Introduction to Making Visible: The Visual and Graphic Practices of the Early Royal Society

The four papers in this volume arise out of a research project, “Making Visible: The visual and graphic practices of the early Royal Society,” funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom.¹ The project sought to understand how visual resources and practices contributed to, and shaped the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge in the first fifty years of the Royal Society. The Royal Society, as an early institution dedicated to promoting natural knowledge, has received substantial scholarly attention from historians of science, aided by a rich administrative archive that has been preserved virtually unbroken since its foundation.² Because modern cataloguing of manuscripts has tended to prioritize textual over pictorial information, the archives of the Royal Society were systematically examined in our project, and more than 4000 pages with images were identified. These do not, however, represent the totality of the images that the...