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The Critical Role of Scholarly Societies in the Past
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Introductory Remarks
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The Early Contribution of Scholarly Societies to the Scholarly Enterprise
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n this brief essay, we identify a couple of reasons why scholarly societies played
such a critical role in the early years of the European Enlightenment.
Central to this thesis is their effectiveness in facilitating the interaction
between like-minded scholars - both in person and through the further
development of the shared scholarly record.
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Scholarly Societies as Meeting Places
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Ornstein on Early Societies Providing Meeting Spaces
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n 1928 Martha Ornstein published a seminal work entitled
Rôle of Scientific Societies in the
Seventeenth
Century (Ornstein 1928) .
Although the scope of her work is primarily
restricted to the sciences, she occasionally made reference to societies
that were concerned with the humanities and social sciences.
In her work, she traced the first scientific societies to the early
years of the seventeenth century. She indicated that the goal of these early societies was
generally to promote research by providing a meeting place at which research
could be discussed or even carried out.
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Ornstein on the Origin of the Royal Society in a Series of Meetings
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n Ornstein's chapter on The Royal Society, she notes that it grew
out of informal weekly meetings in London that first began in 1645. At
these meetings, people interested in the new experimental science
gathered for discussions. Some members moved to Oxford around 1648-1649,
and established separate meetings there. But by 1658 many had moved back
to London, and Gresham College in London became the focus of the meetings
that led to the founding in 1660 of the
Royal Society
(also known as the Royal Society of London), which still exists today.
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Scholarly Societies as Publishers of Research Journals
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Ornstein on the Need for the Establishment of Impartiality in
the Scholarly Record
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n a later chapter on Scientific Journals, Ornstein points
out that scholarly communication existed among scientists prior to the
establishment of real scientific journals, but that it was primarily in
the form of informal hand-written correspondence by some of the voluminous
letters-writers of the day, like Mersenne and Wallis.
She notes that this type of communication caused problems of impartiality in
evaluating research, and of establishing priority.
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The Editor of the Scholarly Societies Project points to the Early Use
of Encryption to Establish Priority
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stablishing priority was a particular concern among
mathematicians in the 17th century. For more information on this matter, see the following
Monday 26 June 2023 - 16.21 blog post:
"Scientific Challenges and Encryption of Discoveries in the 17th Century
Rational Mechanics" which appears on the
British Society for the History of Mathematics website at
https://www.bshm.ac.uk/scientific-challenges-and-encryption-discoveries-17th-century-rational-mechanics
It should be noted that this is one problem that scholarly journals were
intended to mitigate.
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Kronick on the Stability of Society Journals over Independent Journals
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n 1962 Kronick published a History of Scientific & Technical
Periodicals: The origins and development of the scientific and technical press, 1665-1790.
(Kronick 1962))
covering the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He points out that in
addition to research journals published by scholarly societies, there were also
so-called "independent" research journals that had no affiliation with a
scholarly society.
He also points out that independent journals were associated with individual
editors, and therefore tended to be of briefer duration than journals published
by scholarly societies, which had the ongoing institutional resources
of a society.
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The Reuss Repertorium indexes Early Scholarly Articles
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etween the years 1801-1821, Jeremias David Reuss (German librarian,
literary historian, classical philologist and naturalist who lived 1750-1837)
created a monumental sixteen-volume bibliography of scholarly articles entitled
Repertorium Commentationum a Societatibus Litterariis Editarum,
Secundum Disciplinarum Ordinem.
[Index of articles published by scholarly societies, arranged by discipline.]
More information at Reuss.
This work was much praised as the one and only index to journal articles
covering all subjects for
the entire 17th and 18th century scholarly record.
Nothing similar had been published before, nor has been since then.
The early volumes have the title page, tables of contents and section headings
given entirely in Latin.
This massive work is available freely in a couple of online platforms.
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The Implicit Endorsement of Journals Published by
Scholarly Societies
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he natural place to locate an explanation of why Reuss
limited the scope of his bibliography to articles in journals published by
scholarly societies would be in the initial pages of individual volumes of the set.
Alas, each volume begins with a Table of Contents (usually called
"Elenchus" - meaning "list") and then the textual material jumps immediately to
bibliographic entries (given in the language in which they originally appeard).
We take the absence of any such explanation as a tacit assumption that
articles in journals published by scholarly societies are more likely to be
of research quality than those found in independent journals.
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