New book "Lavoisier e Parthenope"
Guerra Corinna, Lavoisier e Parthenope. Contributo ad una storia della chimica del regno di Napoli,
Naples, Società Napoletana di Storia Patria & Istituto Italiano per
gli Studi Storici, 2017, V, 391 p. : ill. ; 24 cm ISBN 9788880440857,
25 euros. Preface by Renata De Lorenzo; Introduction by Maurizio Torrini.
The
French Revolution inexorably marked the year 1789 as a turning point in
European history, but it wasn’t the only revolution that year that
began in France and went on to shake the world.
The
Chemical Revolution, led by Antoine Lavoisier, dramatically reorganized
the discipline of chemistry with new methodological premises and new
discoveries. Like all revolutionary movements, the nouvelle chimie was not accepted or acted upon in the same ways or at the same times by communities of scholars as it swept across Europe.
The
enormity of its impact on chemists in the Kingdom of Naples was no
exception. The largest kingdom in Italy at the time, and the site of
Parthenope, the third largest city in Europe, with a name that linked it
to the myth of the sirens, Naples already had a long tradition of
research and publication.
The
author, examining the printed and manuscript texts derived from the
work of a diverse set of scholars in the fields of pneumatic,
volcanological and medical-pharmaceutical chemistry, gives us a
compelling and deeply researched portrait of the Neapolitan chemists who
confronted the new theory in their efforts to adopt or refute it. The
result is a lively recounting of the scientific life of Parthenope in
the second half of the 18th century. The author illuminates the chaotic
tangle of personalities who carried out experiments guided by these new
principles, who struggled with issues of chemical analysis and who
taught the new discipline. She ably demonstrates how the peculiar
geochemical properties of the area, dominated by Mount Vesuvius, and the
political turmoil of the day, such as the Neapolitan Revolution of
1799, conditioned the history of chemistry in the kingdom.
In
September 2017, the book received financing from the Italian Ministry
of Cultural Heritage for publications of significant cultural interest.
Corinna
Guerra currently pursues her research on Vesuvius as natural laboratory
as an honorary research associate at the Laboratoire d’Excellence
HASTEC (Histoire et Anthropologie des Savoirs, des Techniques et des
Croyances) and at University College London. She is a graduate in
Philosophy at the University of Bari (Italy), where also she obtained
her PhD in the History of Science. From 2011 to 2013, she was a fellow
of the Italian Institute for Historical Studies (Istituto Italiano per
gli Studi Storici) and a fellow of the Neapolitan Society of National
History (Società Napoletana di Storia Patria). In 2016, she was a
post-doc researcher at the Centre Alexandre Koyré (EHESS-CNRS- MNHN) in
Paris. guerra.corinna@gmail.co
Cover available here: http://www.storiapatrian
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