymond and Peter Hinds question the critical aptness of “propaganda” in seventeenth-century studies, arguing that the category is unproductively ahistorical because it bluntly divides historical entities from their discourses (Raymond 11; Hinds 5-6). To use Johnson’s phrase, “what they were then doing” in the Royal Society of the 1660s describes not only scientific endeavor but also the burgeoning social practice of voluntary association. Clifford Siskin and William Warner identify such “associational practices… the creation of a remarkable number and variety of voluntary associations” as one of the four “cardinal mediations” that helped establish the conditions for the possibility of Enlightenment” (12-13). The Royal Society is not only a concrete and historical subject about which Sprat writes, but, as a voluntary association, the Society also mediates Sprat’s writing.

Association here operates akin to the early modern corporation as theorized by Henry Turner: it is developed through language, but “it is also like a language in its form and function” (129). Turner correctly insists that the corporation is “not a bounded entity,” and the “corporate person… is only surface,” a web of “external relations in overlapping networks of other commercial and civic entities” (120). By contrast, the Royal Society, like most voluntary associations, contains “depth” and an “inside”: its membership realizes, though often opaquely, a bounded convergence of plurality (120). At the same time that the Society actively sought to anchor itself in the traditional, vertical authority of the monarchy, it began to develop horizontal modes of authorization integral to its social form in which “no single figure served as the dominating” or uppermost (Griffin 51-52). ⁴ The Society found a basis for this new configuration of authority in its membership, a body comprised of but qualitatively different from the sum of its individual members. Even if Sprat’s membership were purely nominal, as a Fellow of the Royal Society he was drawn into the group’s complex negotiation of authority.

What, then, was Sprat’s “author function?” Foucault’s concept helpfully recognizes the coincidence of authorship and authority, an intersection between the cultural operation of writing and the social endowment of power. The “author function” encourages consideration not only of Sprat’s role as author but also of how authority operates within the text. According to Foucault, the author “constitutes a principle of unity in writing …. There must be — at a particular level of an...