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
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.