Projecting Nature: Agostino Scilla's Seventeenth-Century Fossil Drawings.

In 1670 the Sicilian painter Agostino Scilla (1629-1700) devised an entirely new way of depicting fossils when he wrote and illustrated his Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense (1670-1671), which argued that fossils were the remains of once living creatures and not mimetic stones. This essay explores the nature of Scilla's graphic innovations, comparing his fossils drawings and Pietro Santi Bartoli's engravings of them to earlier and contemporary images of fossils. Scilla captured the effect of time on nature by infusing his style of drawing with his philosophical understanding of what it means to see and to know. He made his drawing less rich in detail to focus on those which served his purpose. In particular, he made the first use of dotted lines in paleontological illustration to render his images dynamic theoretical interpretations rather than static depictions.

The breakdown of Galileo's Roman network: Crisis and community, ca. 1633.

Rome has long been central to the story of Galileo's life and scientific work. Through an analysis of the metadata of Galileo's surviving letters, combined with a close reading of the letters themselves, we discuss how Galileo used correspondence to build a Roman network. Galileo initially assembled this network around the members of the Lincean Academy, a few carefully nurtured relationships with important ecclesiastics, and the expertise of well positioned Tuscan diplomats in the Eternal City. However, an analysis of Galileo's correspondence in the aftermath of the trial of 1633 provides us with a unique opportunity to interrogate how his altered circumstances transformed his social relations. Forced to confront the limitations on his activities imposed by Catholic censure and house arrest, Galileo experienced the effects of these restrictions in his relationships with others and especially in his plans for publication. In the years following 1633, Galileo turned his epistolary attention north to the Veneto and to Paris in order to publish his Two New Sciences. While Galileo's Lincean network and papal contacts in Rome were defunct after 1633, we see how Rome remained important to him as the site of a number of Roman disciples who would continue his intellectual project long after his own death.

The two cultures of scholarship?

This essay examines different approaches to writing the history of science in light of the increased importance of microhistorical studies in the past two decades. It specifically examines the role of microhistory within the history of science and the importance of Thomas Kuhn's concept of the "normal exception" in early methodological statements about the function of microhistory. It also considers the possibilities for writing archivally based history of science for a general readership as a means of bridging the divide between specialized research within the subfields of the history of science and more general accounts of the nature and growth of science.