Pie in the Morning

Not so bad for a Wednesday morning: Shaker Lemon Pie and a little research.

I am working now on the chapter of the manuscript on face to face conversation: how did scientists create knowledge through conversation? It's a sort of odd project, because I'm looking for signs of speech in writing. And I'm also trying to do it while avoiding Walter Ong's "oral mentality," which I think is a little nutty (though in an interesting way--it's fun to teach). I think there's something to say about communication practices in the early modern world, and how people used (and wrote about) speech vs. writing vs. printing; but I'm not so sure you can infer a mentality from that. We'll see, though.

So I'm combing through natural history and antiquarian books from the 16th and 17th century, looking for what they say about speech, particularly how they talk about information that came to them through conversations, rather than books or letters. Do they trust it? Who do they talk to? What do they write about the people they talked to? Do they name them? Do they not? Do they describe the settings of their conversations? The next step is journals, diaries, and letters--I gotta say, I am looking forward to all 9 volumes of Pepys...