2 - Crowd-Sourcing Global Natural History: James Petiver’s Museum

Summary

ON 27 NOVEMBER 1695, James Petiver (c.1663–1718) surely revelled in self-congratulation when he numbered among three members of the medical professions who newly ‘subscrib’d their Names and were admitted fellows’ at the annual meeting of the prestigious Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. A flourishing urban apothecary with substantial ambitions in natural history, this was for Petiver an intellectual and social achievement. To commemorate the privilege, he issued his first substantial venture in print, proudly supplementing his name on the title page with the qualifications ‘Pharmacop[ola] Londinen[sis] & Regiae Societatis Socio’ (‘Apothecary of London & Fellow of the Royal Society’). He also dated a postscript ‘Advertisement’ to 30 November 1695, the institutional anniversary on ‘the feast of St Andrew’ stipulated in the Society's royal charter. The title of Petiver's text was Musei Petiveriani Centuria Prima, Rariora Naturæ Continens: viz. animalia, fossilia, plantas, ex variis mundi plagis advecta, ordine digesta, et nominibus propriis signata: ‘The first century of Petiver's museum, containing rarities of nature: namely animals, fossils, plants, imported out of the various places of the world, classified by rank and distinguished by their proper names’. As its name portentously signals, Musei Petiveriani Centuria Prima lists 100 objects from Petiver's collection of natural curiosities. Heralding the inception of a serial publication that ran to ten ‘centuries’ by 1703, Musei Petiveriani is at once singular and heterogeneous in its authorship, local and global in its means of knowledge production, the metropolitan scientist choreographing natural objects that have been ‘ex variis mundi plagis advecta’ by a wide range of actors.

This chapter analyses the material, geographical and social features of Musei Petiveriani in order to exemplify the generative (if also potentially exploitative) cultures of global transaction with which Global Exchanges of Knowledge is concerned. The first section outlines Petiver's purposes and priorities in authoring and distributing his publication, above all his commitment to acknowledging the many contributors to his ‘museum’ by name. The metaphor of ‘crowd-sourcing’ is adopted from the contemporary digital world to supply one means for conceiving the networked multiplicity of these collaborators.