Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

493 Pages·2005·5.58 MB·English

by  Gianna Pomata (Editor)

history of science and technology
Pomata and
investigation and the writing ofhistory by physicians;
Siraisi, editors
parallels between the practices ofcollecting and presenting “What is history,and where does history stand in relation to other ways ofknowing? Ever
historia
information in natural history and antiquarianism;and since Herodotus,answers to such questions have shaped Western culture,especially in the
significant examples ofthe ease with which early seven- period illuminated by these thoughtful and informative essays.Pomata,Siraisi,and their historia
teenth-century antiquarian scholars moved from studies colleagues are to be congratulated on a volume that reopens these ancient questions with
ofnature to studies ofculture. great insight and effect,showing how indispensable the history ofscience and medicine is
Empiricism and Erudition
to the larger story ofEuropean culture.”
Gianna Pomata is Associate Professor ofHistory at the brian copenhaver, Professor ofPhilosophy and History,University ofCalifornia, in Early Modern Europe
University ofBologna.Nancy G.Siraisi is Distinguished Los Angeles edited by gianna pomata
Professor Emeritus in History at Hunter College and at
and nancy g. siraisi
h
the Graduate Center,City University ofNew York. “The meaning ofthe term historiain the early modern vocabulary ofknowledge was so varied
and so multilayered that it can be properly understood only when approached from multi-
transformations:
Studies in the History of ple angles.This book brings together scholars from a wide variety ofdisciplines to explore
i
Science and Technology series the term’s manifold meanings,revealing a rich and highly textured understanding of historia
that is utterly lost to the modern world.With essays ranging from the study ofthe human s
past to the meaning of historiain medicine and natural history,it provides a fascinating
glimpse into the intellectual world ofthe late Renaissance.” t
T
william eamon, he early modern genre of historiaconnected the
Regents Professor ofHistory,New Mexico State University
study ofnature and the study ofculture from the
o
early Renaissance to the eighteenth century.The
“While today we may take the importance of‘facts’for granted,a few centuries ago the
ubiquity of historiaas a descriptive method across a variety
search for examples oftrue events and real things (historia),and a reluctance to speculate
about causes,helped to create an intellectual revolution in both the natural and the human r ofdisciplines—including natural history,medicine,anti-
sciences.Between about 1450and 1650,getting the details right mattered to just about quarianism,and philology—indicates how closely inter-
twined these scholarly pursuits were in the early modern
everyone.A careful search for accurate information lay behind the production ofnatural
i
period.The essays collected in this volume demonstrate
histories,case histories,civil and religious histories,and other studies.This collection makes
sense ofthat common enterprise and,in a number ofelegant essays,underlines the contem- a that historiacan be considered a key epistemic tool ofearly
modern intellectual practices.
porary importance ofbeing correct.It is a work ofsignificance to all who study the period,
Empiricism and Erudition
Focusing on the actual use of historiaacross disciplines,
the history ofideas,and the history ofscience and medicine.”
harold j. cook, the essays highlight a distinctive feature ofearly modern
The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History ofMedicine at in Early Modern Europe
descriptive sciences:the coupling ofobservational skills with
University College London
edited by gianna pomata philological learning,empiricism with erudition.Thus the
contributors essays bring to light previously unexamined links between
and nancy g. siraisi
the culture ofhumanism and the scientific revolution.
Ann Blair,Chiara Crisciani,Anthony Grafton,Donald R.Kelley,Ian Maclean,Peter N.
The contributors,from a range ofdisciplines that echoes
Miller,Martin Mulsow,Brian Ogilvie,Laurent Pinon,Gianna Pomata,Nancy G.Siraisi
the broad scope ofearly modern historia,examine such topics
as the development ofa new interest in historical method
Cover image:Emblem 16,page 22,from Andrea Alciati, the mit press 0-262-16229-6 from the Renaissance artes historicaeto the eighteenth-century
Emblemata D. A. Alciati(Lyon:Guillaume Rouillé,1550). Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology ,!7IA2G2-bgccjg!:t;K;k;K;k tension between “history”and “system”;shifts in Aristotelian
Typ 515.50.132,Department ofPrinting and Graphic Arts, Cambridge,Massachusetts 02142 thought paving the way for revaluation of historiaas
descriptive knowledge;the rise ofthe new discipline ofnat-
Houghton Library,Harvard College Library. http://mitpress.mit.edu
ural history;the uses of historiain anatomical and medical
Acknowledgments
The genesis of this volume was the workshop “Historia: Explorations
in the History of Early Modern Empiricism” held at the Max Planck
Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, 1–30 June 2003. We wish
to express our gratitude to the Institute for its unusually generous spon-
sorship, which made the workshop and the subsequent volume possible
and greatly facilitated our work as organizers and editors. The Institute’s
financial support and hospitality gave us the resources to convene an
international group of scholars for a month—an invaluable asset when
the goal is, as it was in our case, to bring together scholars from differ-
ent disciplines, not to mention different languages and intellectual tra-
ditions. A month of scholarly cohabitation at the Institute allowed us to
pursue the cross-disciplinary goals of our project in an intensively inter-
active way. Following the practice of working groups at the Max Planck
Institute, papers were precirculated in draft to facilitate discussion during
the first week of our meeting in Berlin, when each paper was debated in
its own terms and with a view to general unifying themes. Contributors
then enjoyed the Institute’s gracious hospitality for two weeks devoted
to revising the papers in the light of group discussion, and to complet-
ing new research as necessary, using the Institute’s excellent research
library service. Our month together ended with another week of renewed
general discussion of the revised papers, with particular attention to the
shared themes to be addressed by the editors in the introduction. The
Institute’s hospitality greatly facilitated our work in planning, preparing,
and editing a collection of individually authored essays that are also, we
hope, genuinely related to one another.
While we gratefully acknowledge the Institute’s support, we particu-
larly wish to thank its director, Lorraine Daston, for her intellectual
viii Acknowledgments
contribution to our work. She was a driving force of the project from
beginning to end. Hers was the idea of recruiting an international
research group on the early modern historia, and in inviting us to organ-
ize the workshop she provided many useful suggestions and insights that
were crucial for our original framing of the project. We would like to
thank her, moreover, for her active participation in our Berlin workshop,
which included an incisive summing-up of our final discussion.
Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the Institute’s support in assigning
us a research assistant, Fabian Krämer, who greatly helped with the edi-
torial stage of our task. We thank him for his diligent work in identify-
ing sources for the introduction and unifying the book’s bibliography.
We would also like to thank Elizabeth McCahill for help in preparing
the manuscript for submission.
We are most grateful to Jed Buchwald, general editor of the Trans-
formations series at the MIT Press, for his interest in our project and his
helpful and expert advice for the completion of the volume. Thanks are
also due to Matthew Abbate and Sara Meirowitz of the MIT Press for
their careful editorial work on the manuscript, and to Janet Abbate for
meticulous and thoughtful copyediting.
Last but not least, we would like to thank all the contributors to the
volume for their enthusiastic sharing of our interest in historia, and their
willingness to move beyond individual interests to join a group explo-
ration of the intricacies of the early modern intellectual landscape. It was
a great pleasure to share with such distinguished practitioners the chal-
lenges and the delights of historia’s time-honored craft.
Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi
Introduction
Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi
Il y aurait un beau livre à écrire sur le mot d’histoire et ses variations de sens
au cours des périodes successives...de l’histoire.
—Lucien Febvre (1936) reviewing Karl Keuck, Historia. Geschichte des
Wortes und seiner Bedeutungen in der Antike und in den romanischen
Sprachen,1934)1
Historia before Historicism
Writing about the prominence of natural history in the seventeenth
century, such a deep connoisseur of the early modern “life sciences” as
Jacques Roger noted that “the history of the word historia itself would
deserve an accurate study.”2 The present book offers a contribution in
that direction by bringing together several essays that investigate, in a
collaborative manner, what historia meant in the early modern vocabu-
lary of knowledge and the roles that historia played in early modern
encyclopedism. The starting point of our inquiry is the ubiquity of his-
toria in early modern learning—the fact that it featured prominently in
a wide array of disciplines ranging from antiquarian studies and civil
history to medicine and natural philosophy. This book is in fact
the result of a workshop, sponsored by the Max Planck Institut für
Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, where scholars working in these
different fields (from the history of the medical and natural sciences to
that of scholarship and historiography) convened with a common
focus on historia as a key epistemic tool of early modern intellectual
practices.3
Bringing together scholars from such disparate backgrounds was
indeed indispensable to our project, because in striking contrast to the
modern use of the term “history,” the early modern historia straddled
2 Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi
the distinction between human and natural subjects, embracing accounts
of objects in the natural world as well as the record of human action.
One may say, in fact, that from the early Renaissance to the eighteenth
century, nature was fully part of the field of research called historia. Most
studies of early modern intellectual life, however, have focused exclu-
sively on historia as civil history, the sense closest to modern usage. A
formidable body of scholarship has been devoted to humanist and
Renaissance writings on historia as the record of the human past. Well
known and much studied are the humanists’ reevaluation of the rhetor-
ical and moral uses of political and civil history and the new attention
to the reading and writing of history signaled by the new genre of the
artes historicae.4 Other studies have traced such indications of the
increasing significance attached to historiain the early modern period as
the emergence of disciplinary histories, the new genre of confessional
history, and the institution of chairs or lectureships of history in univer-
sities and academies.5
By contrast, the role historia played in early modern natural philoso-
phy and medicine has been all but ignored, though there is plenty of evi-
dence of the new significance that historia, in several variants and genres,
also had in these fields. It is well known that a prominent feature of early
modern science was the rapid and exponential growth of historia natu-
ralis, but it would be more correct to talk of a proliferation of natural
histories—in the plural—all with different philosophical pedigrees
and correspondingly different notions of what historia was about.
Aristotelian and Plinian models of natural history, to give the most
obvious example, implied very different concepts of historia.6 In medi-
cine also—a discipline whose ancient connections with history were
noted long ago by Arnaldo Momigliano7—historia enjoyed a special
vogue. A veritable explosion of clinical and anatomical reports written
in the historia format began in the late sixteenth century, to proliferate
even further in the following century. Case histories (called historiae or
observationes) and autopsy narratives multiplied, while in anatomy his-
toria acquired the status of a specific, even technical term. When Fabri-
cius of Acquapendente or William Harvey, for instance, wrote the results
of their anatomical investigations, they regularly started with what they
called a historia, meaning a thorough description of the structure of
bodily parts, preliminary to an understanding of their function, or
Introduction 3
“use.”8 Next to the anatomists’ historia, we also find in late sixteenth-
century medical literature a new acceptation of historia as casus, the
report of an individual case history, a usage circulated by Renaissance
commentators on Hippocrates’ Epidemics. Thus both in natural history
and in medicine historia was an increasingly significant epistemic tool,
covering different intellectual objectives but with an overall reference to
the knowledge and description of particulars (including description from
direct observation).
Was there any link between these new uses of historiaby early modern
physicians and naturalists and the Renaissance intensive discussion and
reappraisal of historiaas antiquarian knowledge? This question has been
mostly evaded so far—not surprisingly, since until recently the history of
historiography and the history of the natural sciences (including medi-
cine) have mostly proceeded on distinct and separate paths.9The reasons
for this separation are not difficult to surmise. A key factor has certainly
been the increasing disjunction of classical studies and scientific training
in the European educational system since the nineteenth century—a dis-
junction that reached momentous proportions in the challenge to the
positivist view of the unity of science posited by the rise of historicism.
At the turn of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twenti-
eth, the attempt to give an autonomous epistemological foundation to
the historical sciences, undertaken by the founding fathers of neo-
Kantian historicism—Windelband, Rickert, Dilthey—led to a sharp dis-
tinction between the “generalizing” (or nomothetic) natural sciences and
the “individualizing” (or idiographic) historical sciences.10 Whether the
distinction between the two was defined as ontological (as in Dilthey) or
logical and conceptual (as in Windelband and Rickert), the epistemol-
ogy of the historical sciences was seen as fundamentally different from
that of the natural sciences. It is not surprising, therefore, that the his-
tories of the two groups of sciences were also perceived as largely unre-
lated—two autonomous, separate intellectual developments. Moreover,
the conventional view of the origins of Historismus, as pioneered by
Friedrich Meinecke, placed the rise of historical consciousness and
method in the eighteenth century—a chronology totally unrelated to the
scientific revolution.11 Later studies of the development of historical
method moved back the chronology, recognizing that already in the
sixteenth century there was a significant move from the rhetorical or
4 Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi
literary concept of historia to a new sensitivity to issues of method and
source criticism, especially in the French artes historicae. But the signif-
icant connection drawn here was with jurisprudence—the spilling over
into history writing of the critical methods of the jurists’ mos gallicus—
not with the natural sciences.12 Though Arnaldo Momigliano long ago
pointed out the similarities between the mental outlook of the early
modern antiquarians and that of contemporary naturalists, his insight
did not lead until recently to further studies in that direction, partly also,
perhaps, because he himself saw antiquarianism as an intellectual tradi-
tion largely apart from historiography.13The underlying assumption that
went unchallenged was that the humanist historiaof the Renaissance was
basically a literary genre, not an epistemic genre.
A significant breakthrough from this view was Arno Seifert’s survey
of early modern definitions of historia in a seminal book published more
than a quarter of a century ago.14 Combining historical semantics with
traditional history of ideas, Seifert reconstructed in detail the Begriffs-
geschichte of historia as a term of learned language, establishing
beyond doubt that in the early modern period, in addition to the liter-
ary genre of narratio rerum gestarum, historia indicated primarily a
modus cognoscendi—a cognitive category. Seifert argued that the epis-
temological status of historia underwent a momentous change in the
transition from Scholasticism to humanism. In Scholastic philosophy, his-
toria had meant incomplete knowledge—the Aristotelian apodeixis tou
oti (or Scholastic demonstratio quia)—that simply offered a description
of “how the thing is” without explaining why it is so. Historia in this
sense was ancillary to philosophy, the humble prelude to the philosoph-
ical knowledge of causes. In contrast, the humanists rediscovered the
ancient Greek (pre-Aristotelian) usage of the word as knowledge in
general, not limited to res gestae but fully including nature—an intellec-
tual turning point stressed by Seifert as the premise to historia’s triumph
in Renaissance intellectual life. Reviewing the various meanings attrib-
uted to cognitio historica from the humanists to Kant, Seifert showed
that starting with the Renaissance emphasis on historiaas vera narratio,
the term came to be associated with a cluster of concepts all variously
related to descriptive, nondemonstrative knowledge (cognitio quod est),
knowledge based on sense perception (sensata cognitio), and knowledge
of particulars (cognitio singularium). This trend culminated in the
Introduction 5
Baconian identification of historia and experientia, which gave the his-
toria of nature an unprecedented significance as the foundation of a true
natural philosophy. Historia kept this association with the semantic field
of factual knowledge (nuda facti notitia) well into the philosophical lan-
guage of the eighteenth century, as finally exemplified by Kant’s defini-
tion of “historical knowledge” as “cognitio ex datis.” Thus for about
two hundred years, Seifert argued, historia came to signify in learned
language the general field of “prescientific empirical knowledge” (vor-
wissenschaftliche Empirie), which had previously been unnamed because
it had not constituted a significant epistemic category.15 The main thesis
of Seifert’s book is that historiawas the Namengeberin, the “name-giver”
or godmother of early modern empiricism.
Seifert’s work remains the most significant contribution to the history
of historia as an epistemological category, and one to which our project
is much indebted.16 Our goal here, however, is to revisit the history of
early modern historia with a primary emphasis not just, as in his book,
on philosophical definitions, but rather on historia’s actual uses across
disciplinary practices. The essays we present in this volume show that
the uses of historia can throw light on the scientific and intellectual
history of the early modern period in two ways. First, they reveal intel-
lectual practices common to natural and human sciences at a time when
what were later to be called the “two cultures” were still relatively undif-
ferentiated. Second, because of historia’s scope as the descriptive knowl-
edge of particulars, these essays offer a close look at the ways in which
practices of information gathering, observation and description devel-
oped in early modern empiricism.
First and foremost, a closer look at historia brings into sharper focus
the peculiar characteristics of the early modern system of the sciences.
The versatility of the early modern historia, equally applicable to the
domain of natural knowledge and to the study of human action, points
to a salient feature of early modern encyclopedism: the lack of a clear-
cut boundary between the study of nature and the study of culture. The
early modern system of knowledge was a far cry from the sharp dis-
tinction of nomothetic versus idiographic disciplines envisaged by
nineteenth-century historicism. If anything, much of early modern
natural knowledge seems by modern standards intensively “idio-
graphic,” highly suspicious of generalization and primarily bent on
6 Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi
capturing the protean world of particulars through strongly analytical
and descriptive skills. The early modern historiaseriously challenges our
assumptions about nature and culture as separate fields of inquiry. It
forces us to realize that, just as the early modern notion of nature was
widely different from ours,17 so did the early modern notion of historia
vary in fundamental ways from what we now call “history” or “culture.”
Early modern natura and historia were not antithetical terms, nor were
the boundaries between them drawn as we draw them now. Precisely
because the contrast with nature is at the very core of our conception of
history, it is often misleading to translate as “history” the early modern
term historia,which often referred to natural objects. Though the expres-
sions “natural history” and medical “case history” are obvious remnants
in our current language of the early modern term, “history” tout court
is all too often an inadequate if not erroneous rendition for a word that
meant primarily a description with little, if any, reference to temporal-
ity. For these reasons, it is often difficult to translate accurately the early
modern historia into the modern languages. Many authors in this col-
lection choose to steer clear of anachronism by systematically using the
Latin term, as we also do in this introductory essay and in the title of
the book.
The early modern historia was a fundamental trait-d’union not just
between conceptual domains but also between different scholarly activ-
ities. Indeed, it is especially by looking at actual intellectual practices that
we can notice how questionable and grossly anachronistic are the disci-
plinary boundaries that are sometimes projected onto early modern
culture. Thus a focus on the various forms of historia may bring us to a
better understanding of intellectual connections that seem puzzling by
present-day disciplinary divisions, such as the close proximity of anti-
quarian studies with medicine and natural philosophy—a phenomenon
not yet fully described and accounted for, though often noticed in passing
by historians of early modern intellectual life, such as Giuseppe Olmi in
the case of Italy and Barbara Shapiro in that of England.18 The connec-
tions among the uses of historia across disciplines were often personal
as well as intellectual. It is not just that the scholars who engaged in
antiquarian research or in the descriptive natural sciences shared the
common culture of late humanism; in several cases, they were actually
the same person. Learned physicians and naturalists not only incorpo-
Introduction 7
rated historiae into their own disciplines but were often active contrib-
utors to the antiquarian and historical culture of their age. In fact, some
early modern physicians openly advocated their polymathic competence
in various areas of learning.19 The very large part played by men with
medical training in the development of natural history and of men
with legal training in the development of civil history is well known, but
there are also numerous examples of physicians who wrote civil history
or engaged in antiquarian pursuits.20 Furthermore, when patterns of
authorship and personal interests are examined, the division between
history and antiquarian studies of the material culture of the past
becomes less clear than is usually assumed. The polymathic or polyhis-
torical character of early modern scholarship has been conventionally
viewed under the negative angle of erudite (if not pedantic) eclecticism,
but much innovative research into both nature and antiquities was
carried on by scholars who were polyhistors in the sense of being the
authors of historiae on various subjects.21 A close look at the multifari-
ous practices of historia shows that between the fifteenth and the sev-
enteenth centuries, academic education still led into an intellectual world
where some disciplinary boundaries were largely permeable, if indeed
they existed at all. Though individual disciplines involved extensive spe-
cialized knowledge, many aspects of humanistic erudition, with its philo-
logical training, were common to learned discourse across disciplines,
spanning both the study of nature and other more rhetorical or literary
pursuits.
The essays in this volume bring out some of these connections by
tracing the ascending fortunes of historia across a range of descriptive
sciences that applied humanist scholarship to both nature and the human
past. They show how closely intertwined were the practices of natural
history, medicine, philology, and antiquarianism, how indeed the same
scholar could nimbly move from one to another, or even combine them
in the same piece of work. Most significantly, they highlight, through a
rich set of examples, one of the most intriguing features of the early
modern descriptive sciences, namely the interlocking of observational
skills and philological learning—the coupling of empiricism and erudi-
tion. They point out striking parallels between ways of observing and
ways of reading, close links between firsthand observation and book
learning, thus bringing into focus the peculiar brand of scholarly or