UCLA Library

William Leybourn (1626 – 1716) was a printer, author, teacher, surveyor, and mathematician. The occupation of “printer” is often associated with passivity: a simple artisan whose sole focus is to bring books to sale and therefore a stranger to the knowledge contained within the books. This paper seeks to revisit this view, showing that William Leybourn was the exact opposite of a passive printer. He introduced to the English public the works of crucial protagonists of the European scientific community (including the works of Galileo Galilei), promoted debates among scholars and natural philosophers, and presented complex topics previously reserved for academic disputations in a manner accessible to a more general audience. Employing both traditional historical research and tools in Digital Humanities, the paper discusses Leybourn’s works as an example of a conceptually and methodologically novel approach to the study of intellectual networks. This bottom-up approach recenters traditionally peripheral figures, such as Leybourn, and reveals crucial social, economic, and political aspects of early modern European cultural and intellectual debates.