This two-years project proposed the first material, social, and gender history of eighteenth-century naturalists’ travel journals. The project is particularly timely now that mobility is at the heart of social, cultural, intellectual, gender history and the history of science, and that travel narratives have been recognized as important sources for historical analysis. However, so far only a few studies have been devoted to the travel journal, that very object in which naturalists used to record their observations while traveling. ON THE SPOT aimed at filling this gap, by focusing on the various and still ill-explored archival materials assembled by two famous married collaborators, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) and Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier (1758-1836) while traveling in the French provinces in the second half of the eighteenth century. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the project will unfold the variety of social, intellectual, and cultural values and emotions operating in the production and use of the travel journal. The project’s broader aim was to provide a theotherical and methodological framework that will allow to understand naturalists’ travel practices as collective and gendered endeavors.
The action has been undertaken at the University of Valencia under the supervision of Prof. Mónica Bolufer. It comprised a transversal training in gender history and the acquisition of transferable skills, as well as a targeted program of dissemination and communication activities. Prof. Bolufer’s ERC-funded research project “Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment: Ideas, Networks, Agencies (CIRGEN)”, which focused on transnational approaches to gender, identities, and cultural mediations in Enlightenment societies and cultures, was highly complementary to the researcher's experience as an historian of eighteenth-century science, making UVEG the perfect locus for the ON THE SPOT project.
The action had four key scientific objectives: 1) To explore how 18th-century naturalists understood and experienced writing in the field; 2) To understand the role travel journals played in naturalists' working routines; 3) To examine field writing as a collective and gendered activity involving multiple actors, from companions to informants; and 4) To establish new dialogue between the history of science, social and cultural history of travel, and gender history. 4) These objectives combined in the general aim of providing a new methodological framework for approaching naturalists' travel journals through the lens of gender, social history, and the history of emotions.
More broadly, the research aimed at contributing to a more inclusive history of science by recovering women's contributions to knowledge production and showing the role of gender in the history of science, while also enhancing European cultural heritage policies by revealing overlooked perspectives in scientific achievement narratives and archives.
