Social Science Research Council

"Robert Hooke Fecit: Making and Knowing in Restoration England"

From the early 1660s until his death in 1703, Robert Hooke served as "Curator of Experiments" to the Royal Society of London, Restoration England's novel state-sponsored scientific institution. As my project will elaborate, Hooke drew from his training as a courtly painter to develop the artistic skills and conceptual framework essential to his evolving, experimental study of nature. But, with the same strokes, he created an institutional position within Charles II's Restored court through which these artistic knowledges newly mattered. Inhabiting the Society's London headquarters as paid employee, Hooke broadened his authority to include keeping the Society's early museum and serving as its resident architect. Drawing upon archival resources available in England, I will elaborate this enterprise, showing how Hooke used the practice of drawing to conceive and direct scientific activity as (in his terms) "discovery"; formulated his museum as a model of the attentive mind; and developed his architectural works as a materialization of attentively-discovered form. By elucidating the breadth of his practices and the conceptual structures through which he integrated them, my dissertation positions Hooke's work as not only the fundamental lynch-pin to any historical account of scientific imaging in early modern England, but a crucial site for understanding the mutual formation of British art and science more broadly.