Oldenburg's correspondence

COMMENTARY

Chronology. When the Royal Society was formed officially in July 1662, Oldenburg was recorded as an inaugural member and appointed one of the two secretaries, alongside John Wilkins. After the charter of 1663 obtained permission for the Society to correspond through the secretary, Oldenburg became the only active member in this capacity. During the next five years, his surviving correspondence grew six-fold and remained at a comparably high level until the year of his death in 1677.

Survival. Due to the preservation of his outgoing as well as incoming correspondence in the archive of the Royal Society, Oldenburg’s incoming and outgoing letters as preserved in very similar quantities.

Geography. Three striking features characterise the map of Oldenburg’s letters. One is his geographical stability. After arriving youthful travels as a student, tutor and diplomatic envoy of his native Bremen, Oldenburg settled in London to become the immobile centre of a wide-ranging correspondence. The geographical extent of his contacts is the second notable feature of his network: his official correspondence ranged as far north as Stockholm, as far south as Seville, Messina, Smyrna, and Aleppo, west to Dublin, Cork and Lisbon, east to Danzig, Breslau, and Bratislava. A third notable feature, also related to the official nature of his correspondence, is its diffuse nature. Most personal correspondences are dominated by a relatively small number of major centres. But Paris – home of the sister institution, the Académie des sciences founded by Colbert in 1666 – is the only foreign centre which looms large on this map (with 186 letters plus a few more in the immediate vicinity). Other centres dwindle rapidly – Danzig (with 61), Hamburg (41), Liège (37), Derby (35), Venice (33), Bologna (26) – to less than two dozen. Yet the rest of western Europe is peppered relatively uniformly with smaller points of contact. Even in England, the pattern is one of a relatively uniform scattering of small centres, rather (for instance) by a map dominated by the two university cities.  

Date source. The primary data source is The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, 13 vols (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press; London: Mansel; London: Taylor & Francis, 1965–86). For further detail, see the EMLO catalogue page.

Map source. Yann Ryan (Oxford and QMUL), executed within the Networking Archives project (AHRC AH/R014817/1). Interactive version available here.