CfP (RSA Boston): Natural History and Archival Epistemology in J.-B. Colbert’s France

In Jacob Soll’s 2009 monograph, The Information Master, Colbert’s activities and his promotion of science have been put under the magnifying glass to demonstrate an openly utilitarian use of the public sphere. Indeed, in Soll’s treatment, a letter of instructions sent by the minister to his son, an aspiring bureaucrat, closely resembled a blueprint to replace antiquarian erudition with technical know-how. While there is little doubt that possession and control of documents became constitutive of a new vision of ‘expertise’, the Académie des Sciences, since its inception in the 1660s, was actually slow in establishing a factual foundation for theorizing; its implementation of experimental protocols was also fractured between province and metropolitan center. It still relied on practitioners of the Republic of Letters, who had their own academies; and it could neither segregate nor co-opt the efforts of Cartesians and Jesuits, who were often perceived as partisan cultural groups.

Since invaluable studies on this topic are either fairly old (Hahn 1971; Lux 1989) or limited to one disciplinary aspect (botany in Stroup 1990, or anatomy in Guerrini 2015), this panel creates a timely opportunity to explore critically the entanglements of politics, economics, and science with ideas of environmental transformation and the public interest. Was the French Académie an arena of projectors similar to the archives of the Royal Society? Did they try to imitate a Baconian notion of natural history? Who served as a communication node – artisans, engineers, natural philosophers – and what changed once it was placed in Colbert’s orbit? Was there a distinct theory of mercantilism? How did the attention shift away and towards the Mediterranean? Was French absolutism, in these years, primarily a rational model? And did paper technology feature as an enabling factor or epistemic result?

The submission deadline is July 15, 2024; notification of acceptance will come by July 25, 2024. To apply please: 1) submit an abstract of no more than 250 words, describing your proposal, and a 150-word narrative CV, as a basis for introducing you; 2) send all this as a single attachment to Stefano Guilizia.