Martin Lister (1639–1712) was a prominent Fellow of the Royal Society who was made an honorary MD in 1684. A benefactor of the Ashmolean, he corresponded regularly on natural history with its keepers, Robert Plot and Edward Lhuyd. Furthermore, Lister was a prolific corresponding Fellow, and he issued a steady stream of letters from his medical practice in York, many of which were printed in the Philosophical Transactions.

Later in life he moved to London, where he acted as Vice-President of the Royal Society and also as Censor of the Royal College of Physicians. In 1697–78 he travelled abroad, and finally retired to Epsom, where he continued to transact voluminous correspondence. Lister was one of the most high-profile and well-connected naturalists of the age. His letters thus provide a unique window onto early enlightenment cultures of medicine and natural philosophy throughout Britain and continental Europe, and serve as an ideal complement to John Aubrey‘s correspondence within Cultures of Knowledge.

His unpublished papers were some of the largest of his donations to the Ashmolean and attest to his remarkably wide expertise, which ranged from Yorkshire antiquities and the origins of kidney stones to the disciplines of conchology (the study of shells) and arachnology (spiders), both of which he founded. In the nineteenth century, these collections passed from the Ashmolean to the Bodleian Library. They contain the bulk of his correspondence, although sizeable quantities of his outgoing letters are held elsewhere, chiefly in the archives of the Royal Society and the British Library‘s collection of Sloane Manuscripts. Those in the Bodleian illuminate, and are illuminated by, his many other scientific manuscripts, which include unpublished works, drafts, notes, and collections from other people’s papers, as well as diaries from his visit to Montpellier in the mid-1660s, where he teamed up with John Ray and other English naturalists, and met prominent continental figures such as the Danish geologist Nicolaus Steno.

Rationale for Inclusion

With the exception of those printed in the Philosophical Transactions and in the correspondences of friends such as John Ray, Lister’s letters are unedited and unpublished, which has led to the relative neglect of this important archive. There are around 1,000 letters to or from Lister known to be extant (roughly 630 of which are in Oxford), but it is anticipated more will be unearthed in a systematic survey of the collections in the Bodleian and Royal Society libraries, as well as in other repositories.