Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
What’s a Britain? That question, as Elizabeth Yale’s splendid monograph shows, perplexed early modern topographers, natural historians, philologists, and antiquarians no less than it plagues its current occupants. Both groups struggled to answer this question by establishing boundaries based on geography, population, history, language, trade and more. Though it seems bleak right now, we can at least hope that the current round of questioning proves as intellectually generative as it was for John Aubrey, Edward Lhuyd, and others in the seventeenth century. Yale’s meticulous research examines how figures like John Evelyn, John Ray, and Robert Plot sought to establish “Britain” as an object of scientific knowledge. How, they wondered, did that gray and verdant archipelago coalesce into a nation – if it did it all? This enterprise forced them to weigh the relative significance of geography, fauna and flora, language, history, ethnicity, and other dimensions. Britain was neither a self-evident nor an easily fixed category, and whenever scholars sought establish what it was, Yale shows, their answers were conditioned by their own methods of inquiry. Indeed, the book’s major contribution lies in how she fuses a novel compound of British history, the history of the book, and the history of
Early Science and Medicine – Brill
Published: Jan 25, 2016
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.