Johannes Kepler is often cited as a witness to scholars’ resistance to the shift from Latin to vernacular languages in the scientific literature in the early 17th century. Allegedly he was unable to read Italian, and reacted to Galileo's transition from Latin to Italian by accusing him of committing a crimen laesae humanitatis, with the double sense of “crime against humanity” and “crime against classical

The paper discusses what lay behind the successes of the Bavarian Academy of Science, which was established in 1759. To this end the academic day-to-day operations during the first five decades of its existence are being analyzed in four different fields of activity (academia, popularization, distribution of natural knowledge, expertise). It is shown that the academy with its skills und competences

This essay examines the aims, labor regime, and workers of the St. Vincent botanic garden to highlight differences in the infrastructure of government-funded botany across the British empire. It argues that slavery was a foundational element of society and natural history in the Anglo-Caribbean, and the St. Vincent botanic garden was both put into the service of slavery and transformed by it. When

In many eighteenth-century agricultural texts, peasants were depicted as an impediment to agrarian improvement, superstitious and resistant to novelty. That was the stereotype one often encountered, in any case, in more programmatic writing about agriculture from this period. A closer look at the era's technical literature tells a more complicated story, however. Much as traveling European naturalists

The practice of early modern natural history depended on the collective collecting activities of a great variety of people. Among them, artisans played a major role in acquiring and distributing knowledge about the natural world and they contributed significantly to the scholarly labour in natural history. This distributed labour was both acknowledged by contemporaries as well as hidden from sight

As recent research has shown, many of the activities of early modern (including eighteenth-century) naturalists were carried out in the household. This article investigates the ways in which family members in particular, both male and female, ended up engaging in kinds of labor which furthered the pursuit of natural history in the eighteenth century. Examining evidence from various different parts

Spanish naturalists established the Viceregal Botanical Garden of New Spain in Mexico City in 1788 to advance agriculture, manufacturing, and medicine. This colonial institution also served the ideological role of cultivating agents of empire. Rather than establish the garden in the already robust tradition of American botany, the Spanish appropriated this space, employing Creole students and servant

The Geometria Culmensis was written around 1400 and is one of the first known mathematical treatises in German. A textbook on land surveying, it not only uses the Hindu‐Arabic numerals throughout the text but also frequently refers to the most influential treatise on these new numbers, the Algorism. Roughly a hundred years before the first German arithmetic books, the Geometria Culmensis tries to educate

In the German Weimar Republic of the 1920s, the field of economic science found itself in a crisis environment beyond the limits of its understanding. Very few contributions from academia found their way into practice, and thus the limited interplay between the two was of little consequence. During this era, universities responded by introducing various new approaches to make the teaching of economics

Current attempts by historians of science to revise the narrative of the Scientific Revolution by using the concept of the Baroque have important implications for art history. Correspondences between baroque art and baroque science gain new complexity when the rational, epistemologically optimistic image of the New Science is put in doubt. Rather than a method of objective observation, early seventeenth-century

In this note, we point attention to and briefly discuss a curious manuscript of Einstein, composed in 1938 and entitled "Unified Field Theory," the only such writing, published or unpublished, carrying this title without any further specification. Apparently never intended for publication, the manuscript sheds light both on Einstein's modus operandi as well as on the public role of Einstein's later

In 1969, a few short months after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Sergei I. Prasolov, advisor to the Soviet Ambassador in Prague, informed František Šorm, President of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, at a formal meeting that he welcomed Šorm's suggestion to intensify scientific exchange between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Šorm politely declined this offer. Behind the veneer

Science Diplomacy is a vibrant research field: this is illustrated by the growing number of scholars who are exploring the field both by studying contemporary issues and reevaluating past conflicts and political negotiations. Coming not only from the ranks of historians, scholars from international relations, Science and Technology Studies, and science management, to name a few, are exploring the history

Research in the fields of history of science and intellectual history over the last thirty years has produced a growing and exciting scholarship on the ways in which, in the early modern period (approximately between 1450 and 1750), the educated classes adapted their approach to managing and reproducing knowledge to meet the new emerging needs of a society faced with the unprecedented impact of the

This article focuses on the U.S. diplomat and nuclear arms control negotiator Gerald (Gerry) Coat Smith in order to cast new light on the importance of diplomats in the context of the set of international activities currently labelled as “science diplomacy.” Smith, a lawyer by training, was a key negotiator in many international agreements on post‐WW2 atomic energy projects, from those on uranium prospecting

The Danish physicist Niels Bohr is best known for two major achievements: first, his model of the quantum atom, published in 1913, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1922; and second, the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics developed together with colleagues at his institute in the latter half of the twenties. Having turned his institute toward nuclear physics, making it a pioneer

In the 1960s, the growing strategic importance of ocean exploration led the French government to develop greater capacity in marine scientific research, aiming to promote cooperative and diplomatic relations with the leading states in ocean exploration. Devised during Charles de Gaulle's government (1958–1969), the restructuring of French oceanography culminated, in 1967, in the establishment of the

Historical studies on the relationship between science and diplomacy tend to focus on events since World War II and on initiatives for the maintenance of peace or to achieve cooperation over contentious matters. This article presents the case of José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage (1823–1907), a Portuguese zoologist who had formal diplomatic responsibilities in a context of competition for the colonization

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT) was set up with assistance of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1956 and 1974. It became the largest, and finally, a successful techno‐scientific education project undertaken by the Federal Republic outside of Germany. In this paper, I argue that the engagement of the Federal Republic at IIT Madras has to be understood primarily as a project of

Early modern medicine was much more dependent on the senses than its contemporary counterpart. Although a comprehensive medical theory existed that assigned great value to taste and odor of medicaments, historical descriptions of taste and odor appears imprecise and inconsistent to modern eyes. How did historical actors move from subjective experience of taste and odor to culturally stable agreements

Performative methods have been part of history of science research and education for at least three decades. Understood broadly, they cover every methodology in which a historian or philosopher of science engages in embodied interaction with sources, tools and materials that do not traditionally belong to historical research, with the aim of answering a historical research question. The question no

The present contribution analyses the nervousness and neurasthenia discourse in the early Soviet Union. Its focus is on psycho‐hygienic plays staged by the Moscow Theatre for Sanitary Culture. It asks in which images, figures and actions a knowledge about the nervous disorder was presented on stage, which genre traditions and communicative instruments were used and on which changing political implications

Perfumes embody a chemical record of style and technology. Blurring the boundary between what counts as natural and artificial in both a material and a perceptual sense, perfumery presents us with a domain of multiple disciplinary identities relevant to social studies: art, craft, and techno‐science. Despite its profound impact as a cultural practice, perfume has seldom featured in historical scholarship

This essay discusses imitation coral reconstruction workshops based on a recipe from a sixteenth‐century “book of secrets” that took place in three different educational contexts: Columbia University, Nunavut Arctic College, and Universität Hamburg. It reflects on the utility of reconstruction and material literacy as present‐day history of science methodologies in which scholarly textual interpretation

This article discusses the (re)construction and use of an Early modern instrument, better known as Herman Boerhaave's (1668–1738) little furnace. We investigate the origins, history and materiality of this furnace, and examine the dynamic relationship between historical study and reconstructing and handling an object. We argue that combining textual analysis with performative methods allows us to gain

What are historians doing in the laboratory? Looking back over six years of collaborative work, researchers of the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University discuss their experience with hands‐on reconstruction as a historical method. This work engages practical forms of knowledge—from pigment‐making to metal casting—recorded in the BnF Ms. Fr. 640, an anonymous French manuscript compiled in

From his arrival in Italy in 1755, Winckelmann's work is infused throughout by a fundamental antinomy: reading versus seeing. This antinomy possesses for him a decidedly epistemological significance: it allows him to present himself as the father of a discipline deserving of its name, i.e., the history of art. In Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), he claims to break with a long tradition of

Since Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition published in 1759 the concept of original genius has been at the centre of considerations concerning creative processes. And George Frideric Handel's compositions were regarded not only by his contemporaries, but also by subsequent generations as an epitome of the creative power of a sublime artistic personality individualized in every sense

The paper reconstructs the tension between the then emerging approach of emphasising authorial innovation and the traditional learned practice of adapting and reusing existing texts, which was cultivated in the early modern ars excerpendi. In 1717, a case of plagiarism occurred in the midst of a new historiographical genre (Reichshistorie) and attracted much attention. Complementing existing scholarship

In his "Méthode nouvelle," an anonymous article in the Bibliothèque universelle of 1686, John Locke described his way of collecting excerpts in notebooks and retrieving relevant entries. The well-known practice of entering textual passages in commonplace books sits uneasily with Locke's criticism of received opinion and authority. Is it possible that he used any of these notes to think with? I suggest

In the history of scholarly practice, Voltaire stands out among eighteenth-century authors for his critical attitude towards erudite reading habits. His contempt for the "compilateurs" is a radical expression of the Enlightenment desire to write free of the traditions and burdens of the past. His famous interventions in Ancien Regime court cases are also emblematic of the action-oriented philosophy

Georg Simon Ohm's work in the field of electricity led to what is now considered to be the most fundamental law of electrical circuits, Ohm's Law. Much less known is that only months earlier, Ohm had published another law-one that differed significantly from the now accepted one. The latter entailed a logarithmic relation between the length of the conductor and a parameter that Ohm called "loss of

The article explores deployment of the Darwinian narrative of the "natural history of humanity" in Russian physical anthropology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It traces two narratives developed by the leading Russian school of physical anthropology: one narrative advanced a universalist vision of collective scholarly enterprise working toward clarifying the missing links in

At the beginning of the 20th century, research on material substances such as blood and metals was in high demand, as is apparent from the successful careers of the serologist Ludwik Hirszfeld (1884-1954) and the metallurgist Jan Czochralski (1885-1953). Both were leading experts of their time, their transnational biographies - spanning the German-speaking countries and Poland - were remarkably similar

Im Zuge der archäologischen Erschließung Ägyptens und des Vorderen Orients im 19. Jahrhundert kamen zahlreiche Menschendarstellungen aus den Kulturen des Altertums zum Vorschein, die auch jenseits der Altertums- und Kunstwissenschaften große Faszination auszuüben vermochten. Dabei wurden insbesondere altägyptische Statuen und Reliefs weniger als ästhetische Repräsentationen, sondern als mimetisch-typologische

The paper explores the significance of rhetorical argumentation in Petr Kropotkin's treatise Mutual Aid. A Factor of Evolution (1902). It argues that Kropotkin's work is steeped in the tradition of a rhetoric of science that is profoundly Darwinian and in which various forms of analogic reasoning play a central role. After explaining the epistemic function of the metaphors "struggle for existence"

Ever since Thomas Kuhn's influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), textbooks have suffered a bad reputation. They have been accused of distorting-at times purportedly-history and of feeding students with an unacceptably simplified and optimistic view of science. This attitude started to change only in recent times. With the increase of attention paid not only to how theories are conceived

In this paper we consider the prehistory of quantum gravity (1916-1930) from two perspectives. First, we investigate how this research field constituted itself and we propose for the first time a red thread to trace its evolution in this earliest period. Second, we focus on a case study: the earliest work of Léon Rosenfeld. In 1927 he tried to merge wave mechanics with general relativity in the context

This paper is a preliminary exploration of the connections between the statistical style of reasoning and the research practices of statistical mechanics in the early period of the long quantum revolution. It suggests that before 1925 the instantiations of the statistical style in physics went through two phases. The first phase consisted of the formulation of the Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics on the

At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s, the process of parallel invention of masers and lasers took place on the opposing sides of the Iron Curtain. While the American part of the story has been investigated by historians in much penetrating detail, comparable Soviet developments were described more superficially. This study aims at, to some extent, repairing this discrepancy by analyzing the

Previous research in the history of physics has led us to believe that Yoshio Nishina (1890-1851) virtually single-handedly imported quantum physics into Japan. However, there are first-hand accounts that Yoshikatsu Sugiura (1895-1960) also played an important role. Sugiura made his name in quantum chemistry with his contribution to the Heitler-London theory of the chemical bond. Yet, historians of

Is there a future for the history of science? And if there is, what will it look like? These questions stood at the outset of the last special issue of Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, published in December 2018 under the auspices of the previous editorship. Many people accepted the challenge and formulated answers from their particular perspectives. One of the topics that repeatedly came up,

Das vorliegende Heft der Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte / History of Science and Humanities markiert gleich in mehrfacher Hinsicht eine Z-sur in der Geschichte dieser Zeitschrift. Zun-chst gibt es ein neues Redaktionsteam. Seit Januar 2019 werden die Berichte von K-rin Nickelsen (Menchen) gemeinsam mit Christian Joas (Kopenhagen), Dominik Knaupp (Menchen) sowie Fabian Kr-mer (Menchen) herausgegeben

In recent years, cultural studies and cultural theory have experienced a new wave of ecological thought. Despite the engagement with the Anthropocene the history of ecology and the environmental sciences has remained somewhat of a puzzle. This goes especially for the 20th century, a period when the sciences of the environment came to matter on a broader scale. Why do we actually know so little about

The new field of the history of knowledge is often presented as a mere expansion of the history of science. We argue that it has a greater ambition. The re‐definition of the historiographical domain of the history of knowledge urges us to ask new questions about the boundaries, hierarchies, and mutual constitution of different types of knowledge as well as the role and assessment of failure and ignorance

This essay investigates the origins and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the new field known as Wissensgeschichte from the perspective of an American intellectual historian. It argues that while some historians of science may be ready to embrace a new identity as historians of knowledge, this terminology remains baggy and invites facile applications of Foucauldian theory. The essay concludes

Mit ihrem Leitbild der „deutschen Frau“ war die Frauenheilkunde in die Ideologie des Nationalsozialismus in ganz besonderer Weise verstrickt. Vor diesem Hintergrund zielt das Erkenntnisinteresse des vorliegenden Beitrags auf Arten und Weisen, mit denen der gesamtdeutsche Fachdiskurs der Gynäkologie und Geburtshilfe nach 1945 unter Maßgaben der Entnazifizierungspolitik und unter Einfluss der Zensurbehörden

This essay presents analogies between the development of historical writing and of physical science during the early modern period. Its necessarily spotty coverage runs from the mid sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth. The analogies include arising from practical concerns; preferring material documents and experimental inquiries over texts; making use of mathematical auxiliary sciences;

The scope and mission of the history of science have been constant objects of reflection and debate within the profession. Recently, Lorraine Daston has called for a shift of focus: from the history of science to the history of knowledge. Such a move is an attempt at broadening the field and ridding it of the contradictions deriving from its modernist myth of origin and principle of demarcation. Taking

This paper explores the kind of knowledge that partisans profess in order to contribute to our studies of what has usually been thought of as the “denial of science.” Building on the research of Robert Proctor, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, I show that the tobacco interests and climate science skeptics usually described as “doubt mongers” also purveyed forms of certainty and rested their arguments

Although I remain sympathetic to the narrative behind the notion of “History of Knowledge,” I argue against redrawing the disciplinary boundaries around “knowledge,” as opposed to retaining the term “science.” This is not because I think there is no place for a “history of knowledge,” and not because I am concerned that such a redrawing of disciplinary boundaries would open the floodgates of “anything

The Classical Archaeologist Hermann Thiersch (1874–1939) and the Acquisition of the Basel Papyrus Collection in 1899/1900. During the winter of 1899/1900, the young archaeologist Hermann Thiersch traveled to Cairo to purchase papyri for the universities in Basel, Strasbourg, and Munich. By this point, European and North American collectors and researchers were racing to discover the finest material

A House for Pettenkofer. Cultivation of a Scientific Tradition in Munich, 1902–1962. The article deals with three attempts to preserve the memory as well as the scientific heritage of Max von Pettenkofer, made by his successors at the University of Munich's Institute of Hygiene, Max von Gruber, Karl Kisskalt, and Hermann Eyer. All of those scientific memorials were supposed to take the form of a building:

The American Policy Sciences, Complexity and the Crisis of Government: On the Social Embeddedness of Concept Formation in the Social Sciences. By analyzing debates about social “complexity” in the American policy sciences and in intellectual discourse of the 1970s, this article draws attention to the social embeddedness of concept formation and theory building in the social sciences. In the 1970s,

Africa in the View of the Academic World of the GDR: An Overview of the History of African Ethnography. Ethnography – also referred to as ethnology by the GDR – was a “minor subject” in which typical big science problems such as mass‐study and large‐scale research played no role. It was therefore not the focus of science policy interventions by the state and/or its ruling party. Nevertheless, ethnographic

Viennese Brain Research and the Formation o