Chapter 4 explores how artisanal knowledge helped sustain early modern monetary order by making and unmaking the intrinsic value of precious metal. Intrinsic value was a conceptual tool and a material practice that allowed people to collapse many coins into one another and to forge units from multiples. Effectively, this meant establishing a network of corresponding values between specific batches of coins. The papers of a family of assayers from The Hague offer a fine-grained picture of the processes involved. Small differences in the precious metal content of coins aroused creeping suspicion, anger, and even physical violence because it was believed that the metal of a coin reflected the mettle of a person. This was particularly true for the masters of the mint, whose reputation was tied to the reputation of their coins. Making coins, and making them work, involved financial and legal expertise, but the artisanal knowledge of assayers and other metal-workers was key. Their practices such as sampling, using high-precision balances and powerful acids, note-taking, the rule of three, and algebraic calculation allowed people to hold on to the convention that metals had an intrinsic, quantifiable value in spite of fluctuations in the price of silver and gold, both across time and across the globe.

Chapter 3 shows how stewards of the princes of Orange-Nassau employed a specific money of account, the Artois pound, to manage land, livestock, and corvée labour across the family’s fifty domains, one of which was the lordship of Bredevoort. The Artois pound was not minted as coins, and nobody in Bredevoort used it to make or receive payments. As an accounting convention, it only existed as ink on slips of paper and in bound volumes and thus required constant scribal labour to be valuable. The stewards’ trained eyes and hands parsed the multiplicity of Bredevoort’s coins, animals, grains, and labour into homogeneous money objects that had currency across the entire accounting system, but not beyond. As the chapter shows, such a system using homogeneous money was also imagined by the mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin, and while he failed to install double-entry bookkeeping in the domains of the Orange-Nassau family, the stewards shared his ideals of surveillance and profit. A series of instructions provided the script for the audit rituals that were performed year after year and that left their traces on the pages of the accounts.

Farmers and other rural folk are often pictured as distant from financial centres and invoked as the last groups to monetise their transactions during a long process of modernisation. By treating grain as money and by comparing barns to banks, Chapter 2 raises important questions about this accepted picture and about the boundaries of financial history as a discipline. This chapter explores how a community in the east of the Dutch Republic sowed, tended to, harvested, stored, and kept track of grain. People sustained the material integrity of grain, but more importantly, they also sustained grain’s ability to act as currency in social interaction. Volume measures, owned privately but calibrated by local authorities, were key for the monetisation of grain. Furthermore, the chapter introduces the notion of ink money, normally associated with urban merchants and bankers who made and unmade money by formal accounting, in order to make sense of farmers’ finance in the Dutch countryside. Unlike trade among merchants, where both parties could produce ledgers when challenged, farmers keeping accounts often dealt with illiterate people. These account books provide indirect evidence that day-labourers and smallholders could record and transact monetary value by way of mental accounting. This money was more precarious than its written counterparts, but could be validated by oral testimonial in local courts.

Chapter 5 examines taxonomic practices of merchants and other users of money to better understand how early modern coins worked in circulation. After-death inventories offer insights into people’s domestic taxonomies, that is, into practices of classifying, labelling, and compartmentalising the money that people encountered as they went about their lives. Mercantile and institutional account books show how people linked different currencies. Assayers’ conclusions, derived from testing tiny specks of matter, were disseminated widely in broadsheets, coin tariffs, and conversion tables, but also in privately collated notes and letters. This information allowed early modern people to relate coins to one another and to convert them into monies of account which were much more homogeneous. This work was more than merely coping with chaos. People’s ability to match coins with transaction types and geography marked out circuits for specific currencies. The spaces in which currencies like the Dutch guilder could circulate freely thus emerged from the ground up. Users’ taxonomic practices were just as crucial for upholding monetary order as the knowledge work performed by assayers, minters, and government officials.

What did early modern money look like when ‘viewed from the inside’? The merchants, assayers, stewards of manors, church wardens, and farmers studied in this book knew that some coins and paper monies had a wide reach, but they were also aware that people living in nearby regions, towns, and villages had preferences as to how they would like to be paid. Many people were good at assessing the quality of objects, recognising objects as currency, and converting one currency into another, because this was fundamental for getting on with their lives. In urban centres, officials, assayers, and masters of the mint were highly skilled at making and testing coins, but once they had released their coins into circulation, they had to enlist a wide range of people, including lowly clerks and bargemen, to uphold the standard of the realm. Juggling units, coins, and goods was the livelihood of merchants and stewards, but farmers and country priests needed this skill, too, as they tended to their farms and flocks. All seemed able to connect the dots between one currency and another, and some constructed networks of currencies, on paper and presumably in their minds, too. Travelling along this network, a bushel of rye in Bredevoort could become a bale of silk in Batavia, with measured silver serving as a middle term. Small acts of scrutiny underpinned the great movements of silver, gold, and other money objects around the globe. Far-flung circuits of exchange emerged from everyday practices at the level of individual transactions.

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) saw differently. Not only that, he described what he saw in a way that others could understand with precise reference to what he saw and the visual culture with which he and his readers were familiar. When he looked through a microscope, he saw what others did not or could not and he translated that perception with the aid of his broad visual education. For example, when John Wilkins, a founding Fellow of the Royal Society of London, looked through a microscope at deer hair, he saw a quill-like structure. Hooke, on the other hand, saw a sponge-like form. Hooke was right. This chapter explores how seeing differently, in this case, was facilitated by Hooke's early training and lifelong interest in the arts, which developed his visual judgement. Hooke's understanding of line and particularly the engraved line allowed him to resolve the images he saw through his microscope in ways that others could not.

Hooke described his working method in the Preface to Micrographia: “And therefore I never began to make any draughts before by many examinations in several lights, and in several positions to those lights, I had discover’d the true form.” His working method was critical to his seeing differently. Hooke struggled with discovering the “true form” of his object of study and this awareness, coupled with his familiarity with artistic techniques, allowed him to see the microscopic world differently than his predecessors and contemporaries. Before the publication of Micrographia there was little visual consensus about how best to display this new microscopic world.

The four chapters of this book have traced a complex web of interrelationships among people, material objects, drawings, and intaglio printed images, all of which were actively involved in the development of understandings of accuracy in the period. As these chapters have shown, these relationships were not simply binaries. Prints and drawings were not related through a logic of exclusion, that is, the carving of information into a copper plate did not negate the value of the drawing on which the print was based. Instead, the durable interdependencies of different modes of representation put pressure on an understanding of the relationship between prints and drawings as adversarial. As the chapters on Willughby's Ornithology and the Philosophical Transactions show, drawings were not necessarily the preliminary step toward creating a printed image. Drawings were made after prints and prints were made after other prints. Prints and drawing were intricately wound together in the early visual culture of the Royal Society. Further, I have stressed over these four chapters that their relationship was neither adversarial nor linear. Both drawings and prints were essential to the visual communication of knowledge by Fellows of the Royal Society and their correspondents, and the same care that went into performing experiments also went into creating images.

Following the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I have treated each of the works considered in this study as rhizomatic structures that exceed their bindings; that is, as interconnected networks of information. The works considered are intertextual and intermedial—they are interconnected with other texts, images, and objects and, thus, the chapters were necessarily “comparative” in that they set the books in a dense web of other books, single-sheet prints, and drawings. The chapters traced the complex interrelationships between material objects and images by both looking closely at the resulting printed images and by systematically tracing the source material for those images. The intermediality of the works under consideration was not proposed in abstract terms, but rather in concretehistoricized terms allowing for a deeper understanding of how accuracy was produced at a given moment in the past.

By including the burin in the pantheon of scientific instruments, I have thus argued that illustration was integral to the experiments and their communication.

In the Preface to the English edition of Willughby's Ornithology, John Ray described at length the visual resources available to him while he was compiling Francis Willughby's research and adding his own further investigations to it. He had known Willughby since their time at Cambridge, and Ray took on the task of compiling and supplementing his observations after his untimely death at the age of thirty-seven in 1672. Ray provided details about the manuscript collections that Willughby bought while in Strasbourg and Nuremberg as well as drawings he commissioned upon his return to England. He also listed some of the printed sources that he used: Aldrovandi, Clusius, Olina, Marggraf, Piso, and Bondt. In addition to having access to earlier printed ornithological texts and drawings, Ray consulted live and dried specimens of some of the birds he was studying. After discussing the difficulties he had communicating with the engravers from where he was working in the country at Willughby's family home, he states: “Notwithstanding the Figures, such as they are, take them all together, they are the best and truest, that is, most like the live Birds, of any hitherto engraven in Brass” (Preface, n.p.). He also described the images as “nearly resembling the live birds” on the title page. This chapter explores what it meant in seventeenth-century London to be “most like the live Birds” and to nearly resemble life by excavating the nuanced process involved in selecting the visual source material used by the engravers for the 373 images of birds included in the eighty plates that accompanied the English edition of Willughby's Ornithology (London, 1678).