Abstract :
The essays in this issue of the British Journal for the History of Science have been
selected from the papers presented at an international conference on Circulation and
Locality in Early Modern Science held in October 2007 at the William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library in Los Angeles. It was initiated and organized by Mary Terrall and
myself and hosted by the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century
Studies.
The aim of the workshop was to examine the many ways in which scientific
knowledge, instruments, texts and practitioners moved around the globe in the early
modern period. This in itself is, of course, no novel theme. Indeed, as the positivist
foundations of the history of science weakened in the 1970s and 1980s, attention
radically shifted from recounting its inexorable progress grounded in a perception of
knowledge as being disembodied and universal – an ‘everywhere and nowhere’ view – to
demonstrating the crucial importance of the historical, cultural, social, gendered and
geographical contexts of its production.1 Contingencies of place thus came to acquire
key importance in recent sociological and historical studies of science.2 This trend was
also in concert with, and indeed in significant measure inspired by, Harold Garfinkel’s
ethnomethodology on the one hand, and microhistorical approaches inaugurated by
scholars such as Edoardo Grendi and Carlo Ginzburg on the other, as well as by Clifford
Geertz’s anthropological insights into the ever-local nature of knowledge across cultural
divides.3
