TRANSLATION, EXPERIMENTATION AND THE SPRING OF THE AIR: RICHARD WALLER’S ESSAYES OF NATURAL EXPERIMENTS by LUCIANO BOSCHIERO*

In 1668, when the Royal Society of London received a copy of the book of experiments compiled by the Tuscan Accademia del Cimento, it was deemed by the Society to contain little that was new or innovative, and was seemingly soon forgotten. Yet 15 years later, Richard Waller’s English translation of this book was licensed and published by the Society. The only reason offered by historians for this turnaround in the English attitude towards the book has been the social and political circumstances facing the Society in the early 1680s. However, a closer look at the reception of the translation and the intellectual interests of some of the Society’s members at this time, especially the Society’s temporary curator, Denis Papin, reveals that the Tuscans’ work was re-evaluated for its significance to natural philosophical theories developed in the field of pneumatics.