Biography

Lorraine Daston is Director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She has published broadly on topics in the history of science, including probability, wonders, objectivity, and observation. Her most recent books are Rules: A short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022) and Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate (Columbia Global Reports, 2023).

Project Summary

The challenge was not only finding a way to throw a net of familiar words around the Brazilians Michel de Montaigne met at the royal entry in Rouen in 1550 or the Aztec gold viewed by Albrecht Dürer in Antwerp in 1520; it was also to create a shared descriptive vocabulary, both quantitative and qualitative, both verbal and visual, for communication within an increasingly dense network of savants. What began in late fifteenth-century Italy as a correspondence among humanists, including many physicians, who exchanged descriptions of new plants, rare ailments, newly unearthed antiquities, and astrometeorological phenomena in their letters, became a concerted movement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the establishment of academies dedicated to everything from the purification of vernaculars, like Accademia della Crusca in Florence, to the collective making of experiments (Accademia del Cimento in Florence, the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris, the Royal Society of London), and the collection and exchange of natural history specimens, medical observations, and antiquities (Accademia dei Lincei in the Papal States, Academia Naturae Curiosorum in the Holy Roman Empire). The collective modes of inquiry pioneered by the academies became a laboratory of new language for new experiences.