Hist. Sci.

, l (2012)

HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NOT-SO-RECENT SCIENCE

Peter Dear
Cornell University

With most categories now apparently contestable in professional historiography,

historians of science (so-called) surely feel especially vulnerable — not least those
concerned with periods prior to the nineteenth century. If the ‘early modern’ dan-
gerously implies teleology, the ‘modern’ implies a terminus from which the only
exit seems to be the postmodern;1 all such labels invite accusations of progressivist
historicism and, for the acutely trained historian of science, of latent whiggishness
(for we are all postmodernists now). One could always obviate the difficulty of the
term ‘early modern’ by ditching talk of ‘modern’ history altogether (its origins lying
only in an opposition to ‘ancient’ history, after all), and speaking instead of ‘recent’
history; the conventional antecedent might be called “not-so-recent history”. But
pragmatically speaking, there seems to be no great conceptual problem lurking behind
this particular issue of terminology. Where one chooses to place the demarcation
between differentiated periods is another question, of course. The present article
takes a look at some of the most recent work on the period c.1500–c.1700, that is,
on the late Scientific Revolution. It is of significance that such an article cannot
claim to be even remotely comprehensive; I focus on a few issues that seem to be
worthy of especial note.

SCIENCE ETC.

An additional burden for historians of pre-nineteenth-century science nowadays con-

cerns the problem of ‘science’ itself: specialist historians seem increasingly agreed
that science as we now know it is an endeavour born of the nineteenth century.2
Disagreement remains rife, however, about whether the general term ‘science’ may
legitimately be used for earlier periods or, indeed, for other cultural regions than
the European. The Latin word scientia and its cognates had specific meanings, at
once extensive and restricted, in usages derived from academic, scholastic sources.
To the extent that we might wish to confine ourselves to the categories of activity
recognized by our historical actors, it would behoove us to take the corresponding
(and shifting) cultural boundaries as in some way definitive of our subject matter.
Thus, the history of science for the “not-so-recent” period, which follows the now
conventionally meaningless ‘medieval’ (“older”?) period, might confine itself to
those fields of endeavour concerned with necessary demonstration of their conclu-
sions, as well as with those areas in which controversy over such scientific status
took place. Yet most scholars would regret the necessity of therefore including within
the ‘history of science’ those subjects, such as the law or theology, which were often
themselves regarded as scientiae.

0073-2753/12/5002-0197/$10.00 © 2012 Science History Publications Ltd

198 · PETER DEAR

The usual solution to this problem has long been to put the word ‘science’ as an
actor’s category to one side in favour of focusing attention on those topical areas of
study that seem to correspond, more or less, to areas of present-day scientific atten-
tion. The approach calls for selective attention to activities in the past the coherence
of which is provided by that of activities in the present, and thus to run a grave risk of
‘present-centredness’, the more expansive version of whiggishness.3 The danger here
lies in imposing a systematic distortion on the categories of the past by heedlessly
understanding historical activities as having been carried out under the categories
of the present. Nonetheless, an effective recommendation to do just this, using the
rubric ‘protoscience’, has recently been put forward by Pamela Smith.4 Smith uses
the term ‘protoscience’ to designate “studies that trace the early modern development
of modern scientific objects, practices, and theories, what we might call the history
of protosciences such as astronomy and physics”. Her idea is to avoid the implication
that such histories would “take their objects of study as fixed” by having their focus
be upon the development of particular ways of thinking and practice that have come
to constitute our contemporary sciences.�
It can hardly be denied that ‘protoscience’ bears a cast oriented towards the
present, or that it overtly implies a tracing of origins. Yet despite the rather internalist
orientation of the work at the Max-Planck that her definition invokes, Smith rightly
characterizes one of the main approaches to the history of ‘protoscience’ as concern-
ing the social context of endeavours already recognized as canonical in intellectualist
history of science. Thus Adam Mosley’s recent study of Tycho Brahe shows how
Tycho’s intelligence network operated to facilitate his astronomical project; but
such a study would have been of correspondingly less interest had that project, and
that network, not produced the astronomical theories and ideas for which Tycho has
long been celebrated in traditional, intellectualist history of science. An instructive
comparison may be made here with Robert S. Westman’s The Copernican question.
While studies such as Mosley’s may be said implicitly to treat issues surrounding the
history of Copernicanism as concerning a ‘protoscience’ destined to produce modern
astronomy, Westman directs his attention towards identifying what was important
about Copernicanism in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries: what was at
stake in the promotion or rejection of heliocentrism.6
The assumptions of Westman’s book diverge considerably from those implied by
Smith’s term ‘protoscience’, because they are premised on the evident significance
of Copernican astronomy and its implications as understood and acted on at the
time. Copernicanism could just as well have proved a dead end in the genesis of later
disciplinary astronomy, but it would remain an object of serious historical enquiry
because of its contemporary importance, both to astronomers and to philosophers. Its
interest as a ‘protoscience’ is from this perspective beside the point, since Westman’s
book concerns a major passage of European cultural history regardless.
And yet, not entirely regardless. Although both Westman’s and Mosley’s books
are differently cast, posing quite distinct questions of their subjects, each certainly
counts, in the eyes of practically everyone, as ‘history of science’. Had Westman’s
 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NOT-SO-RECENT SCIENCE   · 199

book concerned Lutheranism rather than Copernicanism, that would probably not have
been the case. What the community of historians of science regards as its field’s proper
subject matter is, if it can claim to decide on behalf of a wider culture, consequential.
There are two schools of thought on the matter of not-so-recent (and earlier) sci-
ence. One holds that the importance of understanding historical categories of thought
and action that differ significantly from our own is central to the historian’s task, and
therefore cannot be swept aside. The other holds that the term ‘science’ is used in so
many different ways that scrupulousness of definition is counterproductive; historians
should not allow themselves to be shackled by excessive narrowness. Thus Smith:
“for historians of science the role and definition of modern science is one dimension
of our object of study, so it seems artificial not to use the term science at times in
a self-consciously imprecise and catchall manner.”7 For the first school of thought,
however, it is precisely a concern with the “role and definition of modern science”
that makes it imperative not to be imprecise in the use of relevant terms.
A useful contrast may be made with another well-accepted category for historical
study, ‘political history’. Unlike the history of science, political history seems not to
worry overmuch about “the role and definition” of modern politics. Why not? Perhaps
the stabilizing core of the specialty, the functioning of the state, prevents too much
definitional drift.8 Equivalents for the history of science seem too imprecise: sci-
ence as “knowledge of the natural world”, even allowing for the elision of the social
and human sciences, above all leaves us prey to philosophical wrangles over what
counts as ‘knowledge’; ‘nature’ is also a troublesome, because historically variable,
construct. Talk of politics and the state at least has the advantage of having classi-
cal antecedents that do not look entirely alien. There is also the sense of the special
status of science, built into the version of ‘professionalized’ history of science in the
United States by George Sarton: if science is special, it cannot be an ordinary human
activity, and therefore requires special characterization.
More difficulties arise at this point. Is the ‘specialness’ of science for the historian
a result of its supposed epistemic privilege, or is it due to some cultural specificity?
For the historian of science nowadays, the usual choice is the second of these: what
we now call ‘science’ is a human enterprise to be recognized by its particular social,
intellectual, and cultural characteristics. For the not-so-recent period, antecedent but
genealogically related enterprises and conditions are then the proper objects of inves-
tigation: this seems to be the intended meaning of Smith’s term ‘protoscience’. The
main disadvantage of the word is the implication that there is a one-to-one mapping
between ‘protoscience’ and modern science; that modern astronomy can be traced
from a preceding ‘proto-astronomy’, and so forth.
Smith warrants her argument that a loose and accommodating employment of ‘sci-
ence’ by the historian is sometimes justifiable by pointing, in effect, to the heuristic
value of ‘lumping’, and the use of sometimes anachronistic categories for determining
the very nature of one’s subject. But perhaps the chief argument for using the label,
on occasion, is only that it can be done when nothing of significance hangs on it: the
only circumstance in which it can be used harmlessly is when it doesn’t matter for
200 · PETER DEAR

any of the points at issue.9 Consequently, attempts to justify strictly anachronistic uses
of the term ‘science’ in any positive way only serve to undermine such uses, which
can indeed be harmlessly communicative in cases where no analytical precision is
called for. A risky attempt to make such a justification appears at the beginning of
Deborah Harkness’s The Jewel House, in a section headed “A note about ‘science’”.10
Harkness argues that her use of the word in her book is appropriate because it reflects
its common use in her sources. The instances that she gives, and that appear in the
course of the book, however, seem far more readily assimilable to the well-attested
and broadly applicable early-modern senses of ‘science’, or scientia, whereby the
term means any general formalized body of knowledge, or else what Aristotle calls
the “habit” by which such knowledge is acquired; only a reading of any particular
early-modern use of it that expects it to conform to a modern sense of ‘science’, as
a blanket term referring to the entire sweep of natural inquiry, would find the latter
already (let alone routinely) present in Elizabethan English. The individual sciences
were terminologically quite different from the all-encompassing modern ‘science’,
and Harkness’s examples show no clear deviation from that general historical truth.11

BACON, EMPIRICISM

There are other calls on our attention than those focused on uses of the word ‘sci-
ence’. Mosley’s book elaborates on the accepted importance of Tycho in the his-
tory of astronomy; no one could object to such a topic. Harkness’s book adopts an
alternative approach to establishing significance, by representing her case studies
(whether or not concerning ‘science’) as related to the context of Francis Bacon’s
famous philosophical work. Late Elizabethan London certainly reflected features of
the Bensalem found in Bacon’s New Atlantis, as did the Restoration London of R.H.’s
New Atlantis ... continued,12 but it seems ungrateful to reduce Bacon’s significance
to that of a mere reflection of the practical endeavours of others.13
In fact, the most stunning recent scholarship on Bacon has been appearing from
the pen of Sophie Weeks.14 Weeks has reconceived the standard picture of Bacon as
a philosopher who promoted the “makers’ knowledge” approach, well-known from
Paolo Rossi’s classic account and emphasized in the work of Antonio Perez-Ramos.15
Weeks persuasively presents a Bacon who sought above all, not just a systematized
way of producing by artifice the properties of natural bodies (through what he called
experientia literata), but whose ambition extended to a kind of ‘magic’ that would
create novel things hitherto unheard-of, by forcing nature into paths that it had never
followed by itself when “free and unconfined”. Weeks’s work also provides an addi-
tional, and important, case to elaborate on John Henry’s major article of 2008 on
the theme of magic and science, in which he argues for the absorption of significant
aspects of what had once been ‘magic’ into what was now becoming ‘science’.16
Weeks’s meticulous accounts point up another frequently encountered feature of
socio-cultural accounts of ‘science’ in this period, found in Harkness as well as in
Smith’s work among others: the crucial link between the activities that the historian
investigates and modern science itself is constructed around the mediating theme of
 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NOT-SO-RECENT SCIENCE   · 201

‘empiricism’. Most often taken to be a self-evident term to be attached to a miscel-

lany of material manipulations, its identification in any particular case allows an easy
passage to the empiricism associated with Bacon and with the presumed foundational
scientific experimentalism of the early Royal Society. Thus, an undifferentiated
empiricism is allowed to stand in for modern science, and hence (to use Smith’s term
again) to establish as ‘proto-science’ anything older that can be grouped under the
‘empiricist’ label — regardless of differences in character of the activities so grouped.17
The category of empiricism has also been used in recent historiography on natural
history to perform a similar job, namely to connect endeavours in natural history
to the broader (and sometimes prestigious) story of ‘science’. An important link in
making such a connection is, once again, Francis Bacon: Paula Findlen’s “Francis
Bacon and the reform of natural history in the seventeenth century”18 represents an
important route by which the link can be made. Attempts to realize Bacon’s vision of
a critical natural history, one that could underpin a properly causal natural philosophy,
did not get properly underway before the 1640s, as Findlen notes, but the association
of terms has sometimes allowed historians of a prior ‘natural history’ to deploy that
subsequent connection so as to display natural-historical enterprises of (typically)
the sixteenth century as continuous with later Baconian natural philosophy — and
hence ‘science’.
Brian Ogilvie’s The science of describing extends its coverage of (primarily)
sixeenth-century natural history beyond the Italian focus of Paula Findlen’s 1994 Pos-
sessing nature.19 It concludes with a movement via Bacon to the early Royal Society,
although, rather than stressing radical changes along the way, Ogilvie is concerned
to emphasize a certain continuity in natural history from the sixteenth century to the
present. David Freedberg’s very different The Eye of the Lynx, on Federico Cesi’s
Accademia dei Lincei, by contrast appears very much as the work of an art historian;
Freedberg is especially concerned with the meaning of drawing and verisimilitude
among the members of the Accademia (including Galileo’s astronomical drawings),
and the status of that work as ‘science’ never really comes into question. Instead,
the densely narrative and descriptive account concerns itself with natural history as
a project of engagement with representation, and as such makes no claims beyond
the self-evident significance of Galileo and his colleagues.
But the ‘empiricist’ and Baconian connections have been used in recent studies of
the not-so-recent Spanish Americas as a way of emphasizing Iberian aspects of the
traditional ‘Scientific Revolution’. Work by historians such as Alison Sandman and
Antonio Barrera-Osorio further establishes an institutional connection to Baconian
issues by pointing to Spanish state institutions that likely formed models for some of
Bacon’s early institutional recommendations. These Spanish institutions concerned
themselves with technical and scientific endeavours relating to the new Spanish
possessions across the Atlantic. In Seville, the Casa del Contratación (founded in
1503) increasingly concerned itself with navigational techniques, trained pilots
sailing routes to the New World, and gathered and coordinated related geographical
and navigational information. The Consejo de Indias (founded in 1524) gathered
202 · PETER DEAR

geographical and natural historical information from the Americas to assist in the
economic exploitation of mineral and botanical wealth, among other things. These
institutions (the first especially admired and envied by English navigators) evidently
acted as models for Bacon’s own suggestions regarding state-run organizations aimed
at economic benefit derived from knowledge of nature.20

ALCHEMY AND ANATOMY

One of the more prominent historiographical initiatives concerning not-so-recent

science has been a renewed focus on alchemy. There seems to have emerged a basic
duality of approaches to this topic, which mirror a familiar general dichotomy between
the history of science as cultural history, born of the early-modern cultural history
of the 1980s, and the history of science in the same period as ‘protoscience’.21 Most
strikingly, the prolific writings of William Newman and Lawrence Principe have
striven to establish a particular thread of alchemy (that stemming from specifically
medieval traditions, in contrast to Paracelsian varieties) as having been central to the
intellectual history of science in the seventeenth century.22
Newman and Principe, separately and in collaboration, have striven to reshape our
perceptions of what alchemy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was really
about, and have played down the spiritual significance of the alchemist’s search for
the Philosopher’s Stone. They argue that the modern, predominantly spiritual pic-
ture of alchemy is due to a distorted historical view dating from nineteenth-century
mysticism as well as from twentieth-century Jungian psychology. Instead, the true
alchemy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a practical endeavour not
categorically distinguishable from chemistry; hence they refer to a unified field of
“chymistry” in this period that was characterized by techniques and procedures
amounting to a considerable body of practical as well as theoretical knowledge.23
Newman and Principe’s disregard for alchemy’s spiritual dimension, as represented
in countless manuscripts and printed books, and often owing much to the mystical
religious teachings of Paracelsus as well as much earlier texts from Antiquity and the
Arabic tradition, may perhaps be something of an over-reaction to previous treatments
that placed overwhelming emphasis on precisely those features to the exclusion of
others. Their scholarly work has shown, however, that both practical techniques and
theoretical alchemical doctrines concerning atomism and corpuscularianism played
important roles in informing the work of such natural philosophers as Robert Boyle
and Isaac Newton, besides many other lesser-known figures.
With its focus on concrete (and replicable) “chymical” operations as well as on
natural-philosophical speculation concerning atomic matter-theory, Newman’s and
Principe’s work in effect strives to establish alchemy as a part of an empirically
progressive history of chemistry, under the guise of the seventeenth-century English
catchall term “chymistry”. Doing so requires downplaying the spiritual and religious
aspects of alchemy, despite the prominence of those aspects in most alchemical texts
of the period; the sidelining of Paracelsianism is one means to this rehabilitation.24
Like alchemy, not-so-recent anatomy has also invited the attention of cultural
 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NOT-SO-RECENT SCIENCE   · 203

historians of science as well as historians of ‘proto-science’. Domenico Bertoloni

Meli’s new study of Malpighi might be placed in the ‘proto-science’ category, but
it adopts a sophisticated approach that examines how Malpighi’s work in anatomy
traversed several ‘disciplinary’ boundaries in achieving its aims.25 On the other
hand, Andrew Cunningham’s revisionist study of anatomy in the classic tradition
of sixteenth-century Padua, followed recently by his study of experiment, anatomy,
and physiology in the eighteenth century,26 insist on the necessity of understanding
the enterprises of their historical actors rather than taking ‘anatomy’ or ‘physiology’
(or, for that matter, ‘science’) as already-understood categories, and they follow
this rule to a scrupulous degree. Rather than ‘proto-science’, Cunningham’s work
might be called “pre-science”, insofar as it concerns itself with endeavours that are
regarded as categorically different from their modern namesakes while possessing
a genealogical connection to them.27 Katherine Park’s treatment of late medieval
and Renaissance anatomy, in her Secrets of women,28 represents a more evidently
‘cultural-historical’ approach to its subject. Rather than identifying a particular (alien)
enterprise in which her subjects were engaged, Park traces the various purposes for
which anatomical dissections were conducted through the period she investigates,
while at the same time emphasizing a perennial concern with female anatomy and the
mysteries of generation. Compared with Cunningham’s style, Park’s is much more
concerned with making sense of a set of cultural practices than it is with identifying
and characterizing a coherent, albeit unfamiliar, ‘pre-scientific’ investigative tradition.

NETWORKS AND CIRCULATION

For some time historians of economics, commercial historians and others have been
concerned with early-modern ‘global networks’, impelled most notably by the work
of Immanuel Wallerstein.29 In turn, such interests have begun to reinvigorate particular
areas of the history of science concerned with European colonialism and the global
growth of scientific knowledge systems since the seventeenth century; highlighting
such work is the intent of Pamela Smith’s title “Science on the move”.30 Historians of
science have been able to supplement such ideas with the ‘actor network’ approach
most often associated with Bruno Latour. But an additional element of such views has
in recent years been provided by the somewhat amorphous concept of ‘circulation’.31
‘Circulation’ in recent historiography on not-so-recent science emphasizes the
movement of material objects as well as of instrumental practices (including such
items as plants, instruments, books, astronomical data, ethnographic reports) along
the trade routes of the modernizing world, especially those of the Atlantic and Indian
Oceans.32 Some scholars, most notably Harold J. Cook, have interrogated issues of
global commerce without employing the specific notion of ‘circulation’, and with a
focus on what accumulated or grew at the commercial centre.33 The significance of
those studies that do use the metaphor, however, lies in their interpretative assump-
tions about the ‘matter’ of science. The metaphor is partly drawn from the Smithian
notion (Adam, not Pamela) in ‘classical’ economics of the circulation of money and
fungible goods. The term’s adoption by historians of science as the “circulation of
204 · PETER DEAR

knowledge” and the “circulation” of scientific (natural philosophical and mathemati-

cal) practices seems to depend on the implied technical content of the economic
model itself, where commercial networks instantiate classical economic theories of
wealth as being generated by trade — wealth created, therefore, through circulation,
especially the circulation of money. In the ideal (classical) economic case, money
really does circulate, rather than simply move from place to place; that is how the
theory works. But the value of ‘circulation’ is perhaps less clearly applicable to the
concerns of the history of science.
Trade routes as conduits for exchange, mediated by money (whether specie or
credit), surely moved objects and people around.34 The instrumental role of ships and
(more abstractly) trading companies in effecting that movement usefully reifies and
materializes this aspect of the development of global science. Ships also conveyed
letters and papers, intelligence, from place to place,35 and hence the association of trade
routes with distributed knowledge and the instrumentality of technical capabilities.
The phrase “circulation of knowledge” no doubt resonates with Joel Mokyr’s
arguments on the rise of the “knowledge economy”.36 But for early-modern science,
the existence of ‘circulation’ may be only loosely figurative: there was certainly long-
distance travel, and the dispersal of ideas, but circulation of knowledge, analogous to
that of money, seems to be absent. What, after all, would it look like? Artifacts and
instruments moved across the North Atlantic, with experimental reports involving
their use coming back again; astronomical, meteorological, and other instruments,
together with their users, certainly travelled on expeditions sent out from Europe,
and they often returned;37 but ideas themselves did not circulate and proliferate as a
result, because ideas are not like money, not even like paper money.
Techniques, practices, and skills are also sometimes said to “circulate”, insofar
as they clearly travelled, embodied in the people who commanded them. But here
again, ‘circulation’ fails adequately to capture the process. As such things travelled,
to be locally communicated to people in new locales, they might better be seen as
elaborating networks, rather than literally circulating around according to some
feedback-mechanism. At the same time, as studies of standardization in the sciences
during the nineteenth century have made clear, the establishment of an authoritative
centre or privileged node in such a network was ultimately of crucial importance.38 The
whole point in such cases is not to be dynamic, but to have authoritatively enforced
standards, policed in various ways, that try to prevent slippage within the network;
controversy should not be allowed to break out. Determination of time-standards in
mapping out longitude on long voyages is an obvious and early example.39
In that sense, the Latourian picture is opposed to the economic model of circu-
lation: in the latter, it is important that not everywhere be the same as everywhere
else (for example, that there be different demand for particular commodities in dif-
ferent places). In the former, however, standards must be made uniform, on a level,
universal, in which case there is no point to ‘circulation’, only to distribution — or
perhaps, better, proliferation.
The economic model was designed so that the concept of circulation could perform
 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NOT-SO-RECENT SCIENCE   · 205

explanatory work, namely, to show how trade creates wealth. If the economic model
of circulation is to be made applicable to science, especially not-so-recent science,
it will require both a strong analogy to money and, especially, a strong analogy to
wealth. There seems to be no functional parallel for ‘circulation’ in science, which
makes it unsurprising that such circulation (as opposed to travel, or communication)
is hard to find. The prize in modern science has been, rather, the establishment of
uncontested normativity (i.e. standardization), or what is usually called “reason”.

IDEAS AND INTELLECTUAL CULTURE

None of this is to say that the history of not-so-recent-science has ceased to care
about ideas and specifically intellectual culture. There is still a lot of this about, of
various sorts, and there is no real sign of its declining. Indeed, one of its most vigor-
ous homes is in the history of philosophy, which has branched out in recent decades
much more to resemble the old ‘intellectualist’ history of science40 than the kind of
history of philosophy that concerned itself with “thinking men’s thoughts after them”
as though those bygone philosophers had also, somehow, been members of present-
day philosophy departments (or at least those departments when they still often lacked
any female faculty). For our period, such philosophers routinely engaged in natural
philosophy as well as mathematics, and hence formed part of an intellectualist history
of science that appears in scholarship written by philosophers, in a newer vein that
attempts at least intellectual contextualisations of a sort alien to previous generations
of historians of philosophy. The work of Dan Garber is of particular note: as well as
writing the landmark Descartes’ metaphysical physics, Garber has recently published
a work on Leibniz that places a similar contextual stress on Leibniz’s engagement
with issues of matter and mechanism.41 Other scholars whose work is of a similar
nature are Steven Nadler, Christa Mercer, Roger Ariew, Stephen Gaukroger, and Tad
Schmalz; there are many more besides. None is generally regarded as an ‘historian of
science’, however, despite the great interest of their work to those who are so styled;
somehow, the history of philosophy in this new vein remains slightly over a bound-
ary that marks it as overly concerned with ideas that cause other ideas — or perhaps
simply as scholarship written by philosophers rather than by ‘proper’ historians.42
Nonetheless, much excellent recent work in the disciplinarily bounded history
of science has focused on ideas and the intellectual content of the practices and
institutions that produced them. Peter Harrison has argued for the importance of the
Fall from Grace as an element in seventeenth-century evaluations of the potential of
human knowledge, his argument bearing broad significance for understanding the
dynamics of positions adopted by philosophers in that period and the systematic
(theologically correlated) variations to be found among them.43 The continuing
interest in religious and theological themes in the history of science in this period
is represented by another piece by Harrison that takes on John Henry concerning
the classic question of voluntarism. Both Harrison and Henry acknowledge, despite
their differences, the issue’s significance; there is no sense that the question itself has
lost its salience.44 Besides these ongoing concerns with ‘metaphysical foundations’,
206 · PETER DEAR

there is, of course, much work that might once have been called “internalist”, with a
focus on the technical and theoretical ideas and associated practices that constituted
the formal science in question; a notable recent example is Domenico Bertoloni
Meli’s Thinking with objects, on the development of theoretical mechanics during
the seventeenth century.45
More broadly, Westman’s magisterial new book on Copernicanism itself represents
a serious concern with the intellectual debates and purposes that drove his protago-
nists; indeed, the sociological, psychological, and institutional content deployed in
Westman’s study is directed precisely towards an understanding of those intellectual
issues.46 ‘Intellectual history’ by itself is insufficient, although it is by no means to
be disregarded. Ideas and their socio-cultural life are the raison d’être of the history
of science.47
A broader approach to intellectual culture assists enormously in addressing issues
that form a traditional part of the history of science. Matt Jones illustrates this point
well in his The good life in the Scientific Revolution,48 which locates metaphysical and
mathematical concerns of three of the most notable philosophers of the seventeenth
century within a contemporary understanding of what it was to be a philosopher. Other
studies have addressed similar questions, including a general collection of essays (not
primarily on our period), edited by Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum, and work by
Stephen Gaukroger, all indebted to more sociologically oriented approaches adopted
by Steven Shapin.49 Self-understanding of one’s own métier is a central theme also
in Amir Alexander’s Geometrical landscapes, which casts light on the characteristic
theme of natural philosophy and mathematical sciences as ‘discovery’ by displaying
the literal self-understanding of mathematicians such as Thomas Hariott as discover-
ers in a geographical, spatial sense.50

BIG NAMES

Intellectual cultures are performed, or constituted, by people, and individual people

are usually the historian’s best friends as raw materials about whom to give accounts
or as sources of evidence. The biographical approach to the history of science is
alive and well, either in the form of a conventional account of an individual’s life,
or as a focus on some particular aspect of an individual’s career. Recently, two new
scholarly biographies of Galileo have appeared, one of which, by John Heilbron,
makes a point of its lack of any qualification of the title: Galileo.51 Both are serious
and insightful works that master an immense secondary literature, and in that sense
might be thought old-fashioned: the literature is so large because scholars have been
writing about Galileo (the individual) for so long. But a focus on understanding a
life, while necessarily dependent on various fragile historiographical assumptions,52
also engages with the vital core of cultural history, insofar as an individual, even
an extraordinary one, must be made sense of as part of a world. And the historian’s
work in recreating or investigating that world is disciplined by the exigencies of
taking account of a real, rather than ideal, person. Recent attention to outstanding
individuals underlines that disciplinary point, as well as overcoming (or perhaps
 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NOT-SO-RECENT SCIENCE   · 207

only circumventing?) the difficulty with which we started: the category ‘science’
of which we purport to study the history. A study of Galileo can freely discuss his
enthusiasm for Ariosto without needing to make an argument for its relevance to an
abstract category. Whatever was important to Galileo is important for his biography.
In the case of Robert Boyle, around whom a cottage industry has been buzzing for
some years now thanks especially to the labours of Michael Hunter, many studies
have appeared over the past decade or so.53 For Isaac Newton, an important collection
of essays in 2001, several significant individual essays, and above all Rob Iliffe’s
remarkable website “The Newton Project” have ensured the great man’s continued
presence.54 The biographical focus, in short, shows no signs of fading (a quite different
picture from that of a quarter-century ago). Indeed, the History of Science Society’s
Pfizer Prize in 2010 was awarded to a major biography of Leibniz.55
Considerable tracts of historiographical territory remain. One concerns experi-
mental practice in the seventeenth century, which Jed Buchwald has addressed in a
concerted technical manner found less often in recent years except, perhaps, in some
treatments of Newton’s mechanics.56 Grand overviews survive in the pedagogically
necessary genre of the textbook, but the days of the large scale historical account
of the Scientific Revolution seem to be almost gone.57 Whether all this is ‘science’
remains unclear, and possibly even unimportant; that it is “not so recent” is certain.

REFERENCES

1.  Lorraine Daston, “The nature of nature in early modern Europe”, Configurations, vi (1998), 149–72,
for remarks on periodization; Randolph Starn, “The early modern muddle”, Journal of early
modern history, vi (2002), 296–307; Pamela H. Smith, “Science on the move: Recent trends in
the history of early modern science”, Renaissance quarterly, lxii (2009), 345–75.
2.  Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, “De-centring the ‘big picture’: The origins of modern science
and the modern origins of science”, The British journal for the history of science, xxvi (1993),
407–32, has become widely cited without, however, having received a great deal of interrogation.
3.  Adrian Wilson and Trevor Ashplant, “Whig history and present-centred history”, The historical journal,
xxxi (1988), 1–16; idem, “Present-centred history and the problem of historical knowledge”,
ibid., 253–74.
4.  Smith, “Science on the move” (ref. 1).
5.  Ibid., 347. Smith quotes from the mission statement of the Max Planck Institute for the History of
Science.
6.  Adam Mosley, Bearing the heavens: Tycho Brahe and the astronomical community of the late sixteenth
century (Cambridge, 2007); Robert S. Westman, The Copernican question: Prognostication,
skepticism, and celestial order (Berkeley, 2011).
7.  Smith, “Science on the move” (ref. 1), 345 n.1.
8.  See, for a brief discussion, Steven Fielding, “Political history”, on the Institute for Historical
Research’s website “Making history”: http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/
political_history.html (accessed 12 Jan. 2011).
9.  An example of the virtues of ‘splitting’ rather than ‘lumping’ is Peter R. Anstey, “Experimental versus
speculative natural philosophy”, in Peter R. Anstey and John A. Schuster (eds), The science
of nature in the seventeenth century: Patterns of change in early modern natural philosophy
(Dordrecht, 2005), 215–42.
208 · PETER DEAR

10.  Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven,
2007), pp. xv–xviii.
11.  A valuable and concise discussion appears in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A vocabulary of culture
and society, rev. edn (New York, 1985), s.v. “science”.
12.  R.H., New Atlantis. Begun by the Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans: and continued by R.H. Esquire
(London, 1660); it is sometimes suggested that the author was Robert Hooke.
13.  Harkness, The Jewel House (ref. 10), 241–53. Cf. Malcolm Thick, Sir Hugh Platt: The search for
useful knowledge in early modern London (London, 2010), Conclusion.
14.  Sophie Weeks, “Francis Bacon and the art–nature distinction”, Ambix, liv (2007), 117–45; eadem,
“The role of mechanics in Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration”, in Claus Zittel, Gisela Engel,
Romano Nanni, and Nicole C. Karafyllis (eds), Philosophies of technology: Francis Bacon and
his contemporaries (Leiden, 2008), 133–95.
15.  Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From magic to science, transl. by Sacha Rabinovitch (Chicago, 1968);
Antonio Pérez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s idea of science and the maker’s knowledge tradition
(Oxford, 1988).
16.  John Henry, “The fragmentation of Renaissance occultism and the decline of magic”, History of
science, xlvi (2008), 1–48.
17.  See also, for a similar argument, Pamela H. Smith, The body of the artisan: Art and experience in
the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2004), Conclusion.
18.  Paula Findlen, “Francis Bacon and the reform of natural history in the seventeenth century”, in Donald
R. Kelley (ed.), History and the disciplines: The reclassification of knowledge in early modern
Europe (Rochester, 1997), 239–60.
19.  Brian W. Ogilvie, The science of describing: Natural history in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 2006);
Paula Findlen, Possessing nature: Museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern
Italy (Berkeley, 1994).
20.  Alison Sandman and Eric H. Ash, “Trading expertise: Sebastian Cabot between Spain and England”,
Renaissance quarterly, lvii (2004), 813–46; Alison Sandman, “Mirroring the world: Sea charts,
navigation, and territorial claims in sixteenth-century Spain”, in Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen
(eds), Merchants and marvels: Commerce, science, and art in early modern Europe (London,
2002), 83–108; María M. Portuondo, Secret science: Spanish cosmography and the New World
(Chicago, 2009); Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing nature: The Spanish American Empire
and the early Scientific Revolution (Austin, 2006). See also Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Iberian
science in the Renaissance: Ignored how much longer?”, Perspectives on science, xii (2004),
86–124, and idem, Nature, empire, and nation: Explorations of the history of science in the
Iberian world (Stanford, 2006); articles in Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (eds), Colonial
botany: Science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world (Philadelphia, 2005); Daniela
Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan (eds), Science in the Spanish
and Portuguese empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, 2009); Antonio Barrera, “Local herbs, global
medicines: Commerce, knowledge, and commodities in Spanish America”, in Smith and Findlen,
Merchants and marvels, 163–81. Iberian university contexts for the sciences are investigated in a
number of articles in Mordechai Feingold and Víctor Navarro Brotons, Universities and science
in the early modern period (Dordrecht, 2006).
21.  Among more notable studies of the past twenty years, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus face of
genius: The role of alchemy in Newton’s thought (Cambridge, 1991); J. Andrew Mendelsohn,
“Alchemy and politics in England 1649–1665”, Past and present, no. 135 (1992), 30–78; Pamela
H. Smith, The business of alchemy: Science and culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton,
1994); Bruce T. Moran, Distilling knowledge: Alchemy, chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution
(Cambridge, MA, 2005); Tara E. Nummedal, Alchemy and authority in the Holy Roman Empire
(Chicago, 2007). See also Simon Werrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic arts and sciences in European
 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NOT-SO-RECENT SCIENCE   · 209
History (Chicago, 2010), esp. pp. 23–30.
22.  More recently, William R. Newman, Atoms and alchemy: Chymistry and the experimental origins of
the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2006); idem, Promethean ambitions: Alchemy and the quest
to perfect nature (Chicago, 2004); Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy tried in the fire:
Starkey, Boyle, and the fate of Helmontian chymistry (Chicago, 2002); George Starkey, William
R. Newman, and Lawrence Principe, Alchemical laboratory notebooks and correspondence
(Chicago, 2004). See also, on similar themes, Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, principles and
corpuscles: A study of atomism and chemistry in the seventeenth century (Dordrecht, 2000).
23.  William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy vs. chemistry: The etymological origins of
a historiographic mistake”, Early science and medicine, iii (1998), 32–65; Principe and Newman,
“Some problems with the historiography of alchemy”, in William R. Newman and Anthony
Grafton (eds), Secrets of nature: Astrology and alchemy in early modern Europe (Cambridge,
MA, 2001), 385–431.
24.  See now, for a serious major study of Paracelsus himself, Charles Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine,
magic, and mission at the end of time (New Haven, 2008).
25.  Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, experiment, disease: Marcello Malpighi and seventeenth-
century anatomy (Baltimore, 2011); also idem, “The collaboration between anatomists and
mathematicians in the mid-seventeenth century with a study of images as experiments and
Galileo’s role in Steno’s myology”, Early science and medicine, xiii (2008), 665–709.
26.  Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The resurrection of the anatomical project of
the ancients (Aldershot, 1997); idem, The anatomist anatomis’d: An experimental discipline in
Enlightenment Europe (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT, 2010).
27.  Cf. Cunningham and Williams, “De-centring the ‘big picture’” (ref. 2).
28.  Katherine Park, Secrets of women: Gender, generation, and the origins of human dissection (New
York, 2006).
29.  Immanuel Wallerstein, The modern world-system (3 vols, New York, 1974–88).
30.  See, for example, Steven J. Harris, “Networks of travel, correspondence, and exchange”, in The
Cambridge history of science, iii: Early modern science, ed. by Katherine Park and Lorraine
Daston (Cambridge, 2006), 341–62.
31.  Bruno Latour, Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society (Cambridge,
MA, 1987); idem, Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory (New
York, 2007).
32.  For a very few examples: Nicholas Dew, “Vers la ligne: Circulating measurements around the French
Atlantic”, in James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds), Science and empire in the Atlantic world
(New York, 2008), 53–72; Kapil Raj, Relocating modern science (Basingstoke, 2007); see also
its discussion in Smith, “Science on the move” (ref. 1); Nicholas Dew, “Scientific travel in the
Atlantic world: The French expedition to Gorée and the Antilles, 1681–1683”, The British
journal for the history of science, xliii (2010), 1–17; part of “Circulation and locality in early
modern science”, ed. by Mary Terrall and Kapil Raj, special issue of The British journal for the
history of science, xliii/4 (2010). The term is also of long standing amongst anthropologists; it
nonetheless seems to have little clear definition outside economics.
33.  Harold J. Cook, Matters of exchange: Commerce, medicine, and science in the Dutch Golden Age
(New Haven, 2007).
34.  Cf. Carl Wennerlind, “Credit-money as the philosopher’s stone: Alchemy and the coinage problem
in seventeenth-century England”, History of political economy, supplement to vol. xxxv (2003),
235–62.
35.  Simon Schaffer, “Golden means: Assay instruments and the geography of precision in the Guinea
trade”, in Instruments, travel and science: Itineraries of precision from the seventeenth to the
210 · PETER DEAR

twentieth century, ed. by Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum (London,
2002), 20–50; idem, “Newton on the beach: The information order of Principia Mathematica”,
History of science, xlvii (2009), 243–76 (Hans Rausing Lecture, Uppsala University, 2008);
Lissa L. Roberts, “Technology out of context”, inaugural professorial lecture, University of
Twente, 2010. Newspapers have long been said to “circulate” rather than being distributed, but
the origin of this usage is obscure: the Oxford English Dictionary’s first record of this sense (q.v.
“circulation”) is from 1847, but many prior nineteenth-century cases may be found by searching
in Google “Books”. The association of travel with circulation as applied to periodicals, primarily
for the nineteenth century, is especially due to James A. Secord, “Knowledge in transit”, Isis,
xcv (2004), 654–72.
36.  Joel Mokyr, The gifts of Athena: Historical origins of the knowledge economy (Princeton, 2004); see,
e.g., Dew, “Scientific travel” (ref. 32).
37.  Dew, “Scientific travel” (ref. 32); see also Florence C. Hsia, Sojourners in a strange land: Jesuits and
their scientific missions in late Imperial China (Chicago, 2009), who does not speak of circulation.
38.  See esp. Joseph O’Connell, “Metrology: The creation of universality by the circulation of particulars”,
Social studies of science, xxiii (1993), 129–73 (naturally, I regret O’Connell’s choice of the
word ‘circulation’, although his particular use of it here is appropriate); Simon Schaffer, “Late
Victorian metrology and its instrumentation: A manufactory of ohms”, in Invisible connections:
Instruments, institutions and science, ed. by Robert Bud and Susan E. Cozzens (Bellingham, WA,
1992), 23–56; Theodore M. Porter, Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in the science
and its public life (Princeton, 1995); and much else.
39.  See, e.g., Hsia, Sojourners (ref. 37), chap. 5.
40.  Cf. “post-Koyréan intellectualism” in Steven Shapin, “Social uses of science”, in G. S. Rousseau and
Roy Porter (eds), The ferment of knowledge: Studies in the historiography of eighteenth-century
science (Cambridge, 1980), 93–139.
41.  Daniel Garber, Descartes’ metaphysical physics (Chicago, 1992); idem, Leibniz: Body, substance,
monad (Oxford, 2009).
42.  I suggest a criterion concerned with “ideas causing other ideas” because of the role played by
British “sociology of scientific knowledge” in the 1970s and 1980s in shaping historiographical
approaches of many historians of science in that period. The period seems to have represented a
watershed that divided ‘intellectualist’ history of science from that of recent decades, and although
it is difficult to characterize the precise methodological or ideological differences between more
modern work in the history of science and that of the newer ‘intellectual contextualist’ historians
of philosophy, I think that the presumed causal role of ideas (as classically criticized by Bloor
in terms of teleology) represents a crucial, if not always acknowledged, distinction. Cf. David
Bloor, Knowledge and social imagery, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1991), 8–13.
43.  Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the foundations of science (Cambridge, 2008).
44.  Idem, “Voluntarism and early modern science”, History of science, xl (2002), 63–89; John Henry,
“Voluntarist theology at the origins of modern science”, ibid., xlvii (2009), 79–113; Peter Harrison,
“Voluntarism and the origins of modern science: A reply to John Henry”, ibid., xlvii (2009),
223–31. See also John Henry, “Metaphysics and the origins of modern science: Descartes and
the importance of laws of nature”, Early science and medicine, ix (2004), 73–114.
45.  Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Thinking with objects: The transformation of mechanics in the seventeenth
century (Baltimore, 2006). Compare also Walter Roy Laird and Sophie Roux (eds), Mechanics
and natural philosophy before [sic] the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht, 2008).
46.  Westman, The Copernican question (ref. 6).
47.  Westman’s close investigations of the rich astronomical/astrological culture in which Copernicus
participated, and the absence of more evidence of direct textual transmission, imply that
 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF NOT-SO-RECENT SCIENCE   · 211
George Saliba’s argument, that the astronomical developments of the European Renaissance
are unthinkable without a major role for the impressive Islamic astronomical endeavours of the
later Middle Ages, may be overstated: Saliba, Islamic science and the making of the European
Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, 2007), chap. 6.
48.  Matthew L. Jones, The good life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the
cultivation of virtue (Chicago, 2006).
49.  Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum (eds), “Scientific personae”, Science in context, xvi/1 (2003);
Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the transformation of early-modern philosophy
(Cambridge, 2001). See more broadly Steven Shapin, “The man of science”, in Park and Daston
(eds), op. cit. (ref. 30), 179–91.
50.  Amir R. Alexander, Geometrical landscapes: The voyages of discovery and the transformation of
mathematical practice (Stanford, 2002). Compare Katherine Neal, From continuous to discrete:
The broadening of number concepts in early modern England (Dordrecht, 2002).
51.  John L. Heilbron, Galileo (Oxford, 2010); David Wootton, Galileo, watcher of the skies (New
Haven, 2010).
52.  For a particularly important one, see Steven Shapin, “Personal development and intellectual biography:
The case of Robert Boyle”, The British journal for the history of science, xxvi (1993), 335–45.
53.  Not least from the modern editions of Boyle’s works and his correspondence. Leaving aside countless
articles, one might note the following: Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis (eds), The works of
Robert Boyle (14 vols, London, 1999–2000); Michael Hunter, Antonio Clericuzio, and Lawrence
M. Principe (eds), The correspondence of Robert Boyle (6 vols, London, 2001); Michael Hunter
and Edward Davis, The Boyle papers: Understanding the manuscripts of Robert Boyle (Aldershot,
2007); Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and science (New Haven, 2009); Newman and
Principe, Alchemy tried in the fire (ref. 22); Peter R. Anstey, The philosophy of Robert Boyle
(London, 2000).
54.  Jed Z. Buchwald and I. Bernard Cohen (eds), Isaac Newton’s natural philosophy (Cambridge, MA,
2001); “The Newton Project”, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1; and,
miscellaneously, Stephen D. Snobelen, “‘God of Gods, and Lord of Lords’: The theology of
Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia”, Osiris, 2nd ser., xvi (2001), 169–208; Alan
E. Shapiro, “Newton’s ‘experimental philosophy’”, Early science and medicine, ix (2004),
185–217; also Mordechai Feingold’s notable companion volume to an exhibit held at the New
York Public Library, The Newtonian moment: Isaac Newton and the making of modern culture
(New York, 2004).
55.  Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An intellectual biography (Cambridge, 2009). Descartes has not
been ignored either, of course, although perhaps less so among historians of philosophy than
among historians of philosophy. Of note are a major collection: Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster,
and John Sutton (eds), Descartes’ natural philosophy (London, 2000); also Jed Z. Buchwald,
“Descartes’s experimental journey past the prism and through the invisible world to the rainbow”,
Annals of science, lxv (2008), 1–46.
56.  Jed Z. Buchwald, “Discrepant measurements and experimental knowledge in the early modern era”,
Archive for history of exact sciences, lx (2006), 565–649.
57.  Textbooks have been appearing plentifully in recent years: see now Margaret J. Osler, Reconfiguring
the world: Nature, God, and human understanding from the Middle Ages to early modern
Europe (Baltimore, 2010). I have not yet seen the weighty exception to this generalization: H.
Floris Cohen, How modern science came into the world: Four civilizations, one 17th-century
breakthrough (Amsterdam, 2011).