Richard Waller, Fellow and Secretary of the Royal Society, is probably best remembered for editing Robert Hooke’s posthumously published works. Yet, Waller also created numerous drawings, paintings, and engravings for his own work and the Society’s publications. From precisely observed grasses to allegorical frontispieces, Waller’s images not only contained a diverse range of content, they are some of the most beautiful, colorful, and striking from the Society’s early years. This article argues that Waller played a distinctly important role in shaping the visual program of the Royal Society by virtue of his multiple functions as reliable administrator and translator, competent natural philosopher, and skilled image-maker. It analyzes Waller’s visual works in the context of his graphic training—in part influenced by his mother Mary More—and situates them within the context of English image-making traditions and Waller’s own natural philosophical interests. Examined as a functional whole, Waller’s career as a Fellow of the Royal Society emerges as an important case study in the fusion of visual and scientific practices in early-modern England.

This article argues that the copying of text and image was a key process in acquiring, approving, and recording knowledge in the early Royal Society of London. In particular, it focuses on how the administrative archives were set up and sustained in the nascent Society to preserve and establish new knowledge through a copying practice. Images were copied alongside texts to facilitate the collaborative scientific practice among the members of the Royal Society; to communicate essential features of an argument; to serve as proof of rare phenomena; and to establish priority for an invention or an idea. This copying practice was part of a unique system of emphasizing, prioritizing, and preserving for contemporary and future Fellows what was deemed important, groundbreaking , or useful knowledge.

Though the study of copying, imitation, forgery, and reproduction have a long lineage in the history of art, this special issue, and its introduction, seek to investigate the role of copying texts, and especially images, in the process of making new knowledge in the Early Modern period. By looking at a wide variety of images produced in contexts such as artist workshops, learned societies, and publishing houses, and compared with the texts and terminologies of copying and knowledge that surround them, we are not only expanding the scope of when and where copying takes place but also, and especially, emphasizing its importance to the process of creating knowledge. Copying-both its process and how we understand it-has not been a stable concept, and this introduction digs deeper into how Early Modern artists and natural philosophers conceived of and implemented this practice.

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