3d. ser., 69, no. 4
October 2012
Digital Projects
The Material and Social Practices of Intellectual Work: Jonathan Edwards’s Study
By Wilson H. Kimnach and Kenneth P. Minkema
Jonathan Edwards, by Joseph Badger, c. 1750. Yale University Art Gallery, bequest of Eugene Phelps Edwards, 1938. This online exhibition of the objects which comprised Edwards’s study offers insight into his intellectual production through an examination of his material world and the means by which he forged, preserved, and communicated his ideas. What emerges is a portrait of a highly disciplined and organized individual who worked with the technologies at his disposal in his provincial setting and who cared deeply about the manner in which his ideas were broadcast. Edwards largely fabricated the environment in which he worked, and the books he acquired, the writing implements, the homemade notebooks and hand-stitched manuscripts, and the customized furniture he utilized all helped to shape the texts he left behind. He made his quills, brewed his ink, cut his paper, and bound his notebooks; he chose and adapted his study furniture, such as a writing table, desk, small bookcase, and, at Stockbridge, a table that doubled as a stool. In these respects, he was quite traditional and preindustrial, not yet caught up in the emerging consumer culture. Edwards also no doubt had a hand in designing his rotating book table and expansions to his desk, and he certainly was active in shaping the physical makeup of his published writings and their dissemination. In these ways, he reflected and shaped emerging, selective tastes and forms among the provincial gentry of which he was a part. Scholars of Edwards are fortunate that so much of the customized apparatus that made up his study has survived—albeit in scattered locations—since all the houses he called home have been destroyed and there are thus few remaining material “relics” of his working life to contextualize his writings. This virtual exhibition provides a unique opportunity to view Edwards’s study furniture all together in one place once more.
