Abstract Summary
This paper examines the relationship between early modern accounts of longevity and the figuring of a new order of natural knowledge as a project of experience prodigiously extended, preserved and accumulated. Focusing on the English case, it examines the reinvention of longevity in the second half of the seventeenth century through reports of long-lived men in the Philosophical Transactions, discussions of the prodigious longevity of the Patriarchs, and natural historical surveys of the long lived. Treatments of longevity in such accounts have been commonly read as anticipating a factual, proto-demographic understanding of longevity. This paper instead proposes that seventeenth-century authors were interested not in the facts of longevity but in its figuring of the extended experience and immunity to decay exemplified by the media in which these discussions appeared. Projects of reporting, recovering, preserving and accumulating were not here passive vehicles for an approach to knowledge that would reimagine the world as information, but the site of a concerted set of performances of the quasi-magical powers of such a condition.
