The Sciences In Enlightened Europe

Radically reorienting our understanding of the Enlightenment, this book explores the complex relations between "englightened" values and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academics and boisterous clubs, plans for violent wars and for universal peace, are all relocated in the landscape of enlightened Europe. The contributors show how changing forms of discipline, machinery, and instrumentation affected the emergence of new kinds of knowledge; consider how institutions of public rate taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional operations of scientific culture at the geographical fringes of Europe. Covering a wide range of scientific disciplines, both in the principal European countries and in areas peripheral to Europe, the book also includes ample illustrations and an extensive bibliography. Implicated in the rise of both fascism and liberal secularism, the moral and political values that shaped the Enlightenment remain controversial today. Through careful scrutiny of how these values influenced and were influenced by the concrete practices of its sciences, this book gives us an entirely new sense of the Enlightenment. -- from back cover.

In this book the eighteenth century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artefacts from India and China, West Africa and Polynesia. A series of authoritative essays written by experts in the field explores the full range of material culture in the long eighteenth century, raising crucial questions about notions of property and invention, homely and commercial lives. The book also includes a series of well-illustrated exhibits, a startling and provocative assemblage of objects from the Enlightenment world, each accompanied by expert commentaries. The collection of essays and exhibits is the result of collaborative debate by scholars from Europe and north America, who have together worked on the cross-disciplinary importance of material history in making sense of how past society was fundamentally transformed through the world of goods.

Air-pumps, electrical machines, colliding ivory balls, coloured sparks, mechanical planetariums, magic mirrors, hot-air balloons - these are just a sample of the devices displayed in public demonstrations of science in the eighteenth century. Public and private demonstrations of natural philosophy in Europe then differed vastly from today's unadorned and anonymous laboratory experiments. Science was cultivated for a variety of purposes in many different places; scientific instruments were built and used for investigative and didactic experiments as well as for entertainment and popular shows. Between the culture of curiosities which characterized the seventeenth century and the distinction between academic and popular science that gradually emerged in the nineteenth, the eighteenth century was a period when scientific activities took place in a variety of sites, ranging from academies, and learned societies to salons and popular fairs, shops and streets. This collection of case studies describing public demonstrations in Britain, Germany, Italy and France exemplifies the wide variety of settings for scientific activities in the European Enlightenment. Filled with sparks and smells, the essays raise broader issues about the ways in which modern science established its legitimacy and social acceptability. They point to two major features of the cultures of science in the eighteenth-century: entertainment and utility. Experimental demonstrations were attended by apothecaries and craftsmen for vocational purposes. At the same time, they had to fit in with the taste of both polite society and market culture. Public demonstrations were a favourite entertainment for ladies and gentlemen and a profitable activity for instrument makers and booksellers.

The articles in this volume of ARCHIMEDES examine particular cases of `reception' in ways that emphasize pressing historiographical and methodological issues. Such issues arise in any consideration of the transmission and appropriation of scientific concepts and practices that originated in the several `centers' of European learning, subsequently to appear (often in considerably altered guise) in regions at the European periphery. They discuss the transfer of new scientific ideas, the mechanisms of their introduction, and the processes of their appropriation at the periphery. The themes that frame the discussions of the complex relationship between the origination of ideas and their reception include the ways in which the ideas of the Scientific Revolution were introduced, the particularities of their expression in each place, the specific forms of resistance encountered by these new ideas, the extent to which such expression and resistance displays national characteristics, the procedures through which new ways of dealing with nature were made legitimate, and the commonalities and differences between the methods developed by scholars for handling scientific issues.

The Viennese Jesuit court astronomer Maximilian Hell was a key figure in the eighteenth-century circulation of knowledge. He was already famous by the time of his celebrated 1769 expedition for the observation of the transit of Venus in northern Scandinavia. However, the 1773 suppression of his order forced Hell to develop ingenious strategies of accommodation to changing international and domestic circumstances. Through a study of his career in local, regional, imperial, and global contexts, this book sheds new light on the complex relationship between the Enlightenment, Catholicism, administrative and academic reform in the Habsburg monarchy, and the practices and ends of cultivating science in the Republic of Letters around the end of the first era of the Society of Jesus.

Scientific culture was one of the defining characteristics of the English Enlightenment. The latest discoveries were debated in homes, institutions and towns around the country. But how did the dissemination of scientific knowledge vary with geographical location? What were the differing influences in town and country and from region to region? Enlightenment, Modernity and Science provides the first full length study of the geographies of Georgian scientific culture in England. The author takes the reader on a tour of the principal arenas in which scientific ideas were disseminated, including home, town and countryside, to show how cultures of science and knowledge varied across the Georgian landscape. Taking in key figures such as Erasmus Darwin, Abraham Bennett, and Joseph Priestley along the way, it is a work that sheds important light on the complex geographies of Georgian English scientific culture.

Prior to 1735, South America was terra incognita to many Europeans. But that year, the Paris Academy of Sciences sent a mission to the Spanish American province of Quito (in present-day Ecuador) to study the curvature of the earth at the Equator. Equipped with quadrants and telescopes, the mission’s participants referred to the transfer of scientific knowledge from Europe to the Andes as a “sacred fire” passing mysteriously through European astronomical instruments to observers in South America.By taking an innovative interdisciplinary look at the traces of this expedition, Measuring the New World examines the transatlantic flow of knowledge from West to East. Through ephemeral monuments and geographical maps, this book explores how the social and cultural worlds of South America contributed to the production of European scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Neil Safier uses the notebooks of traveling philosophers, as well as specimens from the expedition, to place this particular scientific endeavor in the larger context of early modern print culture and the emerging intellectual category of scientist as author.

Eating the Enlightenment offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners—from physicians and poets to philosophes and playwrights—E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship. En route, Spary devotes extensive attention to the manufacture, trade, and eating of foods, focusing upon coffee and liqueurs in particular, and also considers controversies over specific issues such as the chemistry of digestion and the nature of alcohol. Familiar figures such as Fontenelle, Diderot, and Rousseau appear alongside little-known individuals from the margins of the world of letters: the draughts-playing café owner Charles Manoury, the “Turkish envoy” Soliman Aga, and the natural philosopher Jacques Gautier d’Agoty. Equally entertaining and enlightening, Eating the Enlightenment will be an original contribution to discussions of the dissemination of knowledge and the nature of scientific authority.