One of the most pressing questions for the historically-minded nineteenth century was this: just how much could one trust Herodotus? Known since antiquity as ‚the father of history,’ Herodotus was also notorious for reporting improbable marvels (immense man-make lakes) and sensational tall tales (Arion the bard saved from drowning by a dolphin). Already in the later eighteenth century, scholars began following in the footsteps of the widely-traveled Greek, measuring the Hellespont, investigating wind patterns on the Nile, following crocodiles to check Herodotus’ accounts. The process involved scholars of all types—military geographers, zoologists, proto-ethnographers, archaeologists, orientalists—and a great deal of controversy about how to translate ancient measurements, how to ‚read through’ Herodotus’ Greek to establish proper Egyptian or Persian terms or names, how seriously to take his account of the flying snakes of Egypt, how much change in ‚oriental’ habits to expect over time. In each case, scholars had to decide what it would mean to verify a report given by Herodotus, and debate led to new cycles of research, and more, often highly creative, strategies of verification (or falsification). In this paper, I will offer a few examples of the ways in which scholars with different backgrounds tried to fact-check Herodotus. I will underscore the difficulties all sides faced in making arguments that stuck, but also the gradual emergence of a consensus across the disciplines that Herodotus, in many cases, was a worthy companion, if hardly an inerrant patriarch.

A parallel development in the history of the sciences and the humanities was the structural organization of small-scale, practical, and method-oriented training by German university professors in the mid-nineteenth century. For several disciplines in the humanities and the sciences, historical studies exist which deal with the details of such training. So far, however, the results of these studies have hardly been brought into relation with one another. In my paper, I compare the pedagogical methods of physicists and historians in mid-nineteenth-century Berlin. My main focus lies on the schools emerging around the physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus and the historian Leopold von Ranke. Remarkably, the most advanced exercises (Übungen) that they organized did not take place at the university, but at their private homes. In family-like settings, Magnus and Ranke developed a personal bond with their students, and established standards for the methods and scholarly persona necessary to obtain legitimate “scientific” (wissenschaftliches) knowledge. Drawing the comparison further, I argue that some of the epistemic virtues stressed by historians and physicists trained in these environments were strikingly similar. For instance, Magnus, Ranke, and their students (including Hermann von Helmholtz and Heinrich von Sybel) were all concerned about the proper relation between empirical and speculative methods. While defining this relation, they commonly referred to the importance of ‘exactitude’, ‘skill to combine’ (Kombinationsgabe), and ‘objectivity’, even though the interpretations and practices they associated with these epistemic virtues were different.


The sciences and the humanities have not only been sharing practices, concepts or epistemic virtues with one another, they also cooperated in a concrete, practical and material way. Around 1880, scientific archaeology emerged. In several instances, “historians of material culture”, meaning archaeologists, orientalists, (art-)historians and paleographers, and scientists shared a research interest in archaeological objects and the material analysis thereof. Objects excavated during nineteenth-century colonial expeditions shifted the research focus of historical disciplines towards material sources. The materiality of artefacts held information about the object’s date, origin and manufacturing. However, material analysis required scientific methods. What is still largely unknown, is that historians therefore cooperated with chemists or botanists, who e.g. microscopically analyzed plant fibres in ancient manuscripts or Babylonian enameled tiles, and thus were able to answer historico-cultural questions about ancient civilizations lacking textual sources. My project investigates cooperations between the aforementioned disciplines in terms of their formation and development in German speaking countries from 1880-1930. Using two examples of cooperations, between paleography and botany and assyriology and chemistry, I will uncover cooperative networks and transfer of knowledge among cooperators. In addition, through the analysis of the actor’s research objects (such as paper samples) and the construction of the scientific methods applied to them, I explore the cooperations’ underlying shared practices of knowledge organization, knowledge production, and innovation processes. Generally, my case studies provide insights into the dynamics of cooperative research across disciplinary boundaries between the sciences and the humanities around 1900.