ArgumentSeeing a prodigious cure happen and then testifying about it certainly differs from attending an air pump experiment in order to bear witness to it. Yet early-modern saint-making and the “new” or “experimental philosophy” shared juridical roots, and thereby an understanding of the role of testimony for the establishment of “matters of fact” and for the production of legitimate knowledge. The reforms carried out after the Council of Trent, especially during Urban VIII's pontificate, of the juridical procedures for saint-making in (...) the Catholic Church implied a new attitude towards the examination of proposed miracles. Most of these miracles were healings. While the appeal to medical expertise had long been common, and skepticism had often manifested itself regarding cures or extraordinary bodily phenomena, both were now given formal status. Miracle inquests henceforth leaned towards refuting miraculousness by means of natural explanations. The procedure was systematized in a treatise published in the 1730s by Prospero Lambertini. The combination of Lambertini's work with the canonization causes in which he acted as the “devil's advocate” in charge of disputing arguments favorable to a sainthood candidate allows for a reconstruction of the interplay between the juridical and scientific economies of saint-making, and of the role of testimony in the production of trust and evidence. (shrink)

Over three centuries after the 1711 discovery in the choir of Notre-Dame in Paris of a square-section stone bas-relief (the Pillar of the Boatmen) with depictions of several deities, both Gaulish and Roman, the blocks comprising it were analyzed as a symbol of Parisian power, if not autonomy, vis-à-vis the Roman Empire. Variously considered as local, national, or imperial representations, the blocks were a constant object of admiration, interrogation, and speculation among antiquarians of the Republic of Letters. They were also (...) boundary objects – products of the emergence of a Parisian archeology dated from 1711. If this science reflected the tensions and ambiguities of a local regime of knowledge situated in a national context, it also helped to coordinate archeological work between different institutions and actors. This paper would like to assess the specific role played by the Pillar of the Boatmen as a fetish object in this process. To what extent could an archeological artifact influence this reshaping of urban representation, this change of scales? By following the three-century career of the pillar’s blocks as composite objects, which some have identified as merely stones or a column, it is possible to understand the multiple dimensions that defined the object as archeological – as an artifact that contributed to the relocating of the historical city center – and the multiple approaches that transform existing remains into knowledgeable objects. (shrink)

We used to think it was the job of a historian of Spanish science to combat the negative evaluations of Hispanic cultures that came to be known as the Black Legend. Paradoxically, attempts to amend dominant narratives of the history of science (such as the Scientific Revolution) so that they might accommodate Spain bolstered the very stories we meant to dismantle. Caring about the Black Legend deformed the history we were trying to write and never convinced the people we hoped (...) to sway. In this article, we provide an overview of the historiographic tendencies that most shaped our careers – responses to the Black Legend, such as contributionist history and bibliometrics – and explain why we have chosen to move on. (shrink)

Since Bruno Latour's discussion of a Sakhalin island map used by La Pérouse as part of a global network of “immutable mobiles,” the commensurability of European and non-European knowledge has become an important issue for historians of science. But recent studies have challenged these dichotomous categories as reductive and inadequate for understanding the fluid nature of identities, their relational origins, and their historically constituted character. Itineraries of knowledge transfer, traced in the wake of objects and individuals, offer a powerful heuristic (...) alternative, bypassing artificial epistemological divides and avoiding the limited scale of national or monolingual frames. Approaches that place undue emphasis either on the omnipotence of the imperial center or the centrality of the colonial periphery see only half the picture. Instead, practices of knowledge collection, codification, elaboration, and dissemination—in European, indigenous, and mixed or hybrid contexts—can be better understood by following their moveable parts, with a keen sensitivity toward non-normative epistemologies and more profound temporal frameworks. -/- . (shrink)

This paper traces the trade routes of South American fossil mammal bones in the 1830s, thus elaborating both local and intercontinental networks that ascribed new meanings to objects with little intrinsic value. It analyses the role of British consuls, natural-history dealers, administrative instructions and naturalists, who took the bones from the garbage pits of ranches outside Buenos Aires and delivered them into the hands of anatomists. For several years, the European debates on the anatomy ofMegatheriumwere shaped by the arrival in (...) London of a small living mammal and the ideas and evidence received from Montevideo on the existence of huge fossil bony armours. These debates culminated late in 1838 in the creation of the extinct genusGlyptodonby Richard Owen as a result of the exchange of letters, objects and depictions, and a series of contingent events. Based on primary sources and South American scholarship, this paper aims to contribute to the current debates among historians of science about the mobility of knowledge, as well as presenting the condition that made Charles Darwin's work possible. (shrink)

Recent work in the history of science has questioned the Eurocentric nature of the field and sought to include a more global approach that would serve to displace center–periphery models in favor of approaches that take seriously local knowledge production. Historians of Iberian colonial science have taken up this approach, which involves reliance on indigenous knowledge traditions of the Americas. These traditions present a number of challenges to modern researchers, including availability and reliability of source material, issues of translation and (...) identification, and lack of systematization. This essay explores the challenges that emerged in the author’s attempt to compile a pre-contact Nahua pharmacopeia, the reasons for these challenges, and the ways they may – or may not – be overcome. (shrink)

This article provides a substantive discussion of the relevance of the history of archeology to the history of science. At the same time, the article introduces the papers contained in this special issue as exemplars of this relevance. To make its case, the article moves through various themes in the history of archeology that overlap with key issues in the history of science. The article discusses the role and tension of regimes of science in antiquarian and archeological practices, and also (...) considers issues of scale and place, particularly in relation to the field. Additionally, the piece attends to issues of professionalization and the constitution of an archeological public, at the same time as discussing issues of empire, colonialism, and the circulation of knowledge. Meanwhile, enriching discussions within and beyond the history of science, the article discusses the history of archeology and its relationship with museums, collecting, and material culture and materiality. Finally, the piece discusses the relationship of the history of archeology with wider discussions about scientific ethics. In conclusion, the article questions whether we should speak of ‘the history of archeology’ at all. (shrink)