Abstract

The Royal Society of London is the oldest extant scientific academy in the world. Founded by a committee of twelve curious and optimistic virtuosi in 1660, from its inception the Royal Society was intended to promote and pursue a programme of broadly Baconian natural philosophical investigation. The Royal Society engaged in public experimental demonstrations, licensed its own propagandist literature, and positioned itself as arbiter of international scientific communication in order to promote itself and its aims; this thesis explains how members of the Society used these methods and more to advocate for themselves as both affiliates and individuals. This thesis expands the generic definition and scope of autobiography as an appellative term and demonstrates that autobiographical practice was an integral (rather than incidental) element of the Royal Society’s endurance, furthering scholarship which increasingly understands autobiography to be a mutable and porous genre as well as contributing to the sociohistorical turn in the history of science. By querying how the language of the new scientific method influenced the literary language of its promoters and developers, and exploring the philosophical impact of empiricism on the study of the self, this thesis sheds new light on the published and private writings of natural philosophers Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, and Royal Society promoters Joseph Glanvill, Henry Oldenburg, and Abraham Cowley, assessing these works as active and continuous records of a new social role in development: the faber fortunae, architect of his own fortune.