The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

M SUBJECT is the place of experiment. I want to know where experimental science was done. In what physical and social settings? Who was in attendance at the scenes in which experimental knowledge was produced and evaluated? How were they arrayed in physical and social space? What were the conditions of access to these places, and how were transactions across their thresholds managed? The historical materials with which I am going to deal are of special interest. Seventeenth-century England witnessed the rise and institutionalization of a program devoted to systematic experimentation, accompanied by a literature explicitly describing and defending practical aspects of that program. Nevertheless, aspects of the historiography manifest in this paper may prove of more general interest. Historians of science and ideas have not, in the main, been much concerned with the siting of knowledge production.' This essay offers reasons for systematically studying the venues of knowledge. I want to display the network of connections between the physical and social setting of inquiry and the position of its products on the map of knowledge. I shall try to demonstrate how the siting of knowledge-making practices contributed toward a practical solution of epistemological problems. The physical and the symbolic siting of experimental work was a way of bounding and disciplining the community of practitioners, it was a