Primary Contributors:
Cultures of Knowledge
William Stukeley, by John Smith, after Sir Godfrey Kneller. 1721. Mezzotint. (Source of image: National Portrait Gallery, London, collection no. NPG D4074)
William Stukeley (1687–1765)
The listing of letters provided in this catalogue is not complete and has been identified as an EMLO Starter Catalogue. Scholars and students who are interested in working with EMLO to bring it to completion are warmly invited to be in touch.
The antiquary and natural philosopher William Stukeley was born on 7 November 1687 in Holbeach, Lincolnshire. Following an education at the town’s Free School, he served a clerk’s apprenticeship in his family’s law firm before being admitted in 1703 to St Bene’t’s (Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge to study medicine. Upon graduation in 1708, he moved to London to continue his studies of anatomy (in Chancery Lane), and medicine (at St Thomas’s Hospital under Dr Richard Mead). Two years later he was practising as a physician in Boston, Lincolnshire; it was here that he joined the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society and his friendship with its chairman, Maurice Johnson (1688–1755) from Spalding, began.
On his return to London in 1717, Stukeley began to mix in circles that included such luminaries as Edmond Halley and Hans Sloane. He made the acquaintance of Isaac Newton, then President of the Royal Society, and was proposed for membership of the Society by Halley, his election as FRS taking place on 13 March 1718. In the same year Stukeley became a founder member of the re-established Society of Antiquaries and was appointed its first secretary. By the following year, he had taken the degree of MD at Cambridge and in 1720 was admitted a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. From 1726 Stukeley practised medicine in Grantham, Lincolnshire, where he gathered information about the early life of Isaac Newton. He married Frances Williamson (1696/7–1737) and together they had three daughters. Stukeley remained a widower in Grantham for a decade following the death of his wife, before accepting the living of St George the Martyr in Queen Square, Bloomsbury. On 3 March 1765 Stukeley died at his rectory.
Partners and Additional Contributors
The metadata for William Stukeley’s letters to be found in the Bodleian Card Catalogue were collated during the first phase of work (2009–12) undertaken by the Cultures of Knowledge project thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2019, three letters joined the fledgling collection when the catalogue for The Royal Society Early Letters (1613–1740) was prepared in collaboration with The Royal Society and uploaded into EMLO; this work was made possible with funding from the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund.
In 2018, Laura Lawrence, a volunteer with EMLO, began to collate metadata for new letter records based on the correspondence between William Stukeley and Maurice Johnson, which had been transcribed and edited by Diana and Michael Honeybone and published in 2014 by The Lincoln Record Society, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer (for full publication details, please see the section on ‘Key Bibliographic Source’ and ‘Selected Bibliography’ below). Using the Collect-Webform developed by Cultures of Knowledge in the second and third phases of the project’s research (2013–16), this undertaking was brought to completion in 2021 thanks to Raven Atkinson, a work experience student studying for her masters degree in publishing at Kingston University, London.
Key Bibliographic Source(s)
The Correspondence of William Stukeley and Maurice Johnson 1714–1754, ed. Diana Honeybone and Michael Honeybone, The Lincoln Record Society, vol. 104 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014).
Contents
William Stukeley’s letter-books form part of the ‘Papers of William Stukeley‘ in the care of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. Within this collection, which includes ‘diaries, correspondence, and notes on topography, antiquities, and coins’, fifty-one letters are to be found that were sent to Stukeley by Maurice Johnson from Spalding. Johnson was president of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, and the epistolary dialogue between the two friends spans the four decades from 1714. These letters have been transcribed and may be consulted in the edition published by Diana and Michael Honeybone. Many of these were written in response to a letter from Stukeley or, in the words of Diana and Michael Honeybone, ‘asked questions to which Stukeley’s replies were held at Spalding’. The Honeybone’s edition reunites both sides of the correspondence.
Besides one side of the Stukeley-Johnson exchange, the Bodleian’s letter books contain 198 letters addressed to or received from correspondents other than Johnson, including the antiquary brothers Roger Gale (1672–1744) and Samuel Gale (1682–1754), the library agent and book collector John Murray (1670/71–1748), and the religious controversialist, writer, and critic Bishop William Warburton (1698–1779). In addition, the ‘starter catalogue’ in EMLO contains records for three letters located in Royal Society Library, London, which form part of the Early Letters of the Royal Society collection.
Scope of Catalogue
Further correspondence to and from William Stukeley is known to be held at the British Library (correspondence with Sir Hans Sloane); and the National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (correspondence with Sir John Clerk).
If you are interested in working with William Stukeley and his circle, whether you are a student, an established scholar, or part of an ongoing or a proposed project, we invite you to get in touch (miranda.lewis@history.ox.ac.uk) to discuss how you might make use of this calendar of correspondence—we should be delighted to hear from you.
Further resources
Selected bibliography
The Correspondence of William Stukeley and Maurice Johnson 1714–1754, ed. Diana Honeybone and Michael Honeybone, The Lincoln Record Society, vol. 104 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014).
The Correspondence of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society 1710–1761, ed. Diana Honeybone and Michael Honeybone, The Lincoln Record Society, vol. 99 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2010).
D. Haycock, ‘Stukeley, William (1687–1765), antiquary and natural philosopher‘, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
D. B. Haycock, William Stukeley: science, religion and archaeology in eighteenth-century England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2002).
S. Piggott, ‘William Stukeley: new facts and an old forgery’, Antiquity, 60 (1986), pp. 115–22.
S. Piggott, William Stukeley: an eighteenth-century antiquary (London: Thames and Hudson,1985, rev. edn).
The Commentarys, Diary, and Commoplace Book of William Stukeley and Selected Letters (Doppler Press, 1980).
The family memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, ed. W. C. Lukis, Surtees Society, 73, 76, and 80 (1882-7).
Relevant collections and archives
Papers of William Stukeley, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Special Collections
Sloane Manuscripts, British Library, London, Manuscripts and Archives
Letters with Sir John Clerk, National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh
Spalding Gentlemen’s Society