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.
