Introduction: circulation and locality in early modern science

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