This collection of essays began in humiliation and disappointment. Not their authors': mine. Several years ago, I solicited papers for panel presentation at the annual conference of a large, rich, old, international association for interdisciplinary Renaissance studies. My proposed topic was ‘Science in Mimesis.’ Given the fascinating work that had recently been done on the role of representation in early-modern science, I thought it might be time to re-examine the somewhat older and larger question of how early-modern science got represented in the period's art and literature. I also thought, since I myself was operating at that disciplinary nexus, that organizing an inclusive panel or two would a good way for me to find out about ongoing and like-minded research. So the CFP went out, and the proposals came in—so many, and so good, that I selectively assembled three panels, rather than one. In a mood of professional satisfaction, I submitted my proposals to the conference's planning committee, which duly rejected them all.
This experience (after laying me out on the floor) moved me to reflect. Clearly, there was a lot of interest out there in the kind of conversation I wanted to have: An interaction between humanistic Renaissance studies (literary criticism, art history, period philosophy, etc.) and what one might call echt history and philosophy of science. Yet equally clearly, I had misjudged the proper forum for this kind of conversation. For that matter, when I looked over past programs of the conference in question, I realized how little of its vast offerings—on confraternities, Dalmatian villas, artistic careers, etc.—actually interested me anymore. Having been trained as a kind of bio-historical literary scholar (able to tell you all about John Milton's first wife's family's fortunes in the Civil War, and that sort of thing), I had followed hermeneutic questions far enough into intellectual history to know that I wanted to go much farther. But that path could only lead away from the big eclectic “Renaissance conference”—where, for years, I had struggled to find my developing interests properly represented. So perhaps it wasn't surprising, on reflection, that the big old conference could take or leave my interests. The truth was, my interests had long since taken leave of the big old conference.
The real problem was that I could not easily identify an alternative forum. There were the various academic societies devoted to the study of “literature and science”; but the logic of apposition seemed terribly weak. There was the portmanteau discipline known as Science and Technology Studies (STS); but this seemed to involve a worrying reflexion on its own activities. There was the Group for Early-Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS); but backdating Foucault and Butler was not what I was after. What I was after was an attempt to understand the decisive emergence of modern natural science in the early-modern period in something like the latter's full strangeness. And what I had begun to perceive (at least since participating in the excellent conference “Biblical Exegesis and Early-Modern Science,” organized by Kevin Killeen and Peter Forshaw at Birkbeck College in 2004) was that the strangeness of early-modern science demanded humanistic illumination—including, for example with regard to the categories of interpretation, literary illumination—in exactly its own terms. So it wasn't just a matter of wanting to put “literature” down next to “science,” or of studying the latter with humanistic tools, as a kind of closed question. It was, rather, a matter of wanting to open up the question of science—the hegemon of knowledge in modernity—precisely by examining the early-modern moment when its boundaries had not yet been closed off to humanistic input.
It remained to consider whether I wanted to naturalize my homeless interests within the ambit of history/philosophy of science (HPS), strictly construed. Conversations with my friend and colleague, the historian and theologian Steve Matthews, convinced me that I did not. For both of us, what made the early-modern intellectual scene so exciting was that it destabilized the standards of modern knowledge and opened them up to the possibility of radical retheorization. I had been drawn to work in HPS that did just that, but Steve made clear to me how selective my readings in this area had been. Meanwhile, as we talked, it became apparent that we were both after a strongly interdisciplinary approach to early-modern science-related issues–not just because such an approach was defensible, but because it was necessary. For any lesser dialectic, insofar as it separated out the “science” from its period imbrications, always-already tended to re-establish the Whiggish teleology that it professed to abjure. Steve and I were committed, from our respective disciplinary backgrounds, to scholarly work that attempted to face the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries' new knowledge as an intellectual problem sui generis. But apart from a few occasional meetings, and regional associations, there did not seem to be a regular international forum for such work.
So we decided to start one. This became the conference Scientiae: Disciplines of Knowing in the Early-Modern World, held at the Vancouver, B.C., campus of Simon Fraser University (my institution) in April 2012. When we sent out the CFP for the conference, Steve and I felt that we would be happy to receive 40 proposals, for a quiet one- or two-day meeting. In the event, the proposals we received numbered well over 100, mostly from scholars who would have to travel a very long way to get to Vancouver, and our modest conference suddenly became a major three-day undertaking. The work was amply rewarded, not only by the excellence and diversity of the conference sessions, but also by the enthusiasm and—it is the only word—gratitude of its participants. Clearly, our sense of a gap in the academic market had not been wrong. In Peter Harrison and Mario Biagioli, we had two keynote speakers who were as prominent in the field as their presentations were different from each other. The asking of questions and sparking of conversations that occurred throughout the conference, both inside and outside its sessions—including during a long, casual banquet, where I tried very hard to get everybody to drink up a small budget surplus—were wonderful to behold. The day after the conference was one of the most exhausted, but also most contented, I have had in my career.
This volume, then, presents the first fruits of the Scientiae. The essays collected here, although necessarily only a fraction of the arguments, and kinds of arguments, presented at the conference (see program) nonetheless go a considerable way toward reflecting the work that it featured, from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds: epistemology, cartography, history of medicine; intellectual property, logic, rhetoric; history of astronomy, travel literature. What holds these arguments together, meanwhile, is not just that they are all about various aspects of early-modern culture—that would be a logic of synchronic accidence that could only lead back to the big old “Renaissance conference”—but rather that they are all focussed, however divergently, on aspects of the intellectual issues that surround the early-modern emergence of modern natural science. This constitutes, so to speak, a meaningful interdisciplinarity, in which scholars with differing expertise make the effort to bring it to bear on approximately the same set of intellectual objects. Also, these arguments are keen to get down into the details of their period subject-matters, eschewing, as much as possible, generalization or teleology. The result, it seems to me, is a set of discussions that present challengingly severe and rigorous encounters with a range of complex and yet inter-related period topics.
Can one speak, therefore, of a Scientiae-type discussion? Perhaps we will have the opportunity to find out. At the round-table discussion with which we concluded the Vancouver conference, there was a great deal of enthusiasm for the notion that it might be reiterated. This led, in 2013, to the second Scientiae conference (keynote speakers Sachiko Kusukawa and Stephen Clucas), held at the University of Warwick, UK, and organized by David Beck. The third annual Scientiae, in 2014, will take place in Vienna (keynote speakers Thomas Wallnig and Howard Hotson), organized by Vittoria Feola. In 2015 we expect to meet in Toronto (with Anthony Grafton as one of the keynote speakers). We hope to follow the same tripartite rotation—North America, United Kingdom, continental Europe—in the years to come. A non-profit society, the Academia Scientiae, has been founded in the United Kingdom to ensure continuity in the conference's aims and character (see http://scientiae.co.uk/?p=284). Top-level publication opportunities, like the current volume, are expected to follow each conference. All of this, finally, through not even the slightest effort of mine, but just through the brilliance and diligence of the extraordinary colleagues who have been attracted to the project. In short, the professional shock that I received several years ago has more than been exceeded, at this point, by my utter astonishment at what has come out of it.
I hope that readers who are already familiar with the Scientiae conference will find that its brand of interdisciplinary inquiry into early-modern intellectual culture is appropriately reflected in this special issue of IHR. As for readers who do not yet know about the Scientiae, I hope they will be encouraged by the essays collected here to find out about it, by contributing a presentation to one of the conference's future iterations. The precise disciplinary orientations of the following arguments should not be taken as demarcating or limiting the remit of the conference, but only as indicating some of its strands, facets of its extension. These, for that matter remain to be worked out, in Vienna, Toronto, and beyond. It will take many more years, and many more conferences, and lots more publications—it is to be hoped—for us even to begin to give a comprehensive account of the disciplines of knowing in the early-modern world.