A culture of curiosity: Science in the eighteenth-century home [Hardcover]

This study explores the practice of scientific enquiry as it took place in the eighteenth-century home. While histories of science have identified the genteel household as an important site for scientific experiment, they have tended to do so via biographies of important men of science. Using a wide range of historical source material, from household accounts and inventories to letters and print culture, this book investigates the tools within reach of early modern householders in their search for knowledge. It considers the under-explored question of the home as a site of knowledge production and does so by viewing scientific enquiry as one of many interrelated domestic practices. It shows that knowledge production and consumption were necessary facets of domestic life and that the eighteenth-century home generated practices that were integral to Enlightenment enquiry.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

GBThis book reveals the eighteenth-century home as a site of emergence for science. By rejecting the limiting associations of domestic life, this book re-imagines a culture of enquiry populated by apprentices and housewives as much as Fellows of the Royal Society.Leonie Hannan is a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century History at Queens University, Belfast

A culture of curiosityreveals how the home was an environment uniquely conducive to scientific enquiry in the eighteenth-century British world. Drawing on diverse manuscript sources from household accounts to life writing, the author shows how scientific practices grew from the conditions and labour of the home. In doing so, her study challenges traditional assumptions about the Enlightenment and illuminates a vibrant and diverse population of eighteenth-century scientists.

The book begins with an examination of the home itself, before turning to analyse domestic practices through the lives of diarists, letter-wlCä