Common Errors, Common Readers: Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica and the Scientific Public, 1646–ca. 1800

Abstract

Abstract:Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646–72) is a landmark in the public understanding of science. This essay analyzes 120 copies of Pseudodoxia to uncover its readership between 1646 and about 1800. As this essay argues, this readership was closely engaged with the text and keen to participate in the debates it explored: more than 70 percent of the inspected copies are annotated. Many of these annotations correct, augment, or organize the original text, drawing on both personal experience and experiment and current philosophical writing to do so. This evidence attests not only to the depth of Browne's readership, in terms of its scientific and informational literacy, but also to its breadth. Annotated copies are dispersed across the anglophone world and reveal a culturally and socially diverse audience. Crucially, they also show the extent of substantial and informed engagement with questions of natural philosophy outside known intellectual networks, demonstrating the existence of a serious "scientific public" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.