The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have
long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the
symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of
plainly representing the world as it really was. In Aesthetic Science,
Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that
key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke,
and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project.
To show how early modern naturalists conceived of the interplay between
sensory experience and the production of knowledge, Aesthetic Science
explores natural-historical and anatomical works of the Royal Society
through the lens of the aesthetic. By underscoring the importance of
subjective experience to the communication of knowledge about nature,
Wragge-Morley offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of scientific
representation in the early modern period and brings to light the
hitherto overlooked role of aesthetic experience in the history of the
empirical sciences.