ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the Bluestocking's intense and intimate engagement with art-making and collecting practices that required as well as produced knowledge about the natural world. Taking the Duchess of Portland's collecting practices, Delany's shell work, and Montagu's feather work as examples of sociable activities that partook of the era's fascination with the natural world. The chapter argues that these activities attest to the Bluestockings' engagement with natural history and their possession of an intimate, embodied knowledge of the natural world. Natural history enthusiasts not only bought natural history books and paid fees to visit the British Museum and Sir Ashton Lever's Museum, but they also bought natural history specimens to display in their own cabinets and drawing rooms. Bulstrode is figured as a precursor to the Bluestocking assemblies, some scholars even suggesting that Montagu "considered the duchess of Portland's estate at Bulstrode an ideal of social and intellectual life", with Montagu modelling her London assemblies on Bulstrode.
