How we experience scientific revolutions from Galileo & beyond
History professor Renee Raphael receives a Huntington Library Dibner Fellowship to study the acquisition and transmission of mining technology across Europe and the Atlantic from 1400 to 1800
Renee Raphael, assistant professor in the Department of History, is the recipient of the Huntington Library’s Dibner Fellowship, a research grant awarded to historians offering them the opportunity to study in the Burndy Library and to work in the other resources for the history of science and technology at the Huntington. Raphael, a historian of early modern science, will begin her fellowship in the upcoming year.
Traditionally, the history of early modern science has been approached from the perspective of those who innovated or sparked great changes. Raphael’s research, however, explores science from the perspective of those experiencing the transformations. Her first project, Beyond Galileo’s Revolution: Tradition and Novelty in the Eyes of his Readers, examines how seventeenth-century readers read and appropriated Galileo’s final published book, his 1638 Two New Sciences, into their own scholarship. Her current project, which will be completed with support from the Huntington Dibner Fellowship, will explore the acquisition and transmission of mining technology across Europe and the Atlantic from 1400 to 1800.
Below, we asked Raphael questions about her research and what she hopes to accomplish at the Huntington.
1. How did you get interested in the history of early-modern science?
“As a freshman in college, I enrolled in math and physics classes and also took a survey course on the Renaissance in Florence. I loved the survey course; I had taken Latin throughout high school, and it was fascinating for me to see how fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italians read the works of ancient Romans and tried to recreate their world. As a result of the class, I almost majored in a joint-major called History and Literature, but in the end I stuck with physics for the challenges that it offered and the friends I had in the major. As I got closer to graduation, I realized that the readings and work that really kept me up at night were related to history, especially history of science; I was interested in the people who came up with new ideas, more so than coming up with new scientific theories myself. I regarded math and science as ‘puzzles’ to be solved, but I wasn’t driven to create new puzzles myself. I also realized that the skills and people I admired were humanists: people who learned many languages, read, thought, and wrote deeply, and traveled and lived in foreign cultures. Initially I entered graduate school to study early modern European intellectual history, but I took a class in the history of early modern science and was hooked: it had a deep historiographical tradition which made it challenging and was situated at the intersection of religion, science, literature, and philosophy. I combined all these interests with my first project, which looked at the reception of Galileo’s work in the seventeenth century, especially in Italy.”
2. What are the specifics of your research that you will be conducting or expanding through this fellowship?
“My fellowship at the Huntington will give me the time and materials to begin a second and very new project on the history of mining technology. I’m interested in how people developed new techniques of mining in the period and how this knowledge circulated: how it was taught and passed on, how people wrote and read about it. This new project on the surface looks very different from my first project, which dealt with a topic central to the field of early modern history of science: Galileo’s mechanics (Galileo’s contributions to modern physics and mechanical engineering). However, the projects deal with many of the same questions. Both engage with questions of transformations in early modern science. Both also deal with the same subject: mechanics initially was understood as a practical tradition (like mining) but through the work of Galileo and others, it became more theoretical. Finally, both projects deal with issues of the circulation of knowledge, although in this new project I’m specifically interested in the circulation of mining technology in a more global setting.”
3. What are some of the resources (that you will now have access to) that prove most valuable/important to you?
“The Huntington Library has extensive holdings in early modern books and manuscripts which I’ll consult during my fellowship year. One of their collections is that of the Burndy Library, which is devoted to scientific works. It has many printed books related to early mining and metallurgy, including Biringuccio's 1540 Pirotechnia, Agricola's 1556 De re metallica, and Barba's 1640 El arte de los metales. The library also has holdings related to colonization, surveying, and mining in early modern Europe and colonial America. These materials include manuscript collections dealing with eighteenth-century mining in California, France, England, and Scotland. Finally, I will also make use of printed histories of the early Americas that describe the discovery of mineral deposits.”
4. How can your research in this area help us better understand science today?
“In general, I think the main lesson from historical scholarship about science is that science as we know it didn’t always exist as it does today and that the importance we assign to science isn’t automatic; it is something society creates. More specifically, what motivates my project is my own experience working for an Internet company in Ecuador after graduating from college. I had taken many computer science classes in college and had a degree from a good university; the company hired me on the spot. However, when I went to work, initially I wasn’t useful at all. I found out I had little practical experience building systems from the ground up. In the US, if I had gone to work for a company, I likely would have been mentored by people with more experience, who themselves would have been mentored by others; I would have been valuable because I learned quickly. In Ecuador, however, the people with whom I worked were all learning from books written in the US and learning from the books how to work with open-source software. I knew that open-source software was designed to be readily available to people just like those with whom I worked in Ecuador; it was designed to be inexpensive and provide the tools to make technology global. However, I realized as I worked with my co-workers how difficult it was to implement such a system: it is hard to learn how to do something technical from books and it is even more difficult to do so in a foreign language. This experience made me interested in studying historically this problem of developing and sharing technical knowledge; the techniques people use to communicate new knowledge across cultures, both through texts and through practical teaching.”
For more information on Raphael’s work, please visit her faculty profile here.