Introduction: “Things only fit for Children”

This introduction outlines the main themes and scope of the work, situating it in relation to relevant scholarship by figures including Paula Findlen and Steven Shapin. It opens with a discussion of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satirical representations of the experimental science associated with the Royal Society of London, including Margaret Cavendish’s Observations and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso. In representing that science as childish, I suggest, such satires capitalize on a connection that predecessors, members, and supporters of the Society frequently made themselves. In the early modern period, childhood was understood variously as state of corruption and error, and innocence and insight. Both these strands of thought inflect the work of figures including Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke. On the one hand, experimentalism is associated with manly maturity. On the other, it is valorized as an innocent and epistemically productive form of childish play. The introduction concludes with a discussion of Samuel Pepys’ description of Cavendish’s attendance at a meeting of the Royal Society, where the presence of children is noted by Pepys but rarely discussed by modern scholars.