Commerce, Credit, and Transaction: the Rhetorical Origins of Big Science

Part of a larger project on the languages of ‘big science’ from the 17th to the 21st centuries, Claire's paper considers the earliest form of the large-array model of scientific collaboration and the gathering of data. The term ‘big science’, coined during the Cold War,
is a concept of far earlier origin, in the networking and language of Henry Oldenburg (1618- 1677), the first Corresponding Secretary of the Royal Society and largely responsible for the emergence of a collaborative, transnational ethos in scientific behaviour.

Claire will discuss Oldenburg’s rhetorical modes, often framed in the language of commercial transaction. In his decade and a half shepherding his colleagues and correspondents, gatekeeping the precincts of Baconian enquiry, and editing both the Philosophical Transactions and the epistolary manners of his more fractious associates.

Claire Preston was Professor of Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of London from 2013 to 2020 following over twenty years at Cambridge. She has published widely on various aspects of early-modern literary-scientific interaction. Her most recent book is The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2015). Claire's current project looks at 'big science' from Henry Oldenburg to Robert Oppenheimer. She is General Editor of the Oxford Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne (8 vols, 2023-27) for which she is editing Urne-Buriall, The Garden of Cyrus, and A Letter to a Friend.

This event will also be streamed online through Zoom. If you'd like to join us online, please register for the webinar before Thursday 26 October 2023. 

If you're joining us in-person, you do not need to register for the event.