| Full Text | Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000, testifies to the current revival of historiographical interest in science popularization. Studies of “popular science,” which have been fragmented and marginal in the history of science, have raised a number of bold historiographical reflections over the past decades. In the aftermath of Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey’s seminal essay “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture” (History of Science, 1994, 32:237–267), James Secord has invited scholars to consider popular science as part of a wider framework of communication (“Knowledge in Transit,” Isis, 2004, 95:654– 672). His position has generated a lot of interest and prompted some comments gathered in a recent Isis Focus section organized by Jonathan Topham (Isis, 2009, 100:310 –368). It is now more and more obvious that studying marginalized practices such as popular science or pseudoscience is a useful route to understanding how the demarcation between legitimate science and nonlegitimate knowledge has been generated and how it has to be endlessly renegotiated.
Similarly, a focus away from the big centers of knowledge production, and toward the peripheries, has attracted a lot of scholarship over the past decade. This volume also demonstrates the vitality of the STEP (Science and Technology in the European Periphery) research project launched in 1999. The international scholars involved in this research group have not only recovered an immense heritage of archival sources so far unexploited by historians of science; they have also questioned the relevance of the dominant center/periphery model imposed in Europe by leading countries such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany and uncritically adopted by historians of nineteenth-century science
and technology.
This collective volume reflects a high level of professionalism and historiographical sophistication. Like most collections of national case studies, it suffers from a lack of homogeneity: science in popular books, encyclopedias, museums, textbooks, and the daily press can be many different things, especially when it is embedded in different contexts and different periods ranging from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century.
However—as the editors could have stated more explicitly—the volume does not attempt any illusory comparative study. Rather, the purpose is to test a few theoretical hypotheses for understanding popular science against a number of empirical case studies. Two initial chapters make the strong claim that popular science should be considered an integral part of science. Jonathan Topham refers to Ludwik Fleck’s famous point that popular science helps shape the hard core of academic science; while Paola Govoni, relying on the Italian case, claims that popular science acted as an instrument for undermining the authority of the Catholic Church and securing more freedom for scientific research.
Does the rest of the volume validate the hypothesized influence of popular science on the making of science? The answer is not clear. Johan Kärflet’s chapter on popular astronomy in Sweden fully endorses the working hypothesis in fighting the standard model of popularization as a by-product of knowledge production intended for educating the masses. However, most of the chapters rather emphasize a mechanism of local appropriation of scientific discourses and practices generated elsewhere. For instance, in his study of the various translations and uses of Adolphe Ganot’s physics textbook Josep Simon convincingly argues that popular science is not a genre in itself, that its identity and functions are defined by its users. Chapters on thermodynamics in Spain, by Stefan Pohl-Valero, and on two Belgian series of books, by Geert Vanpaemel and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, suggest a remarkable plasticity of popular science that easily lent itself to the support of imagined nation-states in the nineteenth century.
The rich empirical material provided by the case studies gathered in this volume exceeds the limits of the theoretical framework brought to the fore. In my opinion, this collection confirms the view that science popularization is a process of acculturation of science to local contexts. Popular science disentangles and clarifies the social values and metaphysical agendas underlying the production and legitimation of knowledge. As it makes sense of scientific results and integrates scientific pursuits within current value systems, it undoubtedly contributes to the making of science. However, a number of key issues remain open: To what extent has the center/periphery model been generated or encouraged by popular writers? To what extent has the great divide between science producers and science consumers—which is more a result than a precondition of popular science—interacted with the divide between center and periphery? There is still plenty of historiographical work for this remarkable international research network to do.
BERNADETTE BENSAUDE-VINCENT
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