Al Coppola is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College, CUNY and the 2023-2024 Consortium Albert M. Greenfield Research Fellow. He reports on his research exploring the prehistory and current manifestations of a range of strategies and technologies, first innovated in the long eighteenth century, that bring previously unimaginable or imperceptible phenomena into the domain of knowledge.
It is a pleasure to write this final report for the Albert M Greenfield Fellowship that I received from Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. With the assistance of this travel grant, I was able to make extended visits to rare book libraries at the University of Toronto, Yale University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Linda Hall Library, and the Clendening Library at the University of Kansas.
Consortium support enabled me to substantially advance my current project, Enlightenment Visibilities, a significant portion of which is devoted to the investigation of popularity of the microscope during the long eighteenth century in Europe. As part of that, I have been investigating the annotations left on extant copies of books of eighteenth-century popular microscopy in order to assess how and why a wide range of individuals—both elite practitioners and curious amateurs—engaged in microscope work during the enlightenment. Partly through the assistance of an earlier fellowship at the Dibner Library of the Smithsonian Institution, I had begun compiling a database of notes and research images on the books I had found that bore annotations or other marks of use. With the help of the Consortium fellowship, I was able to inspect 216 separate volumes of microscopy from the years 1600 to 1850, essentially doubling my database, which now contains 510 records of individual volumes housed in over 25 research institutions in the United States, Canada, the UK and Sweden.
I had a hunch that these books were not only remarkably popular in the long eighteenth century, but they were also used by active, engaged readers and practitioners. My Consortium research has proved this without a doubt. 84 of the 216 books I reviewed bore annotations; of that, 67 were annotated in what I would consider a meaningful way, bearing more than a signature or bare mark of ownership. I am only now at the point when I am able to start analyzing the notes and research images I have collected, so I am still teasing out substantive conclusions from the data I have collected. That said, I know that many of the works that I was able to inspect with the assistance of this fellowship will play a large role in my book’s chapters on annotations.
In some cases, we can see clear evidence that these books were owned and used for serious study. I would point to the copy of George Adams’ Essays on the Microscope (1798) held in the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, where a reader has made a special and careful study of animalcules. This copy has its plates bound in the back of the volume, and on the verso of plate 24 there is a very long list identifying each animalcule specimen shown in the facing Plate 25 by its Linnaean classification, which are then indexed to the page in the text where each specimen is discussed
The same careful, studious attention was given plates 26 and 27, all featuring animalcules. I found that the plates of animalcules in Louis Joblot’s Observations d'histoire naturelle (1754) held at the same archive were given similar treatment. Of course, not all readers were as diligent, or even sure that the flights of enthusiasm that microscopic researches were prone to stimulate in authors and readers. There is a copy of the 1787 edition of Adams’ Essays in the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, shelfmark sci f, that elicited this tart annotation from a learned, but clearly unimpressed, reader: “stulti in mudo sunt mutti” (roughly, “fools are dumb in the mud”). That reader was perhaps put off by the extravagant affective states these books were calculated to inspire, while other readers, such as an earlier owner of Henry Baker’s The Microscope Made Easy (1742) held at the Clendening Library, clearly consumed these books precisely for the wonder they could inspire. That copy has a clipping from a contemporary newspaper pasted onto its endpaper that proclaims, “TO BE SEEN…the little furniture of a dining-room…contained in a cherry-stone…The curious four-wheel chaise…pulled by a flea” among all sorts of microscopic rarities then exhibited “At the confectioner’s the corner in George Alley, 1s” (shelfmark WZ 260 B167M 1742).
Some of the most interesting and suggestive evidence comes from the ownership marks that many readers left in their copies, insofar as they help flesh out the human relationships and networks of knowledge exchange that sustained the practices of Enlightenment popular microscopy. Yale’s Beinecke library has a copy of The Wonders of the Microscope (1811), a small, popular work designed to excite interest in the microscopic world, which has a remarkable dedication: “To Sarah with her Aunt Mary’s Love”. In my research I have come across many copies that testify to a robust female readership, and not only at the end of the period. The University of Pennsylvania’s copy of Micrographia bears the inscription, “Anne Burgoyne / ex dono Edvardi Stillingfleet / 1665,” indicating that this brand new luxury item was given as a gift by the future Bishop of Worcester to the wife of his patron (shelfmark Folio 578 H76.2).
A series of other chapters in my book will explore the now-overlooked impact of the solar microscope on the popularization of microscopy in the period, so I was particularly excited to come across the absolutely marvelous copy of Micrographia at Harvard (shelfmark MED QH271 H76 Copy 2) that was originally owned by Edward Bromfield, Jr., son of a prominent merchant and avid microscopist who was one of the first to craft microscopes in the United States. This copy includes a sketch of his home, and calls particular attention to the solar microscope apparatus that he constructed in the window of his study.