Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SCRIBSCIE (Scribal Science: Naturalists' Paper Empire in France ca. 1660-1770) Reporting period: 2019-09-01 to 2021-08-31 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project The advent of digital technologies has prompted questions about how the ways in which data in the natural sciences are gathered, stored, and communicated affect the knowledge thus produced. Entitled “Scribal Science: French Naturalists’ Paper Empire, 1660¬–1770,” this MSCA sought to contribute to a longue durée historical approach to this issue by taking a chronological step back. It studied an old yet pervasive technology for the management and transmission of knowledge about nature: manuscript practices and artefacts. Whereas much effort in the SHS of the past fifty years or so has gone into untangling the modernist knot between a “Print Revolution” and a “Scientific Revolution,” only recently have we begun to measure the unquestionable endurance of manuscript culture among European savants and its role in situations of cross-cultural encounter. This MSCA aimed at contributing to this efforts of understanding how, in the history of early modern global science, a vast and varied world of scribal practices lurked bellow the neat surface of print culture.It did so by focusing on natural history from the mid-seventeenth-century, when naturalists device new means to cope with what is perceived as un unprecedented overload of information on the world’s fauna and flora, to the early nineteenth century, when the unitary field of natural history got fragmented into a myriad of new disciplines. SCRIBSCIE dealt in particular with the case of France, where huge efforts went at the time into stockpiling paper records on the world’s nature in narrow association with the state’s imperial ambitions. To better understand this story, the project mobilized hitherto largely understudied sources from the libraries and collections of the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN) in Paris. Part of the reason they remain understudied is that these are non-narrative sources, such as reading notes, field sketches and scribbles, specimen tags, unending inventories, card catalogs, and so forth. By adopting a material approach, one can come to understand these sources as archives of practice, rather than only as containers of written-down information.Developing and honing such a material approach was the first goal of this MSCA, which was of a methodological nature. The second was historical: to use the case of the MNHN holdings to study actors whose lives and labors in places from the far-off quarters of French colonies to the city of Paris itself can only be brought to light through archives of practice such as these, rather than more traditional, narrative sources. One instance that became central to my research are scribal collaborators and helpers. Whereas the initial project concentrated on naturalists, it soon became clear that most men and women involved in making, amassing and managing manuscript records in natural history were not scholars. These included scholarly pairs, but also family members, such as wives and children, disciples and domestic servant. Whereas their work is barely acknowledged in printed sources, manuscript artefacts preserve traces of it and allow us to bring it to light and to better understand dynamics of social and intellectual dependence in the making of Old Regime knowledge.The third goal of the action was disciplinary and institutional. Historians seldom roam natural history museums, partly because heritage in them is patrimonialized for their value to today’s natural sciences rather than for their historicity. Their very status is often ambiguous, as in the case of manuscript artefacts attached to specimen collections—such as historical labels and inventories—rather than archival services, and are therefore not cataloged themselves. And conservation practices are often diverse and tacit. By tackling this issues, SCRIBSCIE aimed at contributing at the dialogue between research in the history of science and the expertise of curators, tackling in particular the important specificities of natural historical museums and heritage. Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far Although the MSCA coincided almost to the year with the COVID pandemic emergency, which forced to reconceive much of its planned deliverables, and the research questions evolved in sometimes radically new directions along the way, the SCRIBSCIE project offered unique material and intellectual resources for both consolidating my individual project on scribal practices and artefacts in the natural sciences and collectively experimenting novel ways to expand it in the future. Three main streams of results can be highlighted.First, the MSCA allowed me to gather a large amount of materials for a monography on the topic of the project and allowed me to publish one, an entirely re-written version of my doctoral dissertation, one particular case study.Second, I laid both individual and collective emphasis on the social dimensions of scribal scholarly labor, which was not an important part in the original project. This aspect became a new chapter in the book manuscript based on SCRIBSCIE, but also gave place to a symposium and a planned journal special issue.The third main axis of the project as it unfolded during the action also evolved in important but positive ways. It regards a trans-sectorial transfer of knowledge between the history of science conservation in museums of natural history. Thanks to an international working group, which in time derived into two international workshops I was able to recenter this question to type of heritage in which manuscripts are important but not unique and that seems to me essential for highlighting the possibilities of heritage in natural history museums for historical research: peripheral artefacts such that, without being the key object in natural history museums (specimens), surround them. I label them "paraobjects," and they include labels and inventories, but also showcases, storage furniture, mounting support, and so forth. “Paraobjects” are key to retrace the lives and afterlives of collection objects, but also open a unique window onto the practices by which these objects were made, variously understood, and varyingly put to use over time. Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) SCRIBSCIE therefore allowed me not only to publish a first monograph and lay solid grounds for a second monograph, but also to experiment collectively with historians and curators to open up innovative and, I hope, original avenues of research for after the fellowship. The main impact of this work, as it regards heritage in natural history museums by and large, falls under the scope of historical research, although in an attempt to both profit from curatorial expertise and offer the latter tools for highlighting the historicity of the holdings under their care. In the case of scribal artefacts in particular, the project contributed to two main efforts in the SHS: to relativize the weight of the myth of “great men” in narratives on the history of science, by stressing instead, through scribal practices, the collective and often highly unequal dynamics at the basis of knowledge making; to make more visible, through historical research, the weight of non-narrative manuscript artefacts in the history of science, and their potential for historical research through a material approach, at a time when the patrimonial regime of our own digital age—with the massive digitization of historical printed sources, for example—has obscured both more than ever before. 41586-2012-article-bf485171a-figa-html.jpg
