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15 Creating Standards of Accuracy Faithorne’s The Art of Graveing and the Royal Society me฀ ghan฀do฀ herty For my part, I prefer (to guard the Dead) A Copper Plate, before a sheet of Lead. So long as Brasse, so long as Books endure, So long as neat-wrought Pieces, Thour’t secure, A Faithorne sculpsit is a Charm can save From dull Oblivion, and a gaping Grave. Thomas Flatman, “To My Ingenious Friend Mr. Faithorne” This essay argues that standards of accuracy developed over the course of the seventeenth century and came to govern the printed representation of the natural world as a consequence of being deployed in the production of images used for natural history and natural philosophy texts; furthermore, it shows how such standards were developed through the collaboration of artisans and members of the Royal Society of London. As a result of these standards, engraving was treated as a transparent medium; that is, by describing and then conforming to a set of commonly accepted standards, engravers projected a direct relationship between the image and the natural world.1 I do not mean that these images were “truthful” or “objective” by some transhistorical measure.2 Instead, let me suggest, that these images facilitated the production and circulation of knowledge within a group, the Royal Society, and further, these images 16 ฀ meghan฀doherty were contributors to the construction of what Steven Shapin has called the “social history of truth.”3 This essay, then, contends that the engravings produced for the Royal Society in the seventeenth century played a critical role in the circulation of knowledge because they participated in the gentlemanly practices of witnessing that were essential to the Royal Society’s attempts to validate the knowledge its members produced.4 Members of the Royal Society included intaglio printed images in their books as stand-ins for the objects depicted despite the great distance between each object and its representation. These images need to be situated in a social context because, like the “fact,” they represented mediated knowledge.5 Both artisans and members of the Royal Society were concerned with how prints were made and how they functioned as if they transparently represented the natural world. The “as if ” of this proposition is key: it is essential to highlight the strangeness of the possibility that a small, flat, colorless , line image on paper with no simulation of touch, sound, or smell could be taken to represent the full and actual presence of an object. To show how printed images became a necessary part of the communication of knowledge, I aim to unpack how they were produced and how the process of engraving was written about in the middle of the seventeenth century.6 I have chosen the Royal Society as the locus for this study of the development of standards because of the important role it played in promoting and facilitating the increasingly widespread interest in natural knowledge in the seventeenth century, and, moreover, for its avowed commitment to accuracy and exactness. Founded in 1660 for the promotion of experimental learning, the Royal Society worked to improve the state of knowledge about the natural world through experiment and observation.7 The Fellows of the Royal Society broke with past reliance on ancient opinions regarding the workings of Nature and instead relied on their own experiences.8 As Thomas Sprat wrote in his History of the Royal Society (1667): “I shall lay it down, as their Fundamental Law, that whenever they could possibly get to handle the subject, the Experiment was still perform’d by some of the Members themselves. The want of this exactness, has very much diminish’d the credit of former Naturalists.”9 It should be noted at this point that the word “accuracy” was coming into the English language at exactly the same moment as the Royal Society was founded and that early uses of the word occur in texts by its Fellows.10 The standards of accuracy that governed the production of engravings for texts published by Fellows developed within this context of experiment, which valued knowledge gained through first-hand experience. These standards helped to ease the transmission of knowledge as it passed from one individual’s observation into a print that could circulate among a larger audience.11 While Steven Shapin’s work on the social history of truth focuses on gentlemanly culture in mid-seventeenth-century London, I argue that the standards of accuracy that helped intaglio printed images to...

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