Book Review: Keighren on Steinke & Stuber (eds), Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century
André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, Martin Stuber, eds.,
in collaboration with Philippe Rogger. Scholars in Action: The
Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century.
History of Science and Medicine Library/Scientific and Learned Cultures and
Their Institutions Series. Leiden: Brill, 2013. 2 volumes. xl + 932 pp. $318.00
(cloth), ISBN 978-90-04-24390-3.
Reviewed by Innes M. Keighren (Royal
Holloway, University of London)
Published on H-HistGeog (September, 2014)
Commissioned by Robert J. Mayhew
Published on H-HistGeog (September, 2014)
Commissioned by Robert J. Mayhew
Knowledge Made Human
The desire to be read--to have one’s knowledge and ideas made
mobile, to circulate, and to meet with an appropriate audience--is, as Scholars
in Action testifies, a long-standing one. For scholars at work in the
eighteenth century, vital and venerable modes of epistolary communication were
increasingly supplemented by a range of printed alternatives, not least learned
periodicals which permitted a more rapid and far-reaching diffusion of
knowledge through a globally distributed intellectual community numbering “at
the very least 30,000 active citizens” (p. 73). Anxiety as to one’s status as a
citizen within the Republic of Letters often centered upon the mobility and
visibility of one’s knowledge. In that respect, very little separates the
savants, philosophes, and proto-scientists of the eighteenth century
from contemporary academics. In an era, now, where the potential “impact” of
one’s intellectual work depends upon its rapid sighting and citing by others,
the value and desirability of the edited collection as a medium for the
effective exchange of knowledge has been subject to debate. One recent
contributor to the London School of Economics’ Impact Blog concluded,
with tongue somewhat in cheek, that “researchers who write book chapters might
as well bury the paper in a hole in their garden.”[1] Scholars in Action
is, its contributors will be relieved to know, a robust and vibrant refutation
of that assessment.