Massimo Mazzotti

Rethinking Scientific Biography: The Enlightenment of MariaGaetana Agnesi

Some of themost interesting works in the recent history of science have exploredthe ways in which value is attached to scientific practices and, more generally, isembedded in forms of scientific life.1 Reconstructing the relationship betweenknowledge and the virtues of people – as it is articulated in specific historicalsituations – has indeed proved to be a fruitful strategy for addressing moregeneral questions about the ways in which knowledge is made, and made au-thoritative. In this essay, I offer a brief overview of the historical development ofscientific biography as a genre; I then argue that, when handled appropriately,the biographical narrative is especially suited to the exploration of the moraleconomies of science.2More specifically, I propose that the reconstruction of thelives of figures traditionally consideredmarginal for the history of early modernscience – women, for example – can reveal interesting connections betweenscientific and moral life, thus opening up new vistas on distant scientific worlds.Scientific biography, in other words, is not just a fully legitimate pursuit for thehistorian of science, it can also be an effective instrument for the social studies ofscience. In order to illustrate this point, I refer primarily to my experience as abiographer of Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799) whose life I tried elsewhere toilluminate. This experience resulted in a significant transformation of my ownunderstanding of the scientific Enlightenment in Continental Europe during thefirst half of the eighteenth century.3 I then argue against the perception of bi-ography as necessarily focusing on individuals rather than social worlds, and

1 See, for example: Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books,2007); and Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008).

2 Edward Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century’, Past&Present, 50 (1971), 76–136; Lorraine Daston, ‘The Moral Economy of Science’, Osiris, 10(1995), 2–24.

3 Massimo Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

conclude with some remarks on the theoretical challenges that await biogra-phers.

I. Scientific Biography as a Genre

While extremely successful as a genre for the general audience, biography has sofar enjoyed mixed fortunes among professional historians. It has often beenremarked that there is a veritable gulf between the goals and methods of pro-fessional biographers and those of academic researchers, and that biographyenjoys a comparatively low status within the genres of scholarly production.4

Biographers, for example, can talk lightheartedly about identity, personality, andtheir quest for truth, while pondering how best to produce the definitive biog-raphy of a certain individual. After the various turns of the late twentieth cen-tury, such statements cannot but be very problematic for the academic re-searcher, founded as they are on the acritical acceptance of what Pierre Bourdieucalls the ‘postulat du sens de l’existence’.5And it is not just amatter of academicsversus the outside world, or even of postmodernist sensibilities. After all, isn’tthe discovery of the radical and irredeemable discontinuity of reality the verycore of the modernist novel? In many quarters, the self-proclaimed key task ofprofessional biographers – to treat a life as a story, as a meaningful sequence ofevents – has long been regarded as nothing more than a rhetorical illusion.6 Inthe understated words of two authors who have reflected importantly on thesematters: ‘professional biographers ask questions about biography that fit un-easily with the concerns of the modern academic community.’7

Scientific biography, in particular, is emblematic of the ambiguous status ofthis genre in the academic world. In this field one can best observe the chasmbetween biographers and historians, as well as its significant historical varia-tions. Early modern authors tended to frame the development of mathematics,medicine, and natural philosophy according to classical models such as Dio-

4 See, for example: Leon Edel, ‘Biography and the Science of Man’, in New Directions in Bio-graphy, ed. by Anthony Friedson (Manoa: University Press of Hawaii, 1981), pp. 1–11; andMichael Shortland and Richard Yeo, ‘Introduction’, Telling Lives in Science: Essays onScientific Biography, ed. by Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), pp. 1–4. On the feminine associations of biography as a reason for itscomparatively low status in academia, see Paola Govoni, ‘Biography : ACritical Tool to Bridgethe History of Science and the History of Women in Science’, Nuncius, 15 (2000), 399–409.

5 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘L’illusion biographique’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 62–63(1986), 69–72.

6 On this point, see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Le miroir qui revient (Paris: Editions deMinuit, 1984),p. 208.

7 Shortland and Yeo, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.

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genes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. This approach,exemplified by Bernardino Baldi’s Cronica de matematici, published post-humously in 1707, was widely adopted in histories of the advancement oflearning.8 It is only in themid-eighteenth century, with the rise of Enlightenmenthistoriography, that an alternative approach became visible. It was based on thebelief that the advancement of human knowledge should not be understoodprimarily in terms of individual contributions, but rather as the expression ofthe progressive liberation of the human mind from the yoke of tradition anderror. Jean Etienne Montucla’s Histoire des math¦matiques (1758) is a case inpoint, as it shifts the emphasis from the lives of the protagonists to the rationalprogress of the discipline.9 On the one hand, the lives of the great heroes andmartyrs of modern science proved functional to the construction of a mean-ingful genealogy of the modern world. On the other, the image of the progress ofhuman reason as a series of necessary stages gained unprecedented popularity.The tension between these two approaches characterizes most historical re-constructions of the development of the sciences from the age of the Encyclo-p¦die throughout the Victorian era.

This tension is already clear in the pioneering series of biographical essayswritten by Paolo Frisi in the 1770s, especially those on Galileo Galilei and IsaacNewton.10 These carefully crafted lives are, at once, a celebration of exceptionalindividuals – who are effectively transmuted into icons of modern science – andthe reconstruction of the process of emancipation of the human mind fromreligious obscurantism and cultural backwardness. For Frisi, a Barnabite priestand a convinced reformer, the Jesuits were to be held responsible for the re-pression of the Galilean school, and were also the promoters of a domesticationof science to theological dogma that was the real cause of the decline of Italianscience.11 While Galileo was the true father and martyr of the Enlightenment,Newton’s life and career exemplified an alternative way inwhich the relationshipbetween philosophers and society could be arranged. Galileo had begun the

8 Bernardino Baldi, Cronica de matematici, overo epitome dell’istoria delle vite loro (Urbino:Monticelli, 1707); see also Peter Burke, ‘Reflections on the Origins of Cultural History’, inInterpretation and Cultural History, ed. by Joan Pittock and Andrew Wear (New York: SanMartin’s Press, 1991), pp. 153–74. On the biographical tradition of the lives of the philo-sophers, see Liba Taub, ‘Presenting a ‘Life’ as a Guide to the Living: Ancient Accounts of theLife of Pythagoras’, in The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, ed. by Thomas Sö-derqvist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 17–36.

9 Jean Etienne Montucla, Histoire des math¦matiques, dans laquelle on rend compte de leursprogrÀs depuis leur origine jusqu’� nos jours; o¾ l’on expose le tableau& le d¦veloppement desprincipales d¦couvertes, les contestations qu’elles ont fait na�tre,& les principaux traits de lavie des math¦maticiens les plus c¦lebres, 2 vols (Paris: Jombert, 1758).

10 Paolo Frisi, Elogio del Galileo (Milan: Agnelli, 1775); Paolo Frisi, Elogio del Cavaliere IsaccoNewton (Milan: n.p., 1778).

11 Frisi, Elogio del Galileo, pp. 93–4.

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‘revolution of the sciences’, Frisi wrote, but it was Newton who had given themtheir definitive shape, thus becoming ‘the idol of a free, enlightened, and pow-erful nation’.12 In these essays Frisi insisted on two sets of connections. First, theconnection between the moral and epistemic virtues of the two great men whichexemplified the ideal virtues of the modern philosopher of nature. Thus Galileoand Newton, emblematically joined by the fateful date of 1642, were ‘free’, ‘ac-tive’ and ‘patient’ philosophers as well as ‘affable’, ‘modest’ and ‘generous’ in-dividuals. They did not engage in the exploration of the natural world guided bypride, self-interest, or a passion for speculation, but because they were interestedin ‘useful truths’ and ‘in those cases where abstract knowledge can benefit so-ciety’.13 Frisi insisted also on the different pace of scientific progress withindifferent political and economic systems. He took Newton’s magnificent funeralin London as the visible emblem of the relation between a ‘free nation’ and itsdisinterested philosophers: those honors were reciprocated by the ‘absolute[military and political] superiority’ guaranteed to Britain by ‘Newton’s dis-coveries’.14 That is how, in Hapsburg-controlled Milan, the lives of scientificheroes could be deployed to foster the advancement of the sciences in a contextof administrative, economic, and religious reforms inspired by British lib-eralism.15

In later decades, authors like Auguste Comte and William Whewell refinednew models of the development of science based on historical stages. In thesemodels, informed by some version of the idealistic belief in a spirit of the age,discoveries owe less to individual genius and more to method and specifichistorical and spiritual conditions. For many science historians of the positivistera though, it remained all too natural to organize their materials in theframework of the great men’s contributions to the advancement of science. Thespate of celebratory and highly idealized biographies of the great men of scienceof the early twentieth century marks the high point of this tradition.16 Much ofthe later historiographical debate revolved precisely around the critique of thisapproach, and of its theoretical underpinnings. In essence, the new images of

12 Frisi, Elogio del Galileo, p. 134.13 Ibid., pp. 131–34.14 Frisi, Newton, p. 13.15 On the ‘exemplary lives’ of natural philosophers in early modern culture, see Stephen

Gaukroger, ‘Biography as a Route to Understanding Early Modern Natural Philosophy’, inSöderqvist, The History and Poetics, pp. 37–49.

16 See, for example: Robert Murray, Science and Scientists in the Nineteenth Century (London:Sheldon Press, 1925); Joseph Mayer, The Seven Seals of Science: An Account of the Unfold-ment of Orderly Knowledge & Its Influence on Human Affairs (New York: The CenturyCompany, 1927); Philipp Lenard, Große Naturforscher: eine Geschichte der Naturforschungin Lebensbeschreibungen (München: Lehmann, 1929); and Eric Bell, Men of Mathematics(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937).

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science that came to dominate the intellectual landscape of the mid-twentiethcentury made it very hard to carve out a theoretical and methodological spacefor biography. In this context, the narrative of the ‘great men’ rapidly lost itsappeal among professional historians of science: the eclipse of biography as alegitimate genre was swift and apparently irremediable. For one thing, the ne-opositivist separation of the world of logic and perception from that of life andsocial experience turned scientific biographies into a marginal and cognitivelyirrelevant literary category. One might expect that those historians of sciencethat inclined towards a social history inspired by the French school of theAnnales would engage more seriously with the biographical genre. But this wasnot the case, as they focused their attention primarily on structures, institutions,and long dur¦e phenomena, rather than on individual experience. Once again,although for different reasons, the experience of individuals was deemed irrel-evant to the reconstruction and understanding of scientific change. The fortuneof scientific biography did not improvemuch even in the 1960s and 1970s, whenthe historiography of science became receptive to new ways of doing socialhistory that emphasized interpretation andmicroanalysis. Interestingly, one canfind in much of this new social history of science – and even more so in thehistory of medicine – a mistrust of biography that is as profound as that man-ifested within contemporary rationalist philosophy of science.17

In 1979, when Thomas Hankins wrote his well-known essay in defense ofscientific biography, his was still a rather isolated voice, amidst a generalizedhostility towards the genre. ‘[S]cientific biography does not enjoy a very goodreputation these days,’ he noted.18 Hankins argued passionately for the useful-ness of biography as a literary genre for the history of science. Not just of anybiography though, but of a biography that integrates asmuch as possible what hecalls the ‘personality’ of the subject and their scientific work. The biographershould try to bring together the many dimensions of the subject’s life, and showthe ways in which they are connected to each other. Hankins put forward someinteresting programmatic considerations, such as the three ‘necessary attri-butes’ for the kind of scientific biography that he is advocating. First, it mustengage seriously with the scientific content, and not just with colorful anecdotesand the question of personality – as was typical of nineteenth-century biogra-phies. Second, it should delineate the ‘intellectual make-up’ of the subject, i. e. tointegrate the different dimensions of their life ‘into a single coherent picture’.Third, it should be ‘readable’: the author should convey enough information

17 On the fall of the ‘medical hero’, see Beth Linker, ‘Resuscitating the ‘Great Doctor’: TheCareer of Biography inMedical History’, in Söderqvist, The History and Poetics, pp. 221–39.

18 Thomas L. Hankins, ‘In Defense of Biography : The Use of Biography in the History ofScience’, History of Science, 17 (1979), 1–16 (p. 2).

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about the relevant science without departing too dramatically from the subjectsand their surroundings. A balance that is remarkably difficult to strike, and thereader is presented with some illustrious examples of unsuccessful attempts toget it right.19

Following Hankins’ groundbreaking contribution, there has been a definitereturn of interest in scientific biography, and various authors have been strivingtowards a reinterpretation and a re-legitimation of the genre in the academiclandscape of the late twentieth century. The nineties have indeed seen the be-ginning of a sophisticated debate on the nature and the role of biography inprofessional history of science, and the publication of works like Telling Lives inScience: Essays on Scientific Biography (1996), a collection of essays edited byMichael Shortland and Richard Yeo. Since then, the topic has maintained a goodvisibility within the historiography of science, as shown by a 2006 focus sectiondevoted to biography in Isis, and a collection edited by Thomas Söderqvist,significantly entitled The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography (2007),which gathers contributions from a 2002 conference.20 This new wave of studieshas fostered a reflection on the history of the genre, and on its possiblemeaningsin the context of a history of science that has been profoundly reshaped by thetheoretical agenda and methodological insights of the new sociology of scienceof the 1970s and early 1980s. Many of the contributors to this debate havesuggested – from different methodological perspectives – that biography shouldreturn to the toolkit of the professional historian of science. Quite simply, itshould be seen as yet another legitimate technique for the study of scientificpractice. After Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), and while micro-historicalcase-studies fill up the professional journals of history of science and medicine,it seems indeed curious to argue that biographical reconstructions are invariablyill-suited to pursue the aims of the social and cultural history of science.21

Today historians of science would hardly feel that they have to justifythemselves for writing a biography. However, the genre is still surrounded by apersistent ambiguity. This unease can be related first of all to the perception of adichotomy between the ‘biographical’ and the ‘social’, between individual ex-perience on the one hand, and the world of norms and institutions on the other.Even Hankins, in his 1979 apology, pointed out that biography ‘is unsuitable forstudying the social and institutional organization of science’.22 On the contrary,my own project onAgnesi originated from the conviction that I could use her life

19 Ibid., pp. 7–11.20 Telling Lives in Science, ed. by Shortland and Yeo; ‘Focus: Biography in the History of

Science’, Isis, 97 (2006), 302–29; The History and Poetics, ed. by Söderqvist.21 Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the

Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).22 Hankins, ‘In Defense of Biography’, p. 11.

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story as a probe to explore the world of Catholic Enlightenment, and to delineateits little known social and cultural contours. In particular, I was interested inreconstructing the connections between Catholic Enlightenment and the prac-tices of natural philosophy andmathematics. Another set of questions had to dowith the gendering of science and mathematics, and the historical conditionsthat wouldmake it possible for awoman of the first half of the eighteenth centuryto establish herself as a credible mathematician. Here my project ran againstanother couple of obstacles identified by Hankins. First, he suggested that bi-ographies should be about the protagonists of the history of science. Back-ground characters andmarginal individuals (the ‘little man’, in Hankins’ words)will always have a hard time finding their way into biography. Second, and quitecrucially for my project, ‘certain fields of science are especially difficult for thebiographer, the most difficult of all being mathematics’. Writing the scientificbiography of a mathematician is ‘devilishly difficult’ because this science ‘seemsto have a life unto itself ’, it is ‘independent’ from the cultural context, except forthose cases in which it intersects physics and philosophy. Inevitably, and hereHankins is certainly correct, ‘biographies in this field tend to be very technical,or very personal and anecdotal’.23

II. The Enigma of Agnesi

Maria Gaetana Agnesi was the first woman to publish a book of mathematics inher own name, a treatise of algebra and calculus entitled Instituzioni analitichead uso della giovent¾ italiana (Analytical Institutions for the Use of ItalianYouth). The book appeared in two elegant volumes in Milan, then a duchy underAustrian rule, in 1748. Previously, Agnesi had published Propositiones Philo-sophicae (1738), roughly the equivalent of the theses philosophicae that malestudents would publish and defend at the end of their cursus studiorum incontemporary colleges.24Her name had also appeared on the title page of a Latinoration published in 1727 which contained a resolute defense of the right ofwomen to study the fine arts and the ‘sublime sciences’.25 It is unlikely thatAgnesi, then nine years old, wrote this text. We know, however, that she de-claimed it frommemory for an audience of family friends in the summer of 1727,

23 Ibid., pp. 11–2.24 Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Propositiones philosophicae qua crebris disputationibus domi habitus

coram clarissimis viris explicabat extempore, et ab objectis vindicabat Maria Cajetana deAgnesiis mediolanensis (Milan: Malatesta, 1738).

25 Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Oratio qua ostenditur : artium liberalium studia a femineo sexuneutiquam abhorrere habita a Maria de Agnesis rethoricae operam dante anno aetatis suaenono nondum exacto, die 18. Augusti 1727 (Milan: Malatesta, [1727]).

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in the garden of her family palazzo. She will make a similar point, though muchmore concisely, in her introduction to the Instituzioni. In these pages, sig-nificantly dedicated to Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, Agnesi called for allwomen to contribute ‘to the glory of their sex’ through the practice of the arts,the sciences, and indeed of politics.26

The Instituzioni, whichwas conceived as a textbook for ‘Italianyouth’, did notassume any previous knowledge of algebra on the part of the student, and wasamong the very first attempts to provide an extensive and accessible in-troduction towhat was still a set of rather esoteric mathematical techniques. Thebook was well received, and it was translated into French and English.27 Shortlyafter its publication, Agnesi, who was already a member of some academies, wasoffered the chance to lecture on mathematics at the University of Bologna. Laterin the eighteenth century, Joseph Louis Lagrange wouldmention the Instituzionias an important part of his training, and would recommend the second volumeas a good introduction to calculus.28

Thanks to this publication, the name of Agnesi entered the history of math-ematics – even though only as marginalia. Her contemporaries had experiencedAgnesi as a fascinating and slightly unsettling prodigy who inhabited a preca-rious space between masculine skills, such as the ability to defend philosophicalpositions in public disputations, and feminine virtues, such as her modesty andritiratezza (seclusion). For later historians however, she would simply be ahistorical curiosity whose name would be mentioned in association with theInstituzioni, together with a little, mostly incorrect, biographical information.When her main book appeared, leading Italian and French mathematicianspraised Agnesi’s style as clear and effective, but her historiographical fortunedeclined rapidly towards the end of the century, and never quite recovered.29

What seems to have been fatal is, above all, the fact that no original discoverieswere associatedwith her name, only the alleged first description of an interestingbut rather useless curve. It should be noted that, due to a somewhat revealingmistranslation, this curve was referred to as ‘the witch of Agnesi’.30 Agnesi’sperceived lack of originality was given an authoritative and would-be definitiveseal of approval by Gino Loria in 1901. In that year Loria, a prominent historian

26 Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della giovent¾ italiana, 2 vols (Milan:Regia Ducal Corte, 1748), quote from the unpaged introduction.

27 A partial French translation of the Instituzioni appeared as Trait¦s ¦l¦mentaires de calculdiff¦rentiel et the calcul int¦gral (Paris: Jombert 1775). It was translated into English asAnalytical Institutions (London: Taylor and Wilks, 1801).

28 See Lagrange’s lectures, published in Maria Teresa Borgato, ‘Giuseppe Luigi Lagrange:Principi di Analisi Sublime’, Bollettino di storia delle scienze matematiche, 7 (1987), 45–200(esp. pp. 154, 177, and 187).

29 On the reception of the Instituzioni, see Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 120–22.30 Ibid., pp. 116–17, and especially the references given in footnote n. 30.

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of mathematics, delivered a lecture in which he argued for the essential in-capacity of the female mind to produce original knowledge in logic and math-ematics.31 In an intellectual landscape in which the epistemological divide be-tween the context of discovery and that of justification was sharp and un-bridgeable, Loria’s claim was tantamount to banning women from any seriousmathematical research, and hence from the history of mathematics. Nineteenthand twentieth-century historians did refer to Agnesi as a heroine of the En-lightenment, but always bearing inmind the necessary limitations of her gender,and therefore of her technical and conceptual accomplishments. Indeed, thebelief that the practice of mathematics is essentially gendered is not as distant assome of us might like to think. One should just remember that, in 2005, LarrySummers, then president of Harvard University, speculated that behind thegender gap in top science and engineering jobs theremight be ‘issues of intrinsicaptitude’.32

Mathematics, however, is not the only context in which Agnesi’s name hasbeen meaningful. By the time of her death, in 1799, she was already beingcelebrated as a champion of the Catholic faith, and indeed of the Catholic re-action.33 Her devotion, and extraordinary commitment to charity work, werewell known in the city of Milan and, in the nineteenth century, they were de-scribed in numerous apologetic pamphlets and short biographies that circulatedthroughout the Italian peninsula. Her commitment took visible institutionalforms, as when, in 1771, she became the first director of the female section of thePio Albergo Trivulzio, a new charitable institution opened in Milan to assist thecity’s poor and invalid.34 This was just one of the ways in which she collaboratedwith the local ecclesiastical authorities, other interesting examples being herteaching in primary schools attached toMilanese parishes, and her activity as anadvisor to the Archbishop of Milan on delicate theological matters. Moreover,among her unpublished papers one can find a few theological and devotionaltexts. The most remarkable is a large fragment of a manuscript in her own hand,entitledMystic Heaven, a sort of guide to contemplative practices leading to the‘transforming union’ with God.35

Biographers of Agnesi have found it particularly problematic to reconcile

31 Gino Loria, ‘Donne in matematica’, in Id., Scritti, conferenze, discorsi sulla storia dellematematiche (Padua: Milani, 1937), pp. 447–66.

32 Lawrence H. Summers, ‘Remarks at NBER conference on diversifying the science andengineering workforce’, January 14, 2005, see at http://www.harvard.edu/president/spee-ches/summers_2005/nber.php (last retrieved 9/12/2013). On the episode, see Pnina G. Abir-Am’s paper in this book.

33 See, for example, Benvenuto Robbio di San Raffaele,Disgrazie di DonnaUrania, ovvero deglistudi femminili (Parma: Regal Palazzo, 1793), pp. 122–31.

34 Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 147–49; see note n.11 for the relevant archival sources.35 Ibid., pp. 74–7 and 87–92.

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what they perceived as two radically divergent dimensions of her personality.They saw, on the one hand, a resolute defender of the rights of women and anenthusiastic practitioner of the new science of Galileo and Newton. On the other,a devout churchgoer and a champion of the Catholic Church. Emblematic of thistendency to polarize her life is the belief, duly reported by the Dictionary ofScientific Biography, that after the publication of the Instituzioni she wore thehabit of the Augustinian nuns, also known as the ‘blue nuns’. In fact, Agnesinever entered any religious order, nor did she cut completely her relations withfamily and friends, as has often been assumed. It is understandable that, in theage of revolutions first, and then in the context of the so-called ‘warfare of scienceand religion’, historians would struggle to make sense of the scant and appa-rently contradictory traces of her life. So much so that it became handy to labelAgnesi a ‘psychological enigma’.36

Agnesi’s historiographical fortune did not improve much in the twentiethcentury as she continued to be portrayed either as a proto-feminist or a quasi-saint of the Church with the variant, in 1939, of Agnesi as the ideal fascistwoman.37 Incidentally, one should not be surprised to discover that biographiesof Agnesi have been put to all kinds of uses. The same thing happened to hermore illustrious male colleagues, starting with Galileo and Newton. Rather thanbeing a distinctive weakness of biography as a genre, this should be simply seenas a manifestation of the fact that inevitably we write about the past as anexpression of present concerns. In biographies these concerns are often moreapparent than in other genres; this makes them conducive to the reflection onone’s own situatedness as author, and on its implications. The famous remarks ofRichard Westfall on his experience as a biographer of Newton are extremelyinstructive in this respect, as he reflects precisely on the way in which his idealsand expectations shaped his historical narrative. It is not coincidental thathistorians who have engaged in biographical writing, often admiring or loathingtheir subjects, are more likely to end up engaging in similar exercises in re-flexivity.38

But let us return to the biographies of Agnesi. These texts continued to rehasha very limited amount of information, mostly anecdotal, derived from a firstbiography published by a family friend in 1799.39 None of the later biographersseems to have looked carefully at the Instituzioni, or leafed through hermanuscript papers, now at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana inMilan. One remarkableexception is the biography by Luisa Anzoletti (1901), an intellectual and poet

36 Luisa Anzoletti, Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Milan: Cogliati, 1901), p. 340.37 Cornelia Benazzoli, Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Milan: Bocca, 1939).38 SeeMary JoNye’s insightful remarks onher own experience in ‘Scientific Biography :History

of Science by Another Means?’, Isis, 97 (2006), 322–29 (esp. p. 328).39 Antonio Frisi, Elogio storico di Donna Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Milan: Galeazzi, 1799).

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whowas at the time a prominent figure within the Catholic movement for femaleemancipation.40 Her specific social and cultural position created the conditionsfor the emergence of an image of Agnesi that escaped the usual dichotomy of thescienziata santa (saintly scientist). For Anzoletti, Agnesi’s staunch support forfemale education and participation in the worlds of art and science were not incontrast with her sincere devotion and charitable work, quite the contrary.Agnesi’s socially engaged religiosity was indeed a model to which Catholicfeminists of the early twentieth-century could look for guidance and inspiration.Anzoletti’s biography contains the first – and for a long time only – descriptionof Agnesi’s manuscripts, including the theological papers, which had attractedno attentionwhatsoever up to that point. Anzoletti was thus able tomove beyondthe usual stereotype, and provide a view of Agnesi’s life that goes a long way inthe direction of Hankins’s ‘integrated’ biography. On the form and contents ofher scientific work, however, Anzoletti deferred to the unflattering judgment ofhistorians of mathematics such as Loria.

In 1989 Clifford Truesdell published the most in-depth study of Agnesi’sscientific work to date, which also contained some interesting addenda such as areconstruction of the story of the ‘witch of Agnesi’, and of the origins of itsbizarre name.41 This study, however, was still informed by concerns about his-torical priority, and by what one could call the ‘historical curiosity’ model. Wekeep talking about Agnesi, Truesdell concluded, simply because she was awoman engaged in mathematics at a time when this activity was, and wouldcontinue to be for a long time, entirely dominated bymen. But there is nothing inher work that justifies special attention. In fact, Truesdell’s judgment on theInstituzioni is in clear continuity with Loria’s remarks; for him too it is a merework of popularization that lacks originality, and therefore historical interest.

It is remarkable that no historian of mathematics has ever given muchthought to the reasons why a wealthy and devout young lady like Agnesi shoulddecide to spend a few years of her life working on a tract of calculus. If from ourpoint of view this might look like a reasonable thing to do, it certainly was aneccentric choice to make in 1740s Milan. Apart from the obvious gender issues,no one in the duchy had shown any interest in this kind of mathematics, andthere was no need for a textbook as no one was even planning to teach it. For atalented woman in Agnesi’s position it would have been much more obvious toengage in cultural practices like poetry or music, which would have allowed herto enter a well defined, legitimated system of recognition and rewards within the

40 Anzoletti, Maria Gaetana Agnesi.41 Clifford Truesdell, ‘Maria Gaetana Agnesi’, Archive for the History of Exact Sciences, 40

(1989), 113–42; Id., ‘Corrections and Additions for Maria Gaetana Agnesi’, Archive for theHistory of Exact Sciences, 43 (1992), 385–86.

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network of the Milanese conversazioni. I began following the traces of Agnesidriven by this and other related questions. I was not interested in badly-formedquestions of priority, or in the misleading task of assigning her a place in thecanon of western mathematical rationality. My interest lay rather in the ex-ploration of the ways in which knowledge is made andmade authoritative underspecific historical circumstances. I was interested in credibility, the credibility ofknowledge and people. How could Agnesi establish herself as a credible math-ematician in the mid-eighteenth century, when women were routinely bannedfrom scientific academies, universities, and indeed from formal higher educa-tion? Which factors had made it possible for her to gain a status that wasroutinely out of reach for women? And why would a talented woman like herdevote herself to mathematics, rather than poetry, music, the fine arts, or evennatural history – i. e. areas in which the presence of women would be lessproblematic, and that intersected salon life in amore obvious way?Whatwas herown understanding of the meaning of doing mathematics?

First of all, one should notice that the banning of women from early modernscientific institutions was less systematic than is usually assumed, at least insome Italian cities. That a few talentedwomen could negotiate their way throughacademies and universities in eighteenth-century Italy has indeed been dem-onstrated in the exemplary works of Marta Cavazza and Paula Findlen. Cavazzahas exploredwith particular attention the Bolognese context and its institutionalcomplexities, reconstructing networks of patronage that could support women,offering them resources that were unparalleled in other European settings.Building on these pioneering studies, Findlen has skillfully reconstructed thecareer and patronage network of Laura Bassi, the most famous learned woman,or filosofessa, from Bologna. Bassi was awarded a university degree in 1732, andshe taught for many years experimental physics at the local university. Findlenhas also been studying a number of cases of eighteenth-century learned womenfrom other Italian cities and provincial settings, thus tracing the contours of aphenomenon that was much more significant than previously believed.42

With respect to these studies, to whichmine is obviously indebted, the case ofAgnesi added an inescapable religious dimension, and the presence of the

42 Marta Cavazza, ‘Laura Bassi e il suo gabinetto di fisica sperimentale: Realt� e mito’,Nuncius,10 (1995), 715–53; Ead., ‘Dottrici e lettrici dell’universit� di Bologna nel Settecento’, Annalidi storia delle universit� italiane, 1 (1997), 109–26; Ead., ‘Les femmes � l’acad¦mie: Le cas deBologne’, in Acad¦mies et soci¦t¦s savants en Europe, 1650–1800, ed. by Daniel-Odon Hureland G¦rard Laudin (Paris: Champion, 2000), pp. 161–75. Paula Findlen, ‘Science as a Careerin Enlightenment Italy’, Isis, 84 (1993), 441–69; Ead., ‘A Forgotten Newtonian: Women andScience in the Italian Provinces’, in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. by WilliamClarke, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999),pp. 313–49.

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profoundly gendered practice of mathematics. It also invited the reconstructionof the little known early eighteenth-century Milanese social and cultural setting,and of its relations to both Vienna – the capital – and the ecclesiastical au-thorities in Rome. In other words, it invited an evocation of the ‘world’ of Agnesi,hence the centrality of this term in the title of the book that ensued: TheWorld ofMaria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God. To understand the unusual socialtrajectory of Agnesi, her science, and her existential choices, was indeed con-ditional to understanding her world. At the same time, following Agnesi’s movesthrough the web of social life was an effective way to map the set of social andcultural resources that she could rely upon, as well as the normative systems thatframed her actions.My efforts to enlighten Agnesi, in other words, would also beefforts to rediscover the Enlightenment of Agnesi.

In this perspective, the biographical approach appeared to me the best way toachieve my key goals. Granted, mine was to be in many ways a peculiar kind ofbiographical narrative. For example, I was not interested in trying to cover thevarious periods of Agnesi’s life with the same attention, and I decided not to stickto a strict chronological order. Rather, I focused on a few key moments, due bothto documentary limitations and my perception of their overall significance.Also, I did not navigate at a constant analytical level, which is typical of mostbiographies, but I kept changing the scale of analysis within every chapter,moving ‘upwards’ from someminute aspects of the life of Agnesi and her family– an object, a building, a prayer, a letter, a conversation – to the power structuresof Milanese society and the way they were connected to transnational systems.This way of proceeding, which is inspired by the lessons of Italian micro-historyand Michel Foucault’s ‘microphysics of power’, can serve multiple purposes. Inthis way, for example, I was able to construct the thread of Agnesi’s life byweaving it effectively into the texture of Milanese social life. Conversely, bylinking thematerial objects, gestures, andwords that surroundedAgnesi to largesocial and cognitive formations, I was able to observe the ways in which theseformations entered the concrete experience of my historical actors.

In particular, this way of proceeding was functional to the exploration of therelationship between science and religion as it was understood and experiencedby Agnesi and her acquaintances. In Hankins’s parlance, it would be Agnesi’sown concrete experience that would guide my attempt to integrate the allegedlyinconsistent dimensions of her life. This integration, I believed, should not berealized through the imposition of some ready-made historiographical model. Iwas not trying, say, to replace the ‘warfare thesis’ with some sort of given-for-granted harmony. In fact, unlike Hankins, I am not even convinced that theoutcome of such reconstructions should be necessarily an integrated, coherent‘whole’, where everything has to make sense as in a perfect mechanism. Thatcultures are best not understood as self-contained and coherent wholes is indeed

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one of the most profound lessons of late twentieth-century anthropology. I thusfocused on specific moments of Agnesi’s life, her family, and her closest ac-quaintances, turning these episodes into privileged sites for the exploration ofthe concrete relationship between epistemological values and moral values in aclosely scrutinized historical situation. The experience of historical actors,rather than the theoretical formulations of eighteenth-century thinkers, wouldguide my exploration. In fact, I ended up dealing extensively with the writings ofLudovico Muratori (1672–1750) and other theologians and philosophers, butalways in dialogue – and often in tension – with Agnesi’s concrete experience,and her own understanding of their arguments.

III. Mysticism and Logic

What does it mean to use the life of a historical actor as a site for the study of theconcrete relationship between science and religion? An example will clarify myway of proceeding. As I was trying to understand why Agnesi should choose toembark on such an unlikely task as writing a textbook of calculus, I beganlooking at the specific technical features of her book.My expectationwas that thevery style and content of the book could provide me with precious indicationsabout Agnesi’s intentions and goals. The book presents indeed some distinctivefeatures when compared to contemporary productions, both in style and con-tent. For one thing, it looks like a hybrid of different mathematical traditions,namely the Leibnizian-Bernoullian and the Newtonian. Roughly speaking, it iswritten in Leibnizian algebraic notation, but the thinking behind it seems alwaysgenuinely geometrical, as was proper in the Newtonian tradition. It is not acoincidence that the Instituzioni would attract the interest of some Britishscholars at the turn of the nineteenth century, at a time of bitter disputes aboutthe respective merits of the two competing approaches.43

Agnesi’s geometrical inclination, which was definitely running against themain trends of continental mathematics, is confirmed by other features of thebook. For example, she leaves out everything that has to do with the possibleapplications of calculus to describe physical phenomena and solve problems inthe experimental sciences. A choice that seems to have puzzled contemporaryspecialists as well as twentieth-century historians of science such as Truesdell,who commented: ‘while learning calculus, she does not wish to study rational

43 Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 116–17. On Newtonian calculus, see Niccolý Guicciardini, The Deve-lopment of Newtonian Calculus in Britain, 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1989).

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mechanics as well!’.44One should not think thatAgnesi ignored themanyways inwhich calculus was being deployed in those years, from celestial mechanics tohydrodynamics, and which were indeed driving the development of newmathematical concepts and techniques. As emerges from her correspondenceand manuscript papers, she was well aware of what she was leaving out. ‘The[curves] that depend on the knowledge of physics I left aside on purpose’, shewrote to awell-knownmathematician, ‘for, as Your Excellency has seen, I did notwant to get involved with physical matters. I left aside all those problems thatdepend upon them, in order to avoid going beyond pure analysis, and its ap-plication to geometry.’45 These words point to what is indeed one of the mostintriguing features of the book, namely its exclusive focus on what Agnesiperceived as ‘pure mathematics’. She was interested in practicing and teachingthose parts of mathematics that are the most distant from the empirical world,and whose certainty is grounded solely on the intellectual perception of geo-metrical truths, rather than on empirical findings, or the manipulation of al-gebraic algorithms –which for Agnesi is a blind,mechanical operation.Her openreferences to the works of the now forgotten Charles Reyneau (1656–1728) andthe Oratorian mathematical school that had gathered around Nicolas Mal-ebranche are further signs of her inclinations, as is the list of mathematicalbooks in her personal library. To sum up, Agnesi seems to have been primarilyinterested in mathematics as an intellectual exercise, at a time when the greatmajority of mathematicians were actually driven by the amazing versatility ofthe new algebraic methods in capturing features of the empirical world. Thischoice had significant implications, not only at the level of style, but also for thelogical structure of the book, and for the way in which she treated some keyarguments, like the nature of infinitesimals.46

In order to provide an historical interpretation for the distinctive features ofAgnesi’s mathematics, browsing through the books on her shelves was neces-sary, but not sufficient. I decided to follow her around in her daily routines aswell. For this purpose I used letters and archival documents that described thepossessions of the Agnesi family, including things they owned and spaces inwhich they lived – and the way they used them.What stood out in these patternswas not only the unusual conversazione in which Pietro Agnesi staged with greatcare the performances of his gifted daughters – Maria Teresa was a respectedharpsichordist and composer – but also the interaction of the family with spe-

44 Quote from Truesdell, Agnesi, p. 133. See also Mazzotti, Agnesi, p. 117.45 Letter to Jacopo Riccati dated October 1, 1746, in Maria Soppelsa, ‘Jacopo Riccati – Maria

Gaetana Agnesi: carteggio 1745–1751’,Annali dell’Istituto eMuseo di Storia della Scienza diFirenze, 10 (1985), 117–59 (p. 128).

46 Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 105–23.

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cific religious institutions and spiritual traditions.47 The association with theTheatine priests of the nearby church of San Antonio was particularly strong,and was crucial in shaping the religious experience of the Agnesi, and of MariaGaetana in particular. Her devotion was ascetic, profoundly anti-baroque, andoriented towards the ‘century’ – i. e. the world, rather than the safer spaces of thechurch, the cloister, and the family houses. Agnesi divided her time betweencharity work, which increased significantly after the publication of the book,prayer, and meditation. Since her childhood she had been practicing the austereform of spirituality fostered in texts such as The Spiritual Combat by the The-atine Lorenzo Scupoli, a counter-reformist bestseller that would accompanyAgnesi for the rest of her life.48 In its direct, unsophisticated style, The SpiritualCombat portrays the human being as the battleground of opposite forces: theself-destructive senses and passions, and the well-trained intellect, which canguide the will to achieve a worthy spiritual life. Self-control is key in this form ofdevotion, hence the emphasis on exercises designed to train the intellect and thewill against the deception of the passions and the senses. Agnesi spent long hoursimmersed in meditation, at home and in front of an altar on the right side of thechurch of San Antonio. There she contemplated the representations of objectsrelated to the passion of Christ, such as the column, the ropes, and the nails, as ameans to enter into meditation on the holy mysteries. These material objectsfacilitated Agnesi’s participation in Christ’s suffering, her imitation of his purelove, up to the final self-annihilation in the divinity, that particular state that shewould refer to as ‘mystical marriage’, or ‘transforming union’. Agnesi describedher own ascetic techniques in The Mystic Heaven, where she guides the readerthrough various contemplative stages, up to the mystical marriage and thecontemplation of theHoly Trinity. In this process everything seems to acquire itsreal meaning, and reveal its true value. The successful contemplation and theChristomorphic transformation require the cooperation (Agnesi says ‘con-spiracy’) of both sensibility and rationality, will and intellect. ‘While the humanmind contemplates in marvel [the virtues of Christ]’, she wrote, ‘the heartimitates themwith love’. In this perspective the intellectual dimension, althoughnot valuable per se, is a necessary component of the spiritual experience of thebeliever. In fact, the soul is brought to the first mystic heaven by ‘the gifts ofintellect and wisdom’.49 Agnesi is consciously adhering to a tradition in whichthe intellect is described as ‘the eye of the soul’: it must be strengthened throughexercise, andmust be kept ‘lucid and clear’ in order to contribute to self-control,

47 On the functioning of the Agnesi conversazione and the meaning of Maria Gaetana’s per-formances, see Ibid., pp. 1–21.

48 [Lorenzo Scupoli], Combattimento spirituale, ordinato da un servo di Dio (Venice: appressoi Gioliti, 1589).

49 Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 90–1 (p. 91).

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prayer, and concentration. Only a clear intellect can guide the will to a fulfillingspiritual life. Clear intellect means an intellect freed from the pollution of theearthly appetites: only such an intellect can see things as they really are. Neg-ligence and idleness are not just despicable, they are themost dangerous vices, asthey ‘infect’ the will, and ‘blind’ the intellect. To keep one’s intellect lucid andclear through constant training is therefore an essential duty for the believer.50

The uses of a well-trained intellect are described by Agnesi in The MysticHeaven, where she deploys ascetic techniques to meditate on the passion ofChrist. But the same techniques could be deployed to control feelings andimagination in every moment of one’s life. One key element of these practices ofself-discipline is the capacity of ‘attention’. This was understood as the ability toconcentrate for a prolonged period of time, while directing the searchlight of theintellect towards a single object, in order to both inspect its structure andtranscend its materiality, moving from the thing as we perceive it to its moreprofound meanings and associations. Thus, for example, through attention onecan move from the contemplation of the cross and the nails to that of themysteries of the passion of Christ. This is the same ability, Agnesi believed, thatmakes the natural philosopher fully aware of the power of God by separating thematerial thing – say the complex eye of an insect – from its spiritual meaning,and elevating the mind to the contemplation of its creator. ‘Attention’ is a themethat appears often in both devotional and epistemological texts around 1700, andit plays a central role, for example, in the philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche.Agnesi does not show much interest in Malebranche’s metaphysics, but she isdefinitely interested in the ways he tries to connect intellectual activity andspiritual values through hybrid concepts like attention. For Malebranche, at-tention is not simply the ‘occasional cause’ of our knowledge, it is a ‘naturalprayer’ as well. For his disciple Reyneau, the ‘speculative truths’ of mathematics,those that are ‘far from the senses’ are the ones that have the highest spiritualvalue precisely because they refine our capacity of attention.51 When Agnesi iswriting her book, the Oratorian tradition was all but discredited in the eyes ofleading European mathematicians. It was not only their Cartesian assumptionsthat looked outdated, but also their attempt to integrate traditionalmetaphysicalconcerns into modern science. Agnesi was able to drop the heavy apparatus ofMalebranche’s metaphysics, and the cumbersome style of an author like Rey-neau, while rescuing their fundamental goal of investing key aspects of modernscience with spiritual value. In her subtle and understated way – exemplary

50 Ibid., pp. 36–7 (p. 37).51 Ibid., pp. 118–19. On Reyneau, see also Jean Charles Juhel, ‘Le role de proportions dans

l’evolutionde l’ecriture alg¦brique auXVIIÀme siÀcle’, Sciences et techniques en perspective, 8(1984–1985), 57–162 (pp. 114–15).

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incarnation of the feminine virtue of modesty – Agnesi produced an in-troduction to the most advanced mathematics of her age that was also, to thosewho shared her religious form of life, a training ground for ‘attention’, a mostvaluable ascetic ability. Agnesi was convinced that mathematics, and geometryin particular, held a unique epistemological status, due to the certainty of itspropositions, and the ‘evidentness’ of its truths which are apprehended solelythrough intellectual intuition. For her, calculus was the most sophisticated kindof geometry to date, the one that would require the highest level of concentrationto master – indeed of ‘attention’. Training young students in this disciplinemeant therefore to equip them with an ability that will be key to their under-standing of the world, as well as to their spiritual life. Geometry gives us ‘the skillto control the imagination’, Malebranche had written in a similar vein, ‘and acontrolled imagination sustains the mind’s perception and attention’.52 I soonrealized that the mental state of ‘attention’ was also at the center of much of theproduction of the antibaroque painter Giuseppe Antonio Petrini (circa 1677–1755). While Agnesi was working on her book, Petrini was translating the cli-mate of religious reformism that pervaded Milan and the surrounding region inpictorial form. His style is decidedly distant from contemporary decorativerococo, and his choice of themes is equally peculiar. Above all, he seems inter-ested in portraying saints and natural philosophers, capturing them in thatparticular state of absorption that Agnesi considered to be a prerequisite for theexercise of attention and, therefore, for the acquisition of both true knowledgeand divine enlightenment.53

The reconstruction of the complex meaning of ‘attention’ provides an illus-tration of my overall strategy. In order to reconstruct Agnesi’s religious culture Ifollowed her gestures and mental exercises from the family prie-Dieu, throughthe parish churches and Sunday schools of the neighborhood, up to Vienna andRome. In order to do this I relied on the correspondence networks of the Re-public of Letters, but also on other aspects of her material and visual culture.Thus, for example, I reconstructed the establishment of new devotions, such asthat of San Gaetano, that linked the Agnesi to the imperial court via the medi-ation of the Theatine congregation. Or, to give another example, I have let theAgnesi’s Arcadian taste in the fine arts and decoration, and the careful assem-blage of paintings on the walls of their city house, guide me towards a new moraland aesthetic discourse that informed their collection, which was shared by theArchbishop of Milan, and found support in certain sectors of the Roman Curia.

In conclusion, ‘attention’ as understood and experienced by Agnesi was part

52 Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997), p. 429.

53 Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 85–7.

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of a constellation of practices and values that crossed the boundaries of devotion,theology, natural philosophy, and mathematics. These practices and values,more than any abstract set of principles, came to constitute the spiritual andscientific life ofmy early eighteenth-century actors. In my study, I decided to usethe term ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ to refer to this loosely defined cultural for-mation and its social referents.54 More and more, the theme of ‘attention’ ap-peared tome as just one aspect of a broader set of practices for the disciplining ofthe intellect and the imagination that are at the core of Catholic Enlightenment.This cultural movement, which expressed the priorities and aspirations of asignificant portion of the European Catholic elites during the first half of theeighteenth century, has been thus far ignored by the history of science. At thecost, I believe, of seriously limiting our understanding of the contemporarymathematics and natural philosophy.

IV. Conclusion

It is now time to return to biography, and to draw some conclusions. In theprevious pages, I have tried to give an idea of the ways in which I used thebiographical approach inmy book on Agnesi. I moved from the recognition thatthe rigidly dualistic narrative – life and science – that characterized most bi-ographies of the past, especially in mathematics, needs to be abandoned. Butwhat should replace it? Rather than integrating the various dimensions ofAgnesi’s life under some superior point of view or unifying principle, I havetried to understand how the interaction between these dimensionswas perceivedby Agnesi herself. In particular, I have shown how – in her experience – certainboundaries that would appear obvious and rigid to later commentators (betweenreligious and scientific practices, for example) were rather fluid. The point forme was not to argue that there exists a relationship between science and religionin some abstract sense, but to show empirically the way in which actors likeAgnesi constructed and used this relationship. A biographical approach andgood old archive-based family history have also been key to my understandingof the functioning of the Agnesi conversazione, and of the network of alliancesand resources, material and symbolic, that supported the career and credibilityof this talented woman.

Overall, I believe that the persisting doubts about the status of scientificbiography and the perception of a divide between the study of individual ex-perience and ‘the social’ are singularly unjustified, for both practical and the-

54 For a historiographical assessment of the notion of ‘Catholic Enlightenment’, and my use ofthis term, see Ibid., pp. 38–43.

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oretical reasons. Practically, one could simply refer to the spate of excellent case-studies that have been produced in the last couple of decades, where micro-analysis and the focus on individuals are deployed to reveal the essential featuresof historically given systems of power and distributions of knowledge. Thestudies of patronage systems in science are a good case in point.55 This wave ofscholarship is underpinned by theoretical insights derived from the new socialsciences of the 1960s, and in particular from micro-sociology and other inter-pretive trends that have profoundly redefined the meaning and scope of ‘thesocial’. This transformation has concerned primarily our understanding of thelong-debated relationship between structure and action, and of the very notionof agency. This rethinking of the social has gone a long way in bridging of thedistance between individual action and social structures. The emergence of aperformative understanding of social structures, for example, has made itpossible to explore social institutions and normative systems through the ex-periences of individuals. That is because we now tend to think of structures asembedded in these experiences; they do not exist independently and outside ofthem. In this perspective, biography is not an obstacle to the social and culturalstudy of science, but rather one of the most effective ways to explore how cog-nitive and social structures are constructed, sustained, and modified.

That biography can be turned into an effective tool for cultural historians hasalready been shown by a number of recent studies, such as the fine biographiesby Mary Terrall (Pierre Louis Maupertuis), Ted Porter (Karl Pearson), andGiuliano Pancaldi (Alessandro Volta).56 In her contribution to the debate on thestatus of scientific biography, Terrall states that she ’wanted to write the story ofhis [Maupertuis’] career as a story of the meaning and practice of science in thisperiod’, while Porter insists on biography as a way of historicizing the categoryof ‘scientist’, and to recapture ‘the ways that scientists found meaning in theworld and attached moral value to their work’. As for Pancaldi, his biographicalnarrative is turned into an effective instrument to engage with a notion of‘scientific life’ that is now vastly richer than it ever was.57

While for these authors biography is above all a means to explore the socialand cultural dimensions of the making of scientific knowledge, others empha-

55 Emblematic, in this respect, is Mario Biagioli,Galileo Courtier : The Practice of Science in theAge of Absolutism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).

56 Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the En-lightenment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002); Giuliano Pancaldi, Volta: Scienceand Culture in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003);Theodore Porter, Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2004).

57 Mary Terrall, ‘Biography as Cultural History of Science’, Isis, 97 (2006), 306–13 (p. 308);Theodore Porter, ‘Is the Life of the Scientist a Scientific Unit?’, Isis, 97 (2006), 314–21 (p.316).

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size that this genre gives us the opportunity to engage with the ‘freely acting’individual scientist who struggles for self-assertion vis-�-vis the existing socio-political conditions and cultural constraints. It is the case of Thomas Söderqvist,who is concerned primarily with the ‘existential conditions’ of the scientist,which he describes as irreducible to historical and social factors. He believes thatthis move does not imply a return to the ‘myth of personal coherence’, and toBourdieu’s ‘illusion biographique’. Rather, he argues for an ‘open biography’that, using an array of narrative techniques, does not conflate individuality withan essential character, or personality.58 Although it remains unclear how thiscould be achieved in practice, I think that Söderqvist’s argument has themerit ofdirecting the debate towards the question of agency, how we should understandit, and how it should enter our historical narratives. In fact, I believe that one ofthe key challenges for historians and social scientists in the near future will beprecisely that of constructing biographies that keep together the discourse ofindividual responsibility with the rejection of individual agency as some kind ofmysteriousmetaphysical power. In other words, I believe that one should aim fornarratives in which the everyday discourse of human beings operating as freeagents acting voluntarily coexists with the awareness of them being mutuallyaccountable and dependent creatures, and with the pervasiveness of collectiveaction in social life. We need new words and new narrative strategies to bestexplore what Barry Barnes calls ‘the fine line between [social] status and [in-ternal] state.’59

58 Thomas Söderqvist, ‘Existential Project andExistential Choice in Science: Science Biographyas an Edifying Genre’, in Telling Lives in Science, ed. by Shortland and Yeo, pp. 45–84. OnJames Clifford’s ‘myth of personal coherence’, see reference on p. 14.

59 Barry Barnes, Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action (London: Sage,2000), p. 143.

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