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Gender and the historiography of science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Ludmilla Jordanova
Ludmilla Jordanova
Affiliation:
Department of History, Vanbrugh College, University of York, York YO1 5DD.
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Extract

The production of big pictures is arguably the most significant sign of the intellectual maturity of a field. It suggests both that the field's broad contours, refined over several generations of scholarship, enjoy the approval of practitioners, and that audiences exist with an interest in or need for overviews. The situation is somewhat more complicated in the history of science, since the existence of big historical pictures precedes that of a well-defined scholarly field by about two centuries. Broadly conceived histories of science and medicine were being written in the eighteenth century, when such an all-encompassing vision was central to the claims about the progress of knowledge upon which Enlightenment ideologues set such store. The Plato to Nato style histories, characteristic of the earlier twentieth century, were written largely by isolated pioneers, and while these were used in teaching as the field was becoming professionalized, recent scholars have preferred to concentrate on a monographic style of research. Despite the existence of the series started by Wiley, and now published by Cambridge University Press, it is only in the last ten years or so that more conscious attempts have been made to generate a big-picture literature informed by new scholarship. It is noteworthy that most of this is addressed to students and general readers, although there is no logical reason why it should not tackle major theoretical issues of concern to scholars. My point about maturity still holds, then, since as a designated discipline the history of science is rather new; it is still feeling out its relationship with cognate disciplines. Big-picture histories have an important role to play in these explorations since they make findings and ideas widely available and thereby offer material through which ambitious interpretations can be debated, modified and transformed.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 1993 , pp. 469 - 483
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1993

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References

My thanks to John Brooke, Jim Secord, Roger Smith and Bob Westman for their generous help, to Leonore Davidoff for the inspiration her work on gender provides, and to the participants in two recent conferences on gender, at the Universities of Essex (April 1993) and London (July 1993) respectively, for their stimulating ideas. Readers should note that this article does not attempt to offer a survey of the literature on gender.

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