Whatever its historical antecedents, the creation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was assured when twelve men of diverse backgrounds – from Royalist to Cromwellian – gathered at Gresham College during the early days of the restoration of the monarchy, in 1660. They resolved to meet weekly to discuss and advance natural philosophy. Two years later, Charles II granted the group a royal charter. A second charter of 1663 established the operating rules and procedures of the Society. These actions bestowed upon the group of 115 scientific virtuosi a corporate status comparable to the one enjoyed by lawyers in the Inns of Court and by medical doctors in the College of Physicians. The incorporation of the Society itself meant that it could own property, employ officers, possess a seal and coat of arms, and license its own books.5 These were significant legal privileges at the time.
In his book The Great Instauration (1975), Charles Webster suggests that questions about the Royal Society’s origins and true character can be resolved by determining the Society’s active members. Webster identified twelve fellows – among them Boyle, Evelyn, Petty, and Wren – whose activity dominated and sustained the fledgling Society during its first two and a half years. Webster concludes that preliminary meetings were held in London during the closing years of Cromwell’s republic and that ‘diversity of outlook and experience’ brought a remarkable advantage to the group. He contends that it is ‘superfluous’ to ask whether the nucleus was Puritan or Anglican, Parliamentarian or Royalist. The early Society evolved continually in terms of its composition and interests, just as religious beliefs and political convictions fluctuated beyond its confines.
The diverse religious and political composition of the Royal Society set a premium on limiting activity to natural philosophy. The exploration of experimental and mathematical problems concentrated the energies of early fellows and minimized more fundamental differences of opinion. In this way, the Society’s work remained unaffected by the collapse of Cromwell’s republic and the restoration of the monarchy. In Webster’s words, ‘scientific work was insulated from ideological friction’. Science, according to this view, is an anodyne for social dislocation.
The Royal Society dedicated itself to ‘the advancement of the knowledge of natural things and useful arts by experiments, to the glory of God the creator and for application to the good of mankind’. It was governed by a president and a council of twenty-one fellows, from whose ranks were elected a treasurer and two secretaries. The Society employed at least two Curators of Experiments, obtained the cadavers of criminals for anatomical demonstrations, and built quarters for its assemblies in London. Fellows had to be elected by the general membership and upon election had to pay an admission fee, in addition to an annual subscription.
Although the Royal Society may be considered an organization that rewards the achievements of a scientific elite, its membership down from the early days has been relatively large, especially when compared with the size of other national scientific organizations. From its inception, the Society included a large proportion of virtuosi from the leisured classes, men whose interests have encompassed historical, literary, artistic, and archaeological studies. To the more avid scientific practitioners in the Society, the concerns of this element (who were needed for their wealth and social status) appeared aimless, unfocused, and obscure. The virtuosi also gave the Society a tendency to devolve into a social club for gentlemen. (When this current took hold in the Society during the early nineteenth century, it was ironically a member of the aristocracy, the duke of Sussex, son of George III, who reformed the Society and restored its learned purpose.)
Historian of science Marie Boas Hall has recently shifted attention from the organization’s origins and sociological composition to what actually occurred at its meetings. She has been particularly interested in the extent to which experiments were performed by the Society’s paid employees, both curators and operators, during its early years. Empirical discussions and demonstrations of experimental results seemed to offer a respite from potentially divisive political or religious issues. The airing of hypotheses, says Boas Hall, in contrast, led to ‘disputes and wranglings’ inappropriate to a ‘quiet atmosphere of learned debate’.
Boas Hall concludes that although the early Society paid lip-service to the promotion of ‘Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’, early enthusiasm soon gave way to the mere reading of papers and discussion about experiment. Although a small core of virtuosi maintained interest in the demonstration of experimental phenomena by operators (the title is significant) like Robert Hooke, most fellows sensed that the descriptions of experiments in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions possessed more enduring value than demonstrations. In the words of A. Rupert Hall, the Royal Society became ‘a place of report rather than a research institute’. Rhetoric and the prestige that flowed from association with eminent names like Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle nevertheless ensured that contemporaries and historians alike have linked the Royal Society with the new experimental philosophy.6
The early Royal Society’s fulfilment of the Baconian imperative depended entirely on individual initiative, whether Operator Robert Hooke’s enthusiasm for performing experiments or Secretary Henry Oldenburg’s (ca.1618–1677) prosecution of the plan for creating a universal natural history. Oldenburg’s zeal for the task led to the publication of some ‘histories’ (more properly, narratives) of trades in the Philosophical Transactions. These experiential accounts derived from Oldenburg’s queries addressed on a regular basis to correspondents all over the world; by 1668, the annual volume of incoming and outgoing letters supervised by Oldenburg generally exceeded 300. James McClellan characterizes the Royal Society as encouraging ‘a vaguely defined Baconian empiricism that meshed well with the format of its meetings and the looser interests of its members’. He also sees the outward turn away from a dedicated Baconian core as the mechanism that propelled the Society to become the most important learned society of the second half of the seventeenth century.7
Part of the Royal Society’s Baconianism may have been rhetorical. The society encompassed a heterogeneous membership and tended to create myths about its cohesiveness when it was under attack. And attack its critics did. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), for example, Jonathan Swift ridicules the futile projects pursued in the ‘Academy of Lagado’, inspired by the research undertaken by members of the Royal Society. Historian Martha Ornstein is so persuaded of the rhetorical use of Baconianism that she sees the imagery of ‘Salomon’s House’ as fulfilling for learned societies what the Communist Manifesto did for socialism.
Other scientific societies did not trace their inspiration so directly to Bacon. Galileo wielded enormous influence over scientific developments in Italy, and he was a member of Rome’s Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1603. Like Rome, many Italian cities housed learned societies, more properly Renaissance academies that promoted a range of subjects: Bologna claimed an Accademia degli Affidati (1548) and Naples an Accademia Secretorum Naturae (ca. 1560) and later an Accademia degli Investiganti (ca. 1650). Unlike other Renaissance academies, however, those in Bologna and Naples concerned themselves with the cultivation of natural knowledge, rather than literature or the arts.
The foremost among the Italian academies was the Florentine Accademia del Cimento (Academy of Experiments), founded in 1657. The small society of nine members – including the important naturalists Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1674) and Francesco Redi (1626–ca.1698) – depended on the patronage of Prince Leopold de’Medici and answered