Articles and Chapters by Daniel Margocsy
Annals of Science, 2024
This article uses the mythological figure of the satyr to examine European attitudes towards inco... more This article uses the mythological figure of the satyr to examine European attitudes towards incorporating mythical creatures into zoology and, more broadly, to survey attempts to reconcile the relative status of myth vis-à-vis modern science. Evidence is used from the past five hundred years to argue for the longevity of these debates, which continue to repeat the same arguments based on the same sources. It is argued that scholars' attitudes towards Ancient civilizations play a significant role in explaining whether they decide to consider the satyr as the product of the imperfect observation of monkeys or as a creature on its own right.
Stefanie Gänger and Jürgen Osterhammel, Rethinking Global History (CUP), 2024
This chapter offers an overview of historians’ writings about scale and their debates on micro- a... more This chapter offers an overview of historians’ writings about scale and their debates on micro- and macrohistory in the past half century. It is argued that the complex debates between followers of Italian microstoria, members of the Annales school, and social and cultural historians in the Anglo-American world need to be considered in the context of similar discussions and experiments with scale in literary writings, in artworks and especially in the scholarship in human geography. The chapter claims that, in an era of human-made climate crisis, we should reconsider how we conceptualise the role of particles, microbes, parasites, worms, and other animals in historical writing, going beyond the dichotomy of micro- and macrohistory. It is proposed that the geographer Neil Smith’s concept of ‘jumping scales’ is an especially productive way of discussing how hierarchical power structures are established and disrupted by agents operating at levels that range from the microscopical to the global.
Daphnis, 2024
This article offers a revisionist interpretation of the early modern Republic of Letters by offer... more This article offers a revisionist interpretation of the early modern Republic of Letters by offering a contextual analysis of explicit mentions of the term by scholars across Europe in the period. The current historiography on the Republic of Letters tends to present it as the place of friendly, solidary and democratic cooperation across national and religious boundaries. This article argues, instead, that members of the Republic of Letters conceptualised it as a battlefield of permanent warfare. Early modern scholars often compared themselves to soldiers of a hierarchically organised
army or to fighters in a civil war. It is claimed that a militarised conceptualisation of the Republic of Letters offers the opportunity to re-engage with Reinhart Koselleck’s influential Kritik und Krise. Evidence is presented from fifteenth-century Italy to early nineteenth-century Hungary.
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 2023
The Huguenot refugee artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues is traditionally known for his observatio... more The Huguenot refugee artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues is traditionally known for his observations of North America and as the author of numerous albums of floral drawings. This article reassesses the attribution of several of these albums to Le Moyne based on documentary and stylistic evidence. It identifies the sixteenth-century Huguenot nobleman and diplomat Jacques de Morogues as the owner of one of the albums, and it discusses the production and early use of these albums as luxury gifts in French diplomatic and courtly circles. We document connections between the albums associated with Le Moyne and other sixteenthcentury and later works of floral imagery. We argue that the albums associated with Le Moyne show that developments in floral imagery in this period were driven by a distinct network of artists and collectors, and we offer a hypothesis of how members of this network may have interpreted them as an occasion to take pleasure in nature's charming variety, to praise it as God's work and to use flowers as symbols of feminine beauty and fertility. LE MOYNE AND FLORAL ALBUMS The French artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (c. 1533-1588) is known for his first-hand observations of North America and as an artist who specialised in picturing plants and insects, one of the few identified by name in the sixteenth century. The author of a travel account to Florida and the designer of a printed pattern book of plants and animals, in the past century several albums of floral drawings have been ascribed to him. Le Moyne has been cast in the popular and scholarly literature as a versatile and productive figure, viewed as a connecting point between the era of Renaissance floral decorations in manuscript illumination and the emergence of florilegia and flower still lifes at the turn of the seventeenth century. 1
British Journal for the History of Science, 2022
This article situates the collecting practices of museums of natural history in the nineteenth an... more This article situates the collecting practices of museums of natural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in dialogue with similar practices amongst societies in the Pacific by focusing on how European curators, dealers in natural history and Pacific Islanders shared a common fascination with Spondylus shells. In particular, this article examines the processes for turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens. Spondylus shells were crucial for regulating gift and commercial exchanges in the societies of both regions. Famously, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski claimed that these shells were an essential element of the gift-based kula exchange, which helped him distinguish Western capitalist society from less developed societies without commercial trade. Yet Spondylus shells were also collected and exchanged as gifts amongst British and European naturalists in this period, performing the same roles as in Melanesia. In addition, such gift exchanges could only come into being thanks to the actions of commercially motivated dealers, located both in the Pacific and in Europe, who were the suppliers of these shells both to Melanesian participants in the kula and to Western natural historians and collectors. These observations call into question earlier arguments that equate modernity with the rise of commercial capitalism. It is instead claimed that commercial and gift exchanges were intricately connected and reliant on each other throughout the period, whether in the worlds of Western museums or in Pacific archipelagos. The act of turning Spondylus shells into unique or duplicate specimens was the key tool for regulating these exchanges. Looking for difference amongst a sea of similarity is a recurring theme in Vakutan thinking. 1 Here is a Spondylus shell that entered the British Museum in the nineteenth century, originally collected by the Valparaiso sailmaker Hugh Cuming somewhere in the Pacific. 2 And here are three more Spondylus shells from the same museum that Bronisław Malinowski collected in Melanesia during the First World War (Figures 1-5). 3 Now, in 2021, they are clearly not duplicates of each other: they perform different functions
Progress in Development Studies, 2022
The collection, processing, storage and circulation of data are fundamental element of contempora... more The collection, processing, storage and circulation of data are fundamental element of contemporary societies. While the positivistic literature on 'data revolution' finds it essential for improving development delivery, critical data studies stress the threats of datafication. In this article, we demonstrate that datafication has been happening continuously through history, driven by political and economic pressures. We use historical examples to show how resource and personal data were extracted, accumulated and commodified by colonial empires, national governments and trade organizations, and argue that similar extractive processes are a present-day threat in the Global South. We argue that the decoupling of earlier and current datafication processes obscures the underlying, complex power dynamics of datafication. Our historical perspective shows how, once aggregated, data may become imperishable and can be appropriated for problematic purposes in the long run by both public and private entities. Using historical case studies, we challenge the current regulatory approaches that view data as a commodity and frame it instead as a mobile, non-perishable, yet ideally inalienable right of people.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2021
This article offers a new interpretation of the concept of wonder in early modern Europe by focus... more This article offers a new interpretation of the concept of wonder in early modern Europe by focusing on large collections. It shows that many princely Kunstkammern were located above stables, and argues that the horses downstairs and the curiosities upstairs performed similar roles in the courtly display of power. The size and design of stables shaped how curiosities were exhibited and viewed. These majestic buildings facilitated cursory viewing experiences of the assemblage of a great number of animals and objects. They did not necessarily encourage the detailed examination of particular and unique exhibits.
History of Science, 2021
It is the aim of this article to put questions of maintenance and repair in the history of scienc... more It is the aim of this article to put questions of maintenance and repair in the history of science and technology under scrutiny, with a special focus on technologies and methods of transportation. The history of transportation is a history of trying to avoid shipwrecks and plane crashes. It is also a history of broken masts, worm-eaten hulls, the flat tires of cars, and endless delays at airports. This introductory article assesses the technological, scientific, and cultural implications of repairing and maintaining transportation networks. We argue that infrastructures for maintenance and repair played just as important a role in the history of transportation as the wharves and factories where ships, cars, trains, and airplanes were originally built. We also suggest that maintenance and repair are important sites of knowledge production, and a historical account of these practices provides a new, decentered narrative for the development of modern science and technology.
KNOW, 2021
This article examines how the reception history of Maria Sibylla Merian’s oeuvre may shed light o... more This article examines how the reception history of Maria Sibylla Merian’s oeuvre may shed light on the role of medicine in interpreting art around 1700. The focus is on Merian’s iconic images of the pineapple, a fruit that many considered a potential source of disease. The years when Merian was active saw the eruption of debates over the origins of intestinal worms and the possible role of sweet fruits as carriers of the invisible eggs of these parasites. The key figures in these helminthological debates were also the interlocutors and collectors of Merian, including the physicians Richard Mead and Hans Sloane. A study of the writings of these medical professionals reveals that, for Europeans in this period, exotic fruits indicated not only the bountiful productivity of tropical nature but also its inherent dangers. Using this case study, this article therefore argues that dietetics and medicine played a key role in the interpretation of art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when physicians had a strong presence in the world of collecting works of art.
Lia Markey, ed. Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s Nova Reperta. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020
Thinking 3D: Books, Images and Ideas from Leonard to the Present, 2019
An essay on Jacques Fabien Gautier D'Agoty's Exposition anatomique des organes des sens.
in: Bert de Munck and Antonella Romano, eds, Knowledge and the Early Modern City: A History of Entanglements, 2019
Word and Image, 2019
This article reconstructs the reception history of the illustrations of Andreas Vesalius's De hum... more This article reconstructs the reception history of the illustrations of Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica (1543) by tracing how they were copied, pirated, and plagiarized from the sixteenth century to today. Curiously, Early Modern printers never reused the original woodblocks, even though they were available for sale. Instead, publishers commissioned new, smaller, and corrected illustrations that imitated, but did not exactly replicate, the original woodcuts. As I argue, Early Modern medical publishers engaged with images by continually trying to emulate and improve upon them. It was only in the eighteenth century, when the Fabrica ceased to become a textbook for practicing physicians, that its images became cult objects that needed to be replicated exactly. It was in this era that the original woodblocks were rediscovered and then used to print new editions of the Fabrica. Curiously, William Ivins, Jr., the renowned print scholar, came up with his theory of exactly repeatable pictorial statements when he became engaged with the 1934 re-edition of the Fabrica's images, the last edition to rely on these woodblocks. It is claimed here that his theory of pictorial statements is a reflection of how modern publishers engaged with the Fabrica's images, but misrepresented how those images were used in the Early Modern period. Bruno Latour's work on immutable mobiles drew its inspiration from the work of Ivins. Consequently, a reassessment of Ivins's claims about the history of printing is also a reassessment of Latour's claims about the role of inscriptions in the emergence of modernity.
The introduction to this special issue argues that network breakdowns play an important and unack... more The introduction to this special issue argues that network breakdowns play an important and unacknowledged role in the shaping and emergence of scientific knowledge. It focuses on transnational scientific networks from the early modern Republic of Letters to 21st-century globalized science. It attempts to unite the disparate historiography of the early modern Republic of Letters, the literature on 20th-century globalization, and the scholarship on Actor-Network Theory. We can perceive two, seemingly contradictory, changes to scientific networks over the past four hundred years. At the level of individuals, networks have become increasing fragile, as developments in communication and transportation technologies, and the emergence of regimes of standardization and instrumentation, have made it easier both to create new constellations of people and materials, and to replace and rearrange them. But at the level of institutions, collaborations have become much more extensive and long-lived, with single projects routinely outlasting even the arc of a full scientific career. In the modern world, the strength of institutions and macro-networks often relies on ideological regimes of standardization and instrumentation that can flexibly replace elements and individuals at will.
Annals of Science, published online.
Two pirated editions form a vital but neglected part of the printing and reception history of the... more Two pirated editions form a vital but neglected part of the printing and reception history of the first edition of Grotius's Mare liberum.
This article provides a listing of known copies of the first two folio editions of Andreas Vesali... more This article provides a listing of known copies of the first two folio editions of Andreas Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (1543 and 1555), revising earlier estimates. It shows that the Fabrica survives in much higher numbers than previously reported, and has a much wider geographical distribution, as well. The authors discuss the methodologies for conducting census in the digital age, provide an estimate of the print runs, and compare the survival rate of the two folio editions. It is argued that cultural politics explains the circulation patterns and current locations of Vesalius' Fabrica. Throughout history, this luxurious atlas of anatomy could only be afforded by the wealthy, and, as a result, surviving copies tend to concentrate in areas that have traditionally been associated with the development of Western economic power structures.
The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume45 / Special Issue02 / June 2012, pp 153-164, Mar 1, 2012
This introductory article provides an overview of the historiography of scientific secrecy from J... more This introductory article provides an overview of the historiography of scientific secrecy from J.D. Bernal and Robert Merton to this day. It reviews how historians and sociologists of science have explored the role of secrets in commercial and government sponsored scientific research through the ages. Whether focusing on the medieval, early modern or modern periods, much of this historiography has conceptualized scientific secrets as valuable intellectual property that helps entrepreneurs and autocratic governments gain economic or military advantage over competitors. Following Georg Simmel and Max Weber, this article offers an alternative interpretation of secrecy as a tool to organize and to hierarchically order society. In this view, the knowledge content of secrecy is less important than its social psychological effects. The authors argue that, in many instances, entrepreneurial researchers and governments use scientific secrets as an effective tool to manipulate the beliefs of their
competitors and the larger public, and not necessarily to protect the knowledge that they hold.
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Articles and Chapters by Daniel Margocsy
army or to fighters in a civil war. It is claimed that a militarised conceptualisation of the Republic of Letters offers the opportunity to re-engage with Reinhart Koselleck’s influential Kritik und Krise. Evidence is presented from fifteenth-century Italy to early nineteenth-century Hungary.
competitors and the larger public, and not necessarily to protect the knowledge that they hold.
army or to fighters in a civil war. It is claimed that a militarised conceptualisation of the Republic of Letters offers the opportunity to re-engage with Reinhart Koselleck’s influential Kritik und Krise. Evidence is presented from fifteenth-century Italy to early nineteenth-century Hungary.
competitors and the larger public, and not necessarily to protect the knowledge that they hold.