Natural history in the latter seventeenth century has been approached by historians primarily as a proto-classificatory science, focused upon the collection and categorisation of vast numbers of objects as well as textual excerpts. In recent years, as network theory and spatial metaphors have permeated the history of science, historical attention has shifted to the importation of objects from outside Europe, and onto the role of commercial and intellectual influences upon the processes by which these objects were addressed. Natural historical collections have come to be situated as part of a wider culture of collecting which embraced both the cabinet and the notebook. While the taxonomic and epistemological aspects of these collections have remained the focus of most attention, practices of collection held a wide variety of other cultural meanings which have been explored by cultural and literary scholars.

The county natural history was an encyclopaedic genre of writing collecting localised information covering subjects including those we might now refer to as antiquarianism, genealogy, heraldry, cartography, botany, geology, and mineralogy. The methodology of their compilation resembles contemporaneous natural history within the Royal Society: utilising printed questionnaires, first hand observation, eye-witness testimony and experimentation. Yet their primary aim, as this paper will explore, was to fulfil religious and memorial functions, not to advance scientific knowledge. Collection of local knowledge was an end in itself, designed to take ‘a clearer View of the Infinite Wisdom of the Great Creator’, and to enhance the reputation of a locale.

Through exploring the religious and cultural motivations for county natural history the paper will demonstrate that it originates more in local circumstance than global events. This suggests an alternative genealogy of local natural history to that found on the continent by Alix Cooper in her study of the ‘invention’ of indigenous knowledge in Early Modern Germany. Instead of being a response to the exotic intended to produce a taxonomic science of natural knowledge, it was the combination of the English tradition of local chorography with a desire for remembrance and religious tribute which created this style of research and writing.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century regional natural history within Europe was a growing enterprise. This was presented by older historiography as part of a fact-collecting project running alongside and serving the science of the day, an image which persists in much history of science. More recently, however, Swann has explored natural history’s role within a “culture of collecting”, and Cooper has presented regional natural history in particular as a reaction against the “exotic”. This paper will use the natural histories of Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire to present a window into the alternative cultural roles given to the knowledge of nature in English counties. It will focus upon their roots in regional and national custom, and show how local nature was made to perform as tribute, as history, and as useful knowledge.

The County Natural History was an encyclopaedic style of writing in the latter seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Through six printed works and numerous manuscript volumes, each focused upon an individual county, the authors involved covered subjects which we might now refer to as genealogy, heraldry, cartography, botany, geology, and mineralogy, among others. This paper will address the temporary combination of topical generality and spatial localisation which these works represent. Intellectually influenced by both antiquarian and natural philosophical predecessors, and in conversation with their fellow Fellows of the Royal Society, the authors chose to turn to topography for their methodological inspiration. The resultant works were considered by contemporaries to be local encyclopaedia.

The standard account argues that the place of natural history, alongside wider encyclopaedia some in this period, was to provide the descriptions from which useful facts could be selected: it was to be used as an empirical source of information. However in these works the authors were explicitly concerned with mapping in immense detail the features of the locality that interested them. This was the description of the microcosm, rather than evidence towards a theory of the macrocosm.

I intend firstly to unpick some of the intellectual suppositions which made this distinction between the general and the local possible, building on the work of other historians as regards “matters of fact” and “objectivity” in particular. Secondly, and more ambitiously, the paper represents part of an effort to problematize the still-accepted narrative which makes specialisation an inevitable consequence of progress. In today's climate of informational transparency, with the judgement of the informed consumer being given rhetorical primacy over that of the specialist, it seems to me that we should revive the ideal of the gentleman scholar.