Enlightenment Digital Archives

 

 

An extensive archive of Eighteenth Century Texts:  Click on a

number at the top of the page to see whats in the Cabinet:

Laurence Sterne is in Cabinet 12, Cabinet 17

is for Science, Cabinet 18 has some William Blake.

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The Newton Papers at Cambridge University : extensive collection

of the journals and letters of Isaac Newton.

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Robert Hooke: "Micrographia, or, Some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses with observations and inquiries thereupon." (1665)

 

Beudeker's Dutch Baroque Gardens (1718): some wonderful examples of how the Enlightenment delighted in producing harmony and balance in Nature. Note the many symmetrical gardens.

 

Sir Isaac Newton "Opticks or, A treatise of the reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light. Also two treatises of the species and magnitude of curvilinear figures" (1704)

 

Elizabeth Blackwell's A Curious Herbal (1737)  "Elizabeth Blackwell was born in Aberdeen in about 1700, but moved to London after she married. She undertook this ambitious project to raise money to pay her husband's debts and release him from debtors' prison. Blackwell's Herbal was an unprecedented artistic, scientific and commercial enterprise for a woman of her time. She drew, engraved and coloured the illustrations herself, mostly using plant specimens from the Chelsea Physic Garden." (The British Library)