| Full Text | Beyond Borders is a collective volume edited by a group of five young scholars from Spain. It comprises nineteen contributions from thirteen authors, including the editors, all recent Ph.D.’s or graduate students, mostly working in Barcelona but also in Germany, Greece, Italy, Finland, and Peru. Many of them are members of the international group STEP (Science and Technology in the European Periphery). The book is organized in five parts: “Geographies of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” “Communicating Science and Technology,” “Popularization of Science,” “Science and Nation,” and, finally, “Science in the Periphery.” Each part includes an illuminating essay offering a comparative and historiographical introduction to the topic under scrutiny. There is a very good selected bibliography in the end.
Having had as its starting point a postgraduate conference held in Valencia in 2006, the book is much more than a proceedings volume. The inspiration behind it is reflected in the diversity of topics—from astrology and mixed mathematics to mathematics, physics, astronomy, genet-
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ics, and medicine; in the variety of historical periods covered—from the sixteenth to the twentieth century; in the multiplicity of national contexts addressed—Spain, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom; and in the diversity of historical sources used, encompassing both a panoply of geographical provenances and different typologies, including textbooks and translations, newspapers, and women’s guidebooks.
But this volume goes well beyond these originating points. It is the successful outcome of a consistent historiographical project of identification and discussion of “critical topics and historiographical challenges to our discipline” (p. 12). Taking seriously the awareness of disciplinary fragmentation and the unresolved challenge of articulating microhistorical studies with a big picture narrative as their starting point, the authors identify communication and the appropriation of knowledge as central notions and the comparative approach as a tool to be explored in the framework of methodological pluralism. In their perceptive introduction, Josep Simon and Néstor Herran call attention to recent attempts to respond to the challenge. They highlight James Secord’s idea of science as “knowledge in transit,” Margaret Jacob’s and Lewis Pyenson’s calls for “comparative history,” and Kostas Gavroglu and colleagues’ use of “appropriation” as a suitable concept to account for the complexity of reactions of diverse audiences participating in the communication of science. Taken together, these conceptual and methodological devices have the potential, so the authors argue convincingly, to go beyond the tensions between local and global, national and international, center and periphery, science in context and science in transit—to name a few important dichotomies that have recurrently occupied center stage in debates in our discipline. With these tools, the authors seek “to problematize the local, the national and even the international through comparison and through the assessment and analysis of communication practices within
these contexts and across them” (p. 11).
Addressing their work to graduate students and junior historians of science planning to build careers in places away from the mainstream Anglophile world, the authors take a step in training a new generation of scholars sensitive to international topics, eager to participate in international debates, and ready to appropriate them imaginatively. But this book should not be seen merely from this limited, albeit vital, perspective. By offering new vantage points, by standing on the periphery, the authors suggest ways to reconfigure central themes and approaches, on the road to making our discipline truly international. The individual essays do so by calling attention to many assumptions underlying common narratives and by broadening the range of application of the comparative method. I call attention to one possible outcome of such a program by taking as an example Herran’s work on radioactivity research in early twentiethcentury Spain. Should we assess this case study by using as our measuring stick accounts of the same topic in the British context—say, at the Cavendish laboratory? If we recognize that what was going on at the Cavendish was exceptional within the United Kingdom—rather than simply complaining that Spain had nothing comparable—we should change our frame of reference, taking Herran’s parameters of analysis as the starting point for a comparative assessment. In the process, we arrive at a different, and certainly richer, picture of radioactivity in different contexts, including the Cavendish laboratory, enabling us to problematize what is meant by “national,” “international,” “center,” and “periphery.” In the same way, we might conclude that scientists working away from centers of knowledge, embodying the multiple functions of teachers, textbook writers, and popularizers of science (to name just a few of their various roles), were perhaps more typical of the center than we might initially have been willing to accept.
By inviting new questions and new comparisons, by pleading for the generalized use of a diversity of sources and approaches, Beyond Borders is a refreshing contribution to our discipline.
ANA SIMOES
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