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Making Science Social
The Conferences of Théophraste Renaudot, 1633–1642
By Kathleen Wellman
Volume 6 in the Series for Science and Culture
Between 1633 and 1642, the French physician and philanthropist Théophraste Renaudot sponsored a series of public conferences in Paris. These conferences offered an open forum for wide-ranging discussions of a variety of topics, including science, medicine, gender, politics, and ethics. No matter the topic, participants consistently used scientific reasoning as a new standard of evidence. The conferences thus recast the rhetorical traditions of the Renaissance and prefigured the social sciences of the Enlightenment. They provide a candid snapshot of intellectual life at the dawn of the scientific revolution in France.
In Making Science Social, Kathleen Wellman uses the published conference proceedings to develop a broadly conceived, revisionist interpretation of the intellectual history of seventeenth-century France and of the roots of modern culture and science.
“Wellman offers a conceptually brilliant book, relying on a source of unimaginable richness. I have read few works in recent years that posed as many important questions and that opened up so many avenues of research for other scholars.”--James B. Collins, author of The State in Early Modern France
“Wellman’s analysis shifts our understanding of the character of early modern science (less mechanistic than expected, more collaborative, less the story of individual geniuses striving against ignorance, more the story of debate, interaction, and difference) and ties the interests of the conferees to ‘making science social.’”--Mary Lindemann, author of Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe
“Strikingly original conclusions about the nature of debates on absolutism, science, and culture in the seventeenth century.”--Martin S. Staum, author of Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution
“Making Science Social demonstrates convincingly that Renaudot’s version of science formed a bridge between Humanism and the Enlightenment by developing an eclectic, democratizing, and utilitarian approach fundamentally at odds with the highly structured and hierarchized conception of science dominant in the seventeenth century and associated with the culture of absolutism. The book forms a wonderful complement to recent works on early modern science that have sought to challenge the ‘triumphalist’ account of the Scientific Revolution.”--Elizabeth Williams, author of The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750–1850
Kathleen Wellman is Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. She is the author of La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment.
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