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Behind the Public Image

We began with a picture. Now let us turn to the descriptive and theoretical writings of savants, the terse entries of royal expenditure, the secrets preserved in private documents. Where illustration ends, the word begins.

This book makes two kinds of inquiry into the Academy. One is internalist or scientific, the study of ideas. Seventeenth-century savants observed and participated in what has since been called the scientific revolution. It was a time when theories about the world, and ways of seeing and analyzing it, changed fundamentally. The scientific revolution is normally defined with reference to the physical sciences, but the biological sciences were also transformed, partly because savants sought models for the life sciences from biology rather than from physics, mechanics, technology, or mathematics. Academicians were in the vanguard of this trend with their research on the anatomy and physiology of plants, and even their natural history of plants incorporated innovative elements.

The other line of inquiry is traditionally called externalist; it addresses connections between ideas and society. Externalist histories of science usually look for a causal relationship between scientific ideas and underlying social, economic, political, or religious structures. The causal implications of such research have made it controversial, for historians of science can be as reluctant as modern scientists to concede that scientific ideas have any but an intellectual genesis. Yet as contemporary examples show, science is not value free, and neither admission to a scientific career nor status within the scientific community is solely dependent on the quality of one's mind or work. In the seventeenth century, social background was an important determinant of an individual's access to the scientific community.[4]

But externalist inquiries may transcend the correlation of class or religion with career patterns or styles of scientific thought. The relationships among academicians or between them and their ministerial protectors


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influenced ideas and the functioning of the Academy. Academicians' contacts with individuals — friends, patrons, savants, or craftsmen — outside the Academy form a distinctive pattern, characteristic of interactions between an intellectual elite and those excluded from the group. The Academy as a corporate entity was under various obligations, and individual members felt personal responsibilities to society; such duties affected the way they selected problems for study. Inquiry along these lines helps clarify the varied strands of thought that molded the Academy.

Botanical research, the internalist focus of this inquiry, serves as a barometer of both scientific thought and the competing interests that affected science in the Academy. Academic studies of plants took their inspiration from discoveries of new flora, from Bacon and Descartes, from the great botanical and zoological compendia of the previous two centuries, from Harvey, and from chemical theories of the composition of the world. If its inspiration was internalist, botanical research was vulnerable to externalist influences. Academicians alternately collaborated and feuded. Ministerial intervention sometimes encouraged and sometimes sabotaged research. Research was generously supported for a while and then funds were withheld. Academicians tried to balance pure and applied science and to define their responsibilities to the wider community. Official protectors encouraged whatever seemed most useful to the king or the kingdom. As both academicians and protectors sought to reconcile their quest for pure knowledge with their desire to improve the conditions of life, they changed the emphasis of their research. Ideas about the purpose of the Academy changed between its foundation in 1666 and its reorganization in 1699, and these changes affected the conduct of research. In the process academicians developed new theories and new methods for studying plants. By the end of the seventeenth century, they and their ministerial partners had redefined the organization and goals of the Academy, and botanical research was instrumental to that redefinition. The interplay of intellectual and external influences in the Academy thus forces the historian to consider both in order to illuminate the ideas and individuals which composed the institution.

Scientific ideas are the product of many influences, not all of which are intellectual. They are created by individuals with friends and enemies, mentors and patrons, acquaintances and unseen strangers, any of whom may induce the savant to ask particular questions or use special methods. Members of an institution like the Academy were a hothouse variety of scientist, for they lived and worked together; they were related by common goals, common patrons, and common sites of scholarly activity. They


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affected one another by collaborating, feuding, and advising. They also affected others, who were not admitted to their ranks; they were envied and challenged, and they were called on to referee disputes or to solve technical problems.

The Academy became a resource affecting the entire kingdom. It repaid its debt to the crown by producing new ideas and information, by developing a pattern of scholarly conduct that helped professionalize natural philosophy, by carrying out specific commissions for the crown, and by advising magistrates and royal ministers. Ideas, institutional dynamics, finances, governmental pressure, socioeconomic trends, and demand for science all played a part in the story of that development. This book attempts to unite some of those elements into a coherent whole and thereby to enrich our understanding of both the parts and the ensemble.


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