This essay discusses three authors from the early seventeenth century (Galileo, Descartes, and Van Helmont) and the reasons that guided their decisions to write occasionally in their respective vernacular languages even though Latin remained the accepted language for learned communication. From their writings we can see that their choices were social, political, and always of high importance. The choice of language of these multilingual authors conveyed a message that was sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit. Their usage of both Latin and vernacular proved, on the one hand, their place in the international learned community and, on the other hand, their interest and investment in changing the educational system.

This article provides, for the first time, an overview of all images (drawings and prints) sent by the Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) to the Royal Society during their fifty-year long correspondence. Analyses of the images and close reading of the letters have led to an identification of three periods in which Leeuwenhoek worked together with artists. The first period (1673–1689) is characterized by the work of several draughtsmen as well as Leeuwenhoek’s own improving attempts to depict his observations. In the second period (1692–1712) Leeuwenhoek worked together with one unknown draughtsman, while the work in the third period (1713–1723) can now be attributed to the young draughtsman Willem vander Wilt. This article also shows how Leeuwenhoek did not only rely on draughtsmen for the depiction of his own observations, but rather, how he worked together with them in his workshop to observe, confirm, and witness microscopic experiments, replicating the collaborative working methods of the Royal Society in Delft.

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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.