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This new form of “revealed knowledge” required its own scriptural tradition, leading to the establishment of specialised journals and associations.
In Britain, these disciplinary communities were often fluid and informal—to start with, at least. When the Oxford professors and fellows—almost all of them clergymen—who had been loyal to King Charles during the Civil War (1642–1648) were expelled by the rebels, they were replaced by republican men from Cambridge and London, a number of them scientists. (The use of the term scientist is a convenient anachronism: The Oxford English Dictionary gives its first attested occurrence as 1840. Similarly, specialisation and its cognates only really entered the language in the 1860s [Collini, 2006]). Consequently, science at Oxford flourished briefly, and the new appointees, imitating their Italian and French colleagues, began to meet in one another’s rooms to discuss. Such groups evolved into the great national academic institutions: the Accademia dei Lincei in Italy (1603), the Académie Royale in France (1666), and the Royal Society in England (1662). However, the effects of the Civil War lingered on, and after the Restoration, Dissenters were prohibited from entering the universities, which continued to concentrate on preparing future members of the Anglican clergy. Deprived of university education, scientifically minded Dissenters continued to meet and to devote themselves to “improvement”—the application of scientific advances to social life in general and to industry in particular. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries was largely powered by Dissent and conducted independently of the intellectual and institutional constraints represented by the universities. For example, the “Lunar Men” so wonderfully described by Jenny Uglow (2002)—so called because they met at each full moon, a prerequisite for cross-country invitations to dinner—lived in the Midlands, came from relatively modest backgrounds, and were Dissenters. They included Matthew Boulton, a manufacturer; his partner, James Watt, inventor of the steam engine; Josiah Wedgewood, the potter; Erasmus Darwin, physician, inventor, and precursor of his grandson Charles as a theorist of evolution; Joseph Priestley, the chemist who discovered oxygen; and Thomas Day, a disciple of Rousseau who had an important, if controversial, influence on educational theory and practice and was a major figure in the antislavery campaign.