Science as Child’s Play in Seventeenth-Century England

In recent decades, scholars have uncovered the vital contributions made by non-elite figures, including women, artisans, and indigenous peoples, to the development of early modern natural philosophy. This Palgrave Pivot argues that children, too, quite literally  played  a decisive role in seventeenth-century experimental science in England, both as rhetorical exemplars, and as active contributors in the generation of natural knowledge. Exploring a widespread but critically-neglected connection between experiment and child’s play, it both illuminates the extent to which children participated – intentionally or incidentally – in natural historical and experimental activities, and investigates how ideas about childish innocence and sensory receptivity informed the nascent ideology of scientific objectivity. In the work of figures associated with the early Royal Society, this book proposes, children emerge as instinctive empiricists and experimenters, setting in motion a broader cultural transformation in ideas about childhood and education which still shapes how we think about these things today.

Elizabeth L. Swann  is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies at Durham University, UK.