Historiography of Not-So-Recent Science

Daston Lorraine , “The nature of nature in early modern Europe”, Configurations, vi (1998), 149–72, for remarks on periodization; Starn Randolph , “The early modern muddle”, Journal of early modern history, vi (2002), 2002–307; Smith Pamela H. , “Science on the move: Recent trends in the history of early modern science”, Renaissance quarterly, lxii (2009), 2009–75.

Cunningham Andrew Williams Perry , “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.

Wilson Adrian Ashplant Trevor , “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.

Smith , “Science on the move” (ref. 1).

Ibid., 347. Smith quotes from the mission statement of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

Mosley Adam , Bearing the heavens: Tycho Brahe and the astronomical community of the late sixteenth century (Cambridge, 2007); Westman Robert S. , The Copernican question: Prognostication, skepticism, and celestial order (Berkeley, 2011).

Smith , “Science on the move” (ref. 1), 345 n.1.

See, for a brief discussion, Fielding Steven , “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).

An example of the virtues of ‘splitting’ rather than ‘lumping’ is Anstey Peter R. , “Experimental versus speculative natural philosophy”, in Anstey Peter R. Schuster John A. (eds), The science of nature in the seventeenth century: Patterns of change in early modern natural philosophy (Dordrecht, 2005), 215–42.

Harkness Deborah , The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, 2007), pp. xv–xviii.

A valuable and concise discussion appears in Williams Raymond , Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society, rev. edn (New York, 1985), s.v. “science”.

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.

Harkness , The Jewel House (ref. 10), 241–53. Cf. Thick Malcolm , Sir Hugh Platt: The search for useful knowledge in early modern London (London, 2010), Conclusion.

Weeks Sophie , “Francis Bacon and the art—nature distinction”, Ambix, liv (2007), 117–45; eadem, “The role of mechanics in Francis Bacon's Great Instauration”, in Zittel Claus Engel Gisela Nanni Romano Karafyllis Nicole C. (eds), Philosophies of technology: Francis Bacon and his contemporaries (Leiden, 2008), 133–95.

Rossi Paolo , Francis Bacon: From magic to science, transl. by Rabinovitch Sacha (Chicago, 1968); Pérez-Ramos Antonio , Francis Bacon's idea of science and the maker's knowledge tradition (Oxford, 1988).

Henry John , “The fragmentation of Renaissance occultism and the decline of magic”, History of science, xlvi (2008), 1–48.

See also, for a similar argument, Smith Pamela H. , The body of the artisan: Art and experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2004), Conclusion.

Findlen Paula , “Francis Bacon and the reform of natural history in the seventeenth century”, in Kelley Donald R. (ed.), History and the disciplines: The reclassification of knowledge in early modern Europe (Rochester, 1997), 239–60.

Ogilvie Brian W. , The science of describing: Natural history in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 2006); Findlen Paula , Possessing nature: Museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy (Berkeley, 1994).

Sandman Alison Ash Eric H. , “Trading expertise: Sebastian Cabot between Spain and England”, Renaissance quarterly, lvii (2004), 813–46; Sandman Alison , “Mirroring the world: Sea charts, navigation, and territorial claims in sixteenth-century Spain”, in Smith Pamela Findlen Paula (eds), Merchants and marvels: Commerce, science, and art in early modern Europe (London, 2002), 83–108; Portuondo María M. , Secret science: Spanish cosmography and the New World (Chicago, 2009); Barrera-Osorio Antonio , Experiencing nature: The Spanish American Empire and the early Scientific Revolution (Austin, 2006). See also Cañizares-Esguerra Jorge , “Iberian science in the Renaissance: Ignored how much longer?”, Perspectives on science, xii (2004), 2004–124, and idem, Nature, empire, and nation: Explorations of the history of science in the Iberian world (Stanford, 2006); articles in Schiebinger Londa Swan Claudia (eds), Colonial botany: Science, commerce, and politics in the early modern world (Philadelphia, 2005); Bleichmar Daniela De Vos Paula Huffine Kristin Sheehan Kevin (eds), Science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, 2009); Barrera Antonio , “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).

Among more notable studies of the past twenty years, Betty Jo Dobbs Teeter , The Janus face of genius: The role of alchemy in Newton's thought (Cambridge, 1991); Mendelsohn J. Andrew , “Alchemy and politics in England 1649–1665”, Past and present, no. 135 (1992), 30–78; Smith Pamela H. , The business of alchemy: Science and culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, 1994); Moran Bruce T. , Distilling knowledge: Alchemy, chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Nummedal Tara E. , Alchemy and authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago, 2007). See also Werrett Simon , Fireworks: Pyrotechnic arts and sciences in European History (Chicago, 2010), esp. pp. 23–30.

More recently, Newman William R. , 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 Principe Lawrence M. , Alchemy tried in the fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the fate of Helmontian chymistry (Chicago, 2002); Starkey George Newman William R. Principe Lawrence , Alchemical laboratory notebooks and correspondence (Chicago, 2004). See also, on similar themes, Clericuzio Antonio , Elements, principles and corpuscles: A study of atomism and chemistry in the seventeenth century (Dordrecht, 2000).

Newman William R. Principe Lawrence M. , “Alchemy vs. chemistry: The etymological origins of a historiographic mistake”, Early science and medicine, iii (1998), 32–65; Principe Newman , “Some problems with the historiography of alchemy”, in Newman William R. Grafton Anthony (eds), Secrets of nature: Astrology and alchemy in early modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 385–431.

See now, for a serious major study of Paracelsus himself, Webster Charles , Paracelsus: Medicine, magic, and mission at the end of time (New Haven, 2008).

Meli Domenico Bertoloni , 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.

Cunningham Andrew , 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).

Cf. Cunningham Williams , “De-centring the ‘big picture’” (ref. 2).

Park Katherine , Secrets of women: Gender, generation, and the origins of human dissection (New York, 2006).

Wallerstein Immanuel , The modern world-system (3 vols, New York, 1974–88).

See, for example, Harris Steven J. , “Networks of travel, correspondence, and exchange”, in The Cambridge history of science, iii: Early modern science, ed. by Park Katherine Daston Lorraine (Cambridge, 2006), 341–62.

Latour Bruno , 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).

For a very few examples: Dew Nicholas , “Vers la ligne: Circulating measurements around the French Atlantic”, in Delbourgo James Dew Nicholas (eds), Science and empire in the Atlantic world (New York, 2008), 53–72; Raj Kapil , Relocating modern science (Basingstoke, 2007); see also its discussion in Smith, “Science on the move” (ref. 1); Dew Nicholas , “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), 2010–17; part of “Circulation and locality in early modern science”, ed. by Terrall Mary Raj Kapil , 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.

Cook Harold J. , Matters of exchange: Commerce, medicine, and science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, 2007).

Cf. Wennerlind Carl , “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.

Schaffer Simon , “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 twentieth century, ed. by Bourguet Marie-Noëlle Licoppe Christian Sibum H. Otto (London, 2002), 20–50; idem, “Newton on the beach: The information order of Principia Mathematica”, History of science, xlvii (2009), 2009–76 (Hans Rausing Lecture, Uppsala University, 2008); Roberts Lissa L. , “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.

Mokyr Joel , The gifts of Athena: Historical origins of the knowledge economy (Princeton, 2004); see, e.g., Dew , “Scientific travel” (ref. 32).

Dew , “Scientific travel” (ref. 32); see also Hsia Florence C. , Sojourners in a strange land: Jesuits and their scientific missions in late Imperial China (Chicago, 2009), who does not speak of circulation.

See esp. O'Connell Joseph , “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); Schaffer Simon , “Late Victorian metrology and its instrumentation: A manufactory of ohms”, in Invisible connections: Instruments, institutions and science, ed. by Bud Robert Cozzens Susan E. (Bellingham, WA, 1992), 23–56; Porter Theodore M. , Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in the science and its public life (Princeton, 1995); and much else.

See, e.g., Hsia , Sojourners (ref. 37), chap. 5.

Cf. “post-Koyréan intellectualism” in Shapin Steven , “Social uses of science”, in Rousseau G. S. Porter Roy (eds), The ferment of knowledge: Studies in the historiography of eighteenth-century science (Cambridge, 1980), 93–139.

Garber Daniel , Descartes' metaphysical physics (Chicago, 1992); idem, Leibniz: Body, substance, monad (Oxford, 2009).

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. Bloor David , Knowledge and social imagery, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1991), 8–13.

Harrison Peter , The Fall of Man and the foundations of science (Cambridge, 2008).

Harrison Peter , “Voluntarism and early modern science”, History of science, xl (2002), 63–89; Henry John , “Voluntarist theology at the origins of modern science”, ibid., xlvii (2009), 2009–113; Harrison Peter , “Voluntarism and the origins of modern science: A reply to John Henry”, ibid., xlvii (2009), 2009–31. See also Henry John , “Metaphysics and the origins of modern science: Descartes and the importance of laws of nature”, Early science and medicine, ix (2004), 73–114.

Meli Domenico Bertoloni , Thinking with objects: The transformation of mechanics in the seventeenth century (Baltimore, 2006). Compare also Laird Walter Roy Roux Sophie (eds), Mechanics and natural philosophy before [sic] the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht, 2008).

Westman , The Copernican question (ref. 6).

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 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.

Jones Matthew L. , The good life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the cultivation of virtue (Chicago, 2006).

Daston Lorraine Sibum H. Otto , (eds), “Scientific personae”, Science in context, xvi/1 (2003); Gaukroger Stephen , Francis Bacon and the transformation of early-modern philosophy (Cambridge, 2001). See more broadly Shapin Steven , “The man of science”, in Park Daston (eds), op. cit. (ref. 30), 179–91.

Alexander Amir R. , Geometrical landscapes: The voyages of discovery and the transformation of mathematical practice (Stanford, 2002). Compare Neal Katherine , From continuous to discrete: The broadening of number concepts in early modern England (Dordrecht, 2002).

Heilbron John L. , Galileo (Oxford, 2010); Wootton David , Galileo, watcher of the skies (New Haven, 2010).

For a particularly important one, see Shapin Steven , “Personal development and intellectual biography: The case of Robert Boyle”, The British journal for the history of science, xxvi (1993), 335–45.

Not least from the modern editions of Boyle's works and his correspondence. Leaving aside countless articles, one might note the following: Hunter Michael Davis Edward B. (eds), The works of Robert Boyle (14 vols, London, 1999–2000); Hunter Michael Clericuzio Antonio Principe Lawrence M. (eds), The correspondence of Robert Boyle (6 vols, London, 2001); Hunter Michael Davis Edward , The Boyle papers: Understanding the manuscripts of Robert Boyle (Aldershot, 2007); Hunter Michael , Boyle: Between God and science (New Haven, 2009); Newman Principe , Alchemy tried in the fire (ref. 22); Anstey Peter R. , The philosophy of Robert Boyle (London, 2000).

Buchwald Jed Z. Cohen I. Bernard , (eds), Isaac Newton's natural philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 2001); ” The Newton Project”, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1; and, miscellaneously, Snobelen Stephen D. , “‘God of Gods, and Lord of Lords’: The theology of Isaac Newton's General Scholium to the Principia”, Osiris, 2nd ser., xvi (2001), 2001–208; Shapiro Alan E. , “Newton's ‘experimental philosophy’”, Early science and medicine, ix (2004), 2004–217; 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).

Antognazza Maria Rosa , 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: Gaukroger Stephen Schuster John Sutton John (eds), Descartes' natural philosophy (London, 2000); also Buchwald Jed Z. , “Descartes's experimental journey past the prism and through the invisible world to the rainbow”, Annals of science, lxv (2008), 1–46.

Buchwald Jed Z. , “Discrepant measurements and experimental knowledge in the early modern era”, Archive for history of exact sciences, lx (2006), 565–649.

Textbooks have been appearing plentifully in recent years: See now Osler Margaret J. , 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: Cohen H. Floris , How modern science came into the world: Four civilizations, one 17th-century breakthrough (Amsterdam, 2011).