Abstracts Archive

“We are come ashore into a new World,” declared Nehemiah Grew in the dedication to his 17th century publication commissioned by the Royal Society. The world he went on to describe, however, did not include any of the typical features one might expect from a treatise on the exploration of new ter...

In this paper, I will address three related topics: (1) I will discuss Descartes' medical sources and aims when he was writing the long eighteenth chapter of Le Monde (The World), devoted to the study of L'Homme (Man) in the early 1630s.
(2) I will demonstrate the significant novelty introduced in...

In this paper, I examine how historical accounts of experimentation on nonhuman animals can be written in a way that does justice to tested animals as agentic and response-able living beings. In accordance with recent calls to decenter the human, nonhuman animals are given center stage, not because ...

2019 will mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Culianu’s Éros et magie à la Renaissance, 1484, an influential and controversial work of early-modern intellectual history. The central claim of the book is that Renaissance magic, as a specific form of practical knowledge bridgin...

Prevailing views cast the Pacific as a desolate, sparsely populated expanse between continents and a blank slate for the assertion of Western epistemological and territorial claims. Burgeoning East Asian scholarship, migration studies and indigenous critical works adumbrate a radically opposed view:...

This paper enquires the status of late medieval botanical scholars and their capacity to create botanical illustrations. Were plant scholars in the late Middle Ages able to draw at all? Could their own drawings be helpful for the plant studies they performed? Since Antiquity and throughout the Middl...

Johann Funck's "Chronologia" was one of the most popular tabular chronologies of the early modern period with several editions following its original 1545 publication in Nuremberg. In my presentation, I will display an opening from the 1554 Basel edition of the same work to highlight the instability...

The German Institute for Norms (later called DIN), founded in 1917, ostensibly aimed to first fuel wartime production and later restart the German economy after the lost war. By prescribing dimensions and shapes for mass produced objects, engineers and architects constructed an entire norm system sc...

The 1964 Peking Science Symposium was the largest international scientific congress held in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao Era. This event was the centrepiece of China’s strategic pivot in terms of its approach to international scientific outreach during the 1960s, away from exist...

It is a historiographical orthodoxy that the 18th century witnessed the rise of a historical consciousness, partly in response to what Hazard called the crisis of the European mind. Within this rise, we can identify a particular historical sub-genre: that of History of Learning. This ‘historia lit...

On April 27, 1790, the first natural history museum in New Spain—Spanish territory from California to Guatemala—opened its doors. Its founder, José Longinos Martínez, had arrived in the Americas in 1787 as the taxidermist for the Royal Botanical Expedition, one small part of an immense nationa...

In 1794, several persecuted scientists, most notably the chemist Joseph Priestley, fled England for asylum in the United States. Americans celebrated Priestley’s arrival as a victory for science, human rights, and freedom, while their leaders hoped refugee scientists would enhance national science...

The writing of “history” traditionally comprised both natural and human history; but, so the story goes, in the course of the eighteenth century the two historiographies parted, and specialists started to focus on one or the other. By the mid-nineteenth century, at the latest, we have profession...

This paper explores the intersection of ideas about nature, ingenuity (“ingenio”) and invention in seventeenth-century Spanish thought through an examination of the natural historical and natural philosophical writings of the Jesuit scholar Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595-1658), the first holder o...

The question of how Thomas Kuhn’s work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has been received by the Catholic church is a topic that has garnered small bursts of attention over the last fifty years. Theologians such as Hans Küng and David Tracy have explored the possibility of analogizing pa...

The creation of The New York Botanical Garden, an International Plant Research Center at the heart of New York City—and the programs of study that followed since the 1890’s—have helped lay the foundation of ecology as a discipline in America. The Garden now connects an ever larger community of...

During the 19th century children moved into the focus of a blossoming material and media culture. A growing market of parent advice literature, newspapers, and magazines offered information on topics ranging from baby care and nutrition to social and moral education. An increasingly broad range of t...

The paper discusses the history of the food calorie as a case study for the popularization of scientific expertise as an ambivalent process of responsibilization. When chemists introduced the calorie to Americans in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, food and bodies became quantifiable ...

Science in Africa has often been perceived as a tool of empire, a force of ‘epistemicide’, or as diametrically opposed to African knowledge. Recently, historians of science have adopted a more nuanced view which, while sensitive to colonial hierarchies, emphasises circulation, appropriation, and...

In scholarship on the transmission of knowledge across different cultures in the medieval period, historians--most notably George Makdisi--have identified evidence of pedagogical similarities and differences. However, very little attention has been afforded to pedagogies associated with particular d...

In 1851, the botanist and cell-theorist Matthias Schleiden wrote a remarkable essay. In part a book review of Karl Vogt’s German translation of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, it ranged much further, to present an explanation of the contemporary vogue for popular science. Schleiden’...

This panel responds to “the animal turn” in history of science, addressing non-human animals in historical research as well as challenges in writing about other animals. Animal bodies and their behaviors are explored across a range of time periods and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from labo...

When Islamic civilization dawned by the emerge of Islam in the seventh century AD, the seed of knowledge was fertilized in the Islamic realm and it was after about a century (i.e., the eighth century AD) that it yielded. This is the beginning of a period of flourishing of Islamic sciences, known as ...

The role of fiction in both understanding and interpreting the world has recently become an increasingly important topic for many of the human sciences. The next volume of Osiris focuses on the relationship between a particular genre of story-telling – science fiction (SF), told through a variety ...

This paper (undertaken with Aya Homei of Manchester University) depicts how anti-parasite and family planning campaigns developed in Japan and Korea independently after the Second World War, as specifically domestic public health initiatives that directly contributed to the post-war reconstruction (...

This panel presents four different examples of how historical actors in Latin Christendom and the Ottoman Empire worked within and challenged existing narratives about the epistemic value of experience. The papers comprising this panel explore multiple sites and multiple networks separated by space ...

For centuries, people have accumulated natural things and arranged them into collections of examinable, comparable, and combinable specimens to deepen their knowledge of nature. In the last two decades, tracking the pathways of natural things through time, space, and taxonomies has become a popular ...

By the mid-nineteenth century, works by scientists such as Charles Lyell, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin had threatened traditional conceptions of the natural world, drawn heavily from scripture and from the natural theology of William Paley. Much attention has been paid to debates with t...

Today people increasingly use digital technologies to collect data about their body functions and everyday habits. They measure aspects such as sleep patterns, physical performance and calorie intake as well as mood and productivity, in pursuit of self-knowledge and self-improvement. This rapidly gr...