MIAC: The Mind Is a Collection by Sean Silver
A born-digital museum of early-modern cognitive models. Visit www.mindisacollection.org.
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Papers by Sean Silver
Material histories have tended to obscure, rather than illuminate, the materials upon which they ... more Material histories have tended to obscure, rather than illuminate, the materials upon which they depend; because we are seldom ultimately interested in things themselves, histories of the material sort tend to turn to objects only as stepping stones to analyses of cultural contexts. This article is an experiment in a more symmetrical material history, seeking to take seriously the claims of a single historical object as it intersected with the life and autobiography of the historian who introduced it into discourse. The object is one of the two surviving examples of the Kineton Medal, a coin minted in haste in 1643 to commemorate a high point of the English Civil War; the article's subject is John Evelyn (1620–1706), minor statesman, antiquary, and diarist, whose Numismata (1697) assembled a national history entirely out of fragments like this one. Evelyn’s life and the trajectory of the medal were fated to cross in a number of ways; among others, the medal was introduced into history in the same gesture with which Evelyn established himself as a historian. Bringing subject and object into alignment has lessons to teach about the ways the fortunes of an object might wax and wane, even while life-writing collects and shapes its materials. By way of a coda, this article traces the career of this coin, which was believed to have been lost to fire, from its birth to its current home in Birmingham.
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Abstract: During the past four decades there has developed a burgeoning literature on the concept... more Abstract: During the past four decades there has developed a burgeoning literature on the concept of serendipity, the name for sudden insights or conceptual breakthroughs that occur by chance or accident. Studies repeatedly note that it was Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century man of letters, who coined the word. None of them, however, notice that Walpole’s term is itself indebted to a much older tradition, invoking a formula developed by Francis Bacon. Recovering the prehistory of the term suggests that “serendipity,” rather than being a name for a special mode of discovery invented by Walpole, has all along accompanied empiricism as the name for an essential gap in its epistemology. Serendipity bears directly on the “induction problem,” or what has more recently been called the “conceptual leap.” Though Walpole gave it its current name, versions of the concept have all along isolated a critical gap in the method of the sciences inaugurated by Bacon.
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Eighteenth-century Studies, 2012
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MIAC: The Mind Is a Collection by Sean Silver
Papers by Sean Silver