{"id":7288,"date":"2016-09-30T08:52:19","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T08:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=7288"},"modified":"2016-09-30T22:13:02","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T22:13:02","slug":"the-cautionary-tale-of-john-dodington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=7288","title":{"rendered":"The cautionary tale of John Dodington"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Venice_smallestRP-T-1921-54\"

‘View of Sta Maria della Salute, Venice’, by Jan van Call. Before 1699, pencil and water-colour on paper, 12.3 by 23 cm. (Image courtesy of Rijksmueum, Amsterdam, object no. RP-T-1921-54)<\/p><\/div>\n

For those wishing to play their part\u00a0on a diplomatic or\u00a0networking\u00a0stage there is much to be learnt from the life and death of John Dodington. For two years from 1670 this English agent was based in Venice, where he became an invaluable intermediary between Henry Oldenburg and a number of notable Italian scientists, including Marcello Malpighi and Tommaso Cornelio.<\/p>\n

Until recently, Dodington has remained a little-known figure. He was described by A. Rupert and Marie Boas Hall in their edition of Oldenburg’s correspondence as a ‘useful correspondent in Italy . . . to him Oldenburg could dispatch letters for Malpighi and others via official channels.’ But the Halls conceded also, ‘It is not quite certain who Dodington was \u2014 though his name figures often enough in the official records \u2014 but he was by no means uninterested in the tasks that Oldenburg asked him to perform on the Society’s behalf.’ [A. R. and M. B. Hall, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg<\/em>, vol. VI (1969), pp. xxi\u2013xxii] Indeed it was thanks in no small measure\u00a0to Dodington\u00a0that a gulf was breached between Royal Society members in England and their scientific counterparts\u00a0in Italy, a country which (again in the words of the Halls) may have seemed to Oldenburg\u00a0\u2018almost as remote in an epistolary sense as Bermuda \u2026 or Connecticut.\u2019 [A, R, and M. B. Hall, vol. III (1969), p. xxv] The role Dodington performed for Oldenburg has been charted\u00a0by Oxford’s professor of the History of Science, Robert Iliffe <\/a>[see \u2018Making Correspondents Network. Henry Oldenburg, Philosophical Commerce, and Italian Science, 1660\u201372\u2032, in Marco Beretta, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence M. Principe, eds, The Accademia del Cimento and its European Context<\/em>\u00a0(Sagamore Beach, MA, 2009), pp. 211\u201328], and given the relationship and exchange of letters between the two men \u2014 fourteen\u00a0letters from Oldenburg to Dodington are calendared in EMLO, and fifteen from Dodington to Oldenburg \u2014 it is fitting that this\u00a0calendar of Dodington\u2019s correspondence<\/a> should be published at the same time as the release of metadata for a further two volumes of the Halls\u2019 edition of Oldenburg\u2019s letters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The French scholar Alexandre J. Tessier<\/a>\u00a0worked on Dodington\u2019s correspondence in connection with his doctoral studies on Sir Joseph Williamson and has contributed this calendar to EMLO. At present, Dr Tessier is focussing\u00a0on the European postal system of the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and, revisiting Dodington’s letters, he has collated and noted additional information such as dates of receipt. Here at EMLO we are in the process of investigating how best to capture and\u00a0display such\u00a0detailed information, together with a number of other postal-related fields (for example: location stamps; notes on a letter’s routes; reasons for non-delivery; or\u00a0postage costs). Our partners in this work include both Dr Tessier and the invaluable Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered<\/a><\/em> project based at the Museum voor Communicatie<\/a> in The Hague.<\/p>\n

Dodington seems to have been\u00a0more successful in his scientific networking activities than he proved\u00a0in his diplomatic roles. As an individual, he gives the impression of having\u00a0been touchy, tactless, and irascible \u2014 not, as Dr Tessier points out in his introductory summary of Dodington\u2019s life, characteristics that sit well in\u00a0a diplomat or are suited to ambassadorial activity. Dodington\u00a0fell out with his (admittedly difficult) father; he spent a spell in the Tower (following his insult of a Bencher of Lincoln\u2019s Inn with ‘opprobrious and misbecominge language\u2019); he was recalled from his post as resident in Venice after\u00a0an accumulation of complaints (including an incident\u00a0that involved his slander of\u00a0Louis XIV in a Savoyard inn); and he met his end as the result of\u00a0a drinking session in a London tavern:\u00a0\u2018With two other gentlemen he consumed five quarts of wine at the Bear, in Leadenhall Street, and as the King’s letter-carrier, Thomas Derham, wrote to Williamson, they “fell immediately after drinking it into high fevers and deliriums, of which Mr. Dodington and another died”\u2019. [Lloyd Charles Sanders, Patron and place-hunter, a study of George Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe<\/a><\/em> (London and New York: The Bodley\u00a0Head and John Lane, 1919), p. 8.]<\/p>\n

We hope very much you enjoy exploring Dodington\u2019s correspondence alongside that of an\u00a0expanded Oldenburg catalogue. Should you have access via\u00a0a subscribing institution, you will be able to consult (through State papers Online 1509\u20131714<\/a>) the manuscripts of Dodington’s\u00a0letters now in the care of\u00a0the National Archives<\/a>. This little tip comes with a final ‘health\u00a0warning’, however: avoid downing a gallon and a quarter of wine as you read!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those wishing to play their part\u00a0on a diplomatic or\u00a0networking\u00a0stage there is much to be learnt from the life and death of John Dodington. For two years from 1670 this English agent was based in Venice, where he became an invaluable intermediary between Henry Oldenburg and a number of notable Italian scientists, including Marcello Malpighi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}