ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

A New Kind of Amusement for Cultivating the Mind: Science Popularisation in Britain and Italy in the Long Eighteenth Century

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

In 1737, the Italian polymath Francesco Algarotti published a popular science book which became an international bestseller. Il Newtonianismo per le Dame, or Newtonianism for Ladies, offered female audiences across Europe a compelling account of Newton’s optical discoveries. Algarotti, however, aimed to do much more than simply communicate scientific knowledge – the book, as he put it, was to provide ‘a new Kind of Amusement’ for ‘cultivating the Mind’.
This was a common aim in contemporary popular science literature. In fact, Algarotti’s work in many ways epitomises what eighteenth-century science popularisation is all about – taking science into the public domain, reaching across borders and across social groupings, engaging particularly those who would normally have been excluded from science.
In Newtonianism for Ladies, Algarotti blended British and Italian intellectual traditions and it is from his work that we take our inspiration. Ostensibly, each talk in the panel focuses on a different topic: Italian itinerant demonstrators of electrical experiments; local visitors in the Museum of Physics and Natural History of la Specola in Florence; the plurality of worlds debate in popular science literature; and trends in public science lecturing in Britain. But just as Algarotti’s book goes beyond its central topic, this panel has broader aims: it will progress into a wider discussion about key features of science popularisation in 18th-century Europe.
By using quantitative, qualitative, and comparative approaches, and looking at a variety of sources and cultural contexts, the panel will shift the historiographical focus to lesser-known popularisers and to science audiences, both in national and international settings and at the micro and the macro levels. We will re-evaluate the concept of popularisation of science, interrogate the boundaries between popularisers and audiences and foreground marginal voices in the history of 18th-century science communication.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Isobel Falconer, University of St Andrews

Individual Presentations

• “Ognuno fa i maravigliosi fenomeni della virtù elettrica”. Italian itinerant demonstrators and the diffusion of electrical knowledge in Northern Italy between 1745 and 1755 - Lorenzo Voltolina, University of Padua

• Public Science Lecturing in Britain (1700-1820) - Plamena Panayotova, University of Glasgow

• Popular with the people: Local visitors in the Museum of Physics and Natural History of la Specola (Florence, 1780s) - Elena Romero-Passerin, University of Bristol

• All the planets are similar to our Earth, and may well be inhabited. Plurality of worlds in 18th-century Italy - Lorenzo De Piccoli, University of Pisa, University of Florence