Mazzotti - Rethinking Scientific Biography-libre

Massimo Mazzotti

Rethinking Scientific Biography: The Enlightenment of MariaGaetana Agnesi

Some of themost interesting works in the recent history of science have explored

the ways in which value is attached to scientific practices and, more generally, is

embedded in forms of scientific life.1 Reconstructing the relationship between

knowledge and the virtues of people – as it is articulated in specific historical

situations – has indeed proved to be a fruitful strategy for addressing more

general 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 of

scientific biography as a genre; I then argue that, when handled appropriately,

the biographical narrative is especially suited to the exploration of the moral

economies of science.2More specifically, I propose that the reconstruction of the

lives of figures traditionally consideredmarginal for the history of early modern

science – women, for example – can reveal interesting connections between

scientific 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 the

historian of science, it can also be an effective instrument for the social studies of

science. In order to illustrate this point, I refer primarily to my experience as a

biographer of Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799) whose life I tried elsewhere to

illuminate. This experience resulted in a significant transformation of my own

understanding of the scientific Enlightenment in Continental Europe during the

first 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 so

far enjoyed mixed fortunes among professional historians. It has often been

remarked that there is a veritable gulf between the goals and methods of pro-

fessional biographers and those of academic researchers, and that biography

enjoys a comparatively low status within the genres of scholarly production.4

Biographers, for example, can talk lightheartedly about identity, personality, and

their 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 Bourdieu

calls the ‘postulat du sens de l’existence’.5And it is not just amatter of academics

versus the outside world, or even of postmodernist sensibilities. After all, isn’t

the discovery of the radical and irredeemable discontinuity of reality the very

core of the modernist novel? In many quarters, the self-proclaimed key task of

professional biographers – to treat a life as a story, as a meaningful sequence of

events – has long been regarded as nothing more than a rhetorical illusion.6 In

the understated words of two authors who have reflected importantly on these

matters: ‘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 of

this genre in the academic world. In this field one can best observe the chasm

between 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.

Massimo Mazzotti118

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 of

learning.8 It is only in themid-eighteenth century, with the rise of Enlightenment

historiography, that an alternative approach became visible. It was based on the

belief that the advancement of human knowledge should not be understood

primarily in terms of individual contributions, but rather as the expression of

the progressive liberation of the human mind from the yoke of tradition and

error. Jean Etienne Montucla’s Histoire des math¦matiques (1758) is a case in

point, as it shifts the emphasis from the lives of the protagonists to the rational

progress of the discipline.9 On the one hand, the lives of the great heroes and

martyrs 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 of

human 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 essays

written by Paolo Frisi in the 1770s, especially those on Galileo Galilei and Isaac

Newton.10 These carefully crafted lives are, at once, a celebration of exceptional

individuals – who are effectively transmuted into icons of modern science – and

the reconstruction of the process of emancipation of the human mind from

religious obscurantism and cultural backwardness. For Frisi, a Barnabite priest

and 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 domestication

of science to theological dogma that was the real cause of the decline of Italian

science.11 While Galileo was the true father and martyr of the Enlightenment,

Newton’s life and career exemplified an alternative way inwhich the relationship

between 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.

The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi 119

‘revolution of the sciences’, Frisi wrote, but it was Newton who had given them

their 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, the

connection between the moral and epistemic virtues of the two great men which

exemplified the ideal virtues of the modern philosopher of nature. Thus Galileo

and 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 by

pride, self-interest, or a passion for speculation, but because they were interested

in ‘useful truths’ and ‘in those cases where abstract knowledge can benefit so-

ciety’.13 Frisi insisted also on the different pace of scientific progress within

different political and economic systems. He took Newton’s magnificent funeral

in London as the visible emblem of the relation between a ‘free nation’ and its

disinterested 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 scientific

heroes could be deployed to foster the advancement of the sciences in a context

of administrative, economic, and religious reforms inspired by British lib-

eralism.15

In later decades, authors like Auguste Comte and William Whewell refined

new models of the development of science based on historical stages. In these

models, 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 specific

historical and spiritual conditions. For many science historians of the positivist

era though, it remained all too natural to organize their materials in the

framework of the great men’s contributions to the advancement of science. The

spate of celebratory and highly idealized biographies of the great men of science

of the early twentieth century marks the high point of this tradition.16 Much of

the later historiographical debate revolved precisely around the critique of this

approach, 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).

Massimo Mazzotti120

science that came to dominate the intellectual landscape of the mid-twentieth

century made it very hard to carve out a theoretical and methodological space

for biography. In this context, the narrative of the ‘great men’ rapidly lost its

appeal among professional historians of science: the eclipse of biography as a

legitimate genre was swift and apparently irremediable. For one thing, the ne-

opositivist separation of the world of logic and perception from that of life and

social experience turned scientific biographies into a marginal and cognitively

irrelevant literary category. One might expect that those historians of science

that inclined towards a social history inspired by the French school of the

Annales would engage more seriously with the biographical genre. But this was

not 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 fortune

of scientific biography did not improvemuch even in the 1960s and 1970s, when

the historiography of science became receptive to new ways of doing social

history that emphasized interpretation andmicroanalysis. Interestingly, one can

find in much of this new social history of science – and even more so in the

history 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 of

scientific biography, his was still a rather isolated voice, amidst a generalized

hostility towards the genre. ‘[S]cientific biography does not enjoy a very good

reputation 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 any

biography though, but of a biography that integrates asmuch as possible what he

calls the ‘personality’ of the subject and their scientific work. The biographer

should try to bring together the many dimensions of the subject’s life, and show

the ways in which they are connected to each other. Hankins put forward some

interesting programmatic considerations, such as the three ‘necessary attri-

butes’ for the kind of scientific biography that he is advocating. First, it must

engage seriously with the scientific content, and not just with colorful anecdotes

and 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. to

integrate 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).


about the relevant science without departing too dramatically from the subjects

and their surroundings. A balance that is remarkably difficult to strike, and the

reader is presented with some illustrious examples of unsuccessful attempts to

get it right.19

Following Hankins’ groundbreaking contribution, there has been a definite

return of interest in scientific biography, and various authors have been striving

towards a reinterpretation and a re-legitimation of the genre in the academic

landscape 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 in

professional history of science, and the publication of works like Telling Lives in

Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (1996), a collection of essays edited by

Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo. Since then, the topic has maintained a good

visibility within the historiography of science, as shown by a 2006 focus section

devoted 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 studies

has fostered a reflection on the history of the genre, and on its possiblemeanings

in the context of a history of science that has been profoundly reshaped by the

theoretical agenda and methodological insights of the new sociology of science

of the 1970s and early 1980s. Many of the contributors to this debate have

suggested – from different methodological perspectives – that biography should

return to the toolkit of the professional historian of science. Quite simply, it

should be seen as yet another legitimate technique for the study of scientific

practice. After Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), and while micro-historical

case-studies fill up the professional journals of history of science and medicine,

it seems indeed curious to argue that biographical reconstructions are invariably

ill-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 justify

themselves for writing a biography. However, the genre is still surrounded by a

persistent ambiguity. This unease can be related first of all to the perception of a

dichotomy 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 for

studying 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.

Massimo Mazzotti122

story as a probe to explore the world of Catholic Enlightenment, and to delineate

its little known social and cultural contours. In particular, I was interested in

reconstructing the connections between Catholic Enlightenment and the prac-

tices of natural philosophy andmathematics. Another set of questions had to do

with the gendering of science and mathematics, and the historical conditions

that wouldmake it possible for awoman of the first half of the eighteenth century

to establish herself as a credible mathematician. Here my project ran against

another 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 quite

crucially for my project, ‘certain fields of science are especially difficult for the

biographer, the most difficult of all being mathematics’. Writing the scientific

biography of a mathematician is ‘devilishly difficult’ because this science ‘seems

to have a life unto itself ’, it is ‘independent’ from the cultural context, except for

those cases in which it intersects physics and philosophy. Inevitably, and here

Hankins 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 in

her own name, a treatise of algebra and calculus entitled Instituzioni analitiche

ad uso della giovent¾ italiana (Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian

Youth). The book appeared in two elegant volumes in Milan, then a duchy under

Austrian rule, in 1748. Previously, Agnesi had published Propositiones Philo-

sophicae (1738), roughly the equivalent of the theses philosophicae that male

students would publish and defend at the end of their cursus studiorum in

contemporary colleges.24Her name had also appeared on the title page of a Latin

oration published in 1727 which contained a resolute defense of the right of

women to study the fine arts and the ‘sublime sciences’.25 It is unlikely that

Agnesi, 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]).


in the garden of her family palazzo. She will make a similar point, though much

more concisely, in her introduction to the Instituzioni. In these pages, sig-

nificantly dedicated to Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, Agnesi called for all

women 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 not

assume any previous knowledge of algebra on the part of the student, and was

among the very first attempts to provide an extensive and accessible in-

troduction towhat was still a set of rather esoteric mathematical techniques. The

book was well received, and it was translated into French and English.27 Shortly

after its publication, Agnesi, who was already a member of some academies, was

offered the chance to lecture on mathematics at the University of Bologna. Later

in the eighteenth century, Joseph Louis Lagrange wouldmention the Instituzioni

as an important part of his training, and would recommend the second volume

as 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 experienced

Agnesi as a fascinating and slightly unsettling prodigy who inhabited a preca-

rious space between masculine skills, such as the ability to defend philosophical

positions in public disputations, and feminine virtues, such as her modesty and

ritiratezza (seclusion). For later historians however, she would simply be a

historical curiosity whose name would be mentioned in association with the

Instituzioni, together with a little, mostly incorrect, biographical information.

When her main book appeared, leading Italian and French mathematicians

praised Agnesi’s style as clear and effective, but her historiographical fortune

declined 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 discoveries

were associatedwith her name, only the alleged first description of an interesting

but rather useless curve. It should be noted that, due to a somewhat revealing

mistranslation, this curve was referred to as ‘the witch of Agnesi’.30 Agnesi’s

perceived lack of originality was given an authoritative and would-be definitive

seal 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.

Massimo Mazzotti124

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 serious

mathematical research, and hence from the history of mathematics. Nineteenth

and 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, the

belief that the practice of mathematics is essentially gendered is not as distant as

some of us might like to think. One should just remember that, in 2005, Larry

Summers, then president of Harvard University, speculated that behind the

gender gap in top science and engineering jobs theremight be ‘issues of intrinsic

aptitude’.32

Mathematics, however, is not the only context in which Agnesi’s name has

been meaningful. By the time of her death, in 1799, she was already being

celebrated as a champion of the Catholic faith, and indeed of the Catholic re-

action.33 Her devotion, and extraordinary commitment to charity work, were

well known in the city of Milan and, in the nineteenth century, they were de-

scribed in numerous apologetic pamphlets and short biographies that circulated

throughout the Italian peninsula. Her commitment took visible institutional

forms, as when, in 1771, she became the first director of the female section of the

Pio Albergo Trivulzio, a new charitable institution opened in Milan to assist the

city’s poor and invalid.34 This was just one of the ways in which she collaborated

with the local ecclesiastical authorities, other interesting examples being her

teaching in primary schools attached toMilanese parishes, and her activity as an

advisor to the Archbishop of Milan on delicate theological matters. Moreover,

among her unpublished papers one can find a few theological and devotional

texts. 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.


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 an

enthusiastic practitioner of the new science of Galileo and Newton. On the other,

a devout churchgoer and a champion of the Catholic Church. Emblematic of this

tendency to polarize her life is the belief, duly reported by the Dictionary of

Scientific Biography, that after the publication of the Instituzioni she wore the

habit of the Augustinian nuns, also known as the ‘blue nuns’. In fact, Agnesi

never entered any religious order, nor did she cut completely her relations with

family and friends, as has often been assumed. It is understandable that, in the

age of revolutions first, and then in the context of the so-called ‘warfare of science

and 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 label

Agnesi a ‘psychological enigma’.36

Agnesi’s historiographical fortune did not improve much in the twentieth

century 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 fascist

woman.37 Incidentally, one should not be surprised to discover that biographies

of Agnesi have been put to all kinds of uses. The same thing happened to her

more illustrious male colleagues, starting with Galileo and Newton. Rather than

being a distinctive weakness of biography as a genre, this should be simply seen

as a manifestation of the fact that inevitably we write about the past as an

expression of present concerns. In biographies these concerns are often more

apparent than in other genres; this makes them conducive to the reflection on

one’s own situatedness as author, and on its implications. The famous remarks of

Richard Westfall on his experience as a biographer of Newton are extremely

instructive in this respect, as he reflects precisely on the way in which his ideals

and expectations shaped his historical narrative. It is not coincidental that

historians who have engaged in biographical writing, often admiring or loathing

their 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 rehash

a very limited amount of information, mostly anecdotal, derived from a first

biography published by a family friend in 1799.39 None of the later biographers

seems to have looked carefully at the Instituzioni, or leafed through her

manuscript papers, now at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana inMilan. One remarkable

exception 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).

Massimo Mazzotti126

whowas at the time a prominent figure within the Catholic movement for female

emancipation.40 Her specific social and cultural position created the conditions

for the emergence of an image of Agnesi that escaped the usual dichotomy of the

scienziata santa (saintly scientist). For Anzoletti, Agnesi’s staunch support for

female education and participation in the worlds of art and science were not in

contrast with her sincere devotion and charitable work, quite the contrary.

Agnesi’s socially engaged religiosity was indeed a model to which Catholic

feminists of the early twentieth-century could look for guidance and inspiration.

Anzoletti’s biography contains the first – and for a long time only – description

of Agnesi’s manuscripts, including the theological papers, which had attracted

no attentionwhatsoever up to that point. Anzoletti was thus able tomove beyond

the usual stereotype, and provide a view of Agnesi’s life that goes a long way in

the direction of Hankins’s ‘integrated’ biography. On the form and contents of

her scientific work, however, Anzoletti deferred to the unflattering judgment of

historians of mathematics such as Loria.

In 1989 Clifford Truesdell published the most in-depth study of Agnesi’s

scientific work to date, which also contained some interesting addenda such as a

reconstruction of the story of the ‘witch of Agnesi’, and of the origins of its

bizarre name.41 This study, however, was still informed by concerns about his-

torical priority, and by what one could call the ‘historical curiosity’ model. We

keep talking about Agnesi, Truesdell concluded, simply because she was a

woman engaged in mathematics at a time when this activity was, and would

continue to be for a long time, entirely dominated bymen. But there is nothing in

her work that justifies special attention. In fact, Truesdell’s judgment on the

Instituzioni is in clear continuity with Loria’s remarks; for him too it is a mere

work of popularization that lacks originality, and therefore historical interest.

It is remarkable that no historian of mathematics has ever given much

thought to the reasons why a wealthy and devout young lady like Agnesi should

decide to spend a few years of her life working on a tract of calculus. If from our

point of view this might look like a reasonable thing to do, it certainly was an

eccentric 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, and

there was no need for a textbook as no one was even planning to teach it. For a

talented woman in Agnesi’s position it would have been much more obvious to

engage in cultural practices like poetry or music, which would have allowed her

to 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.


network of the Milanese conversazioni. I began following the traces of Agnesi

driven by this and other related questions. I was not interested in badly-formed

questions of priority, or in the misleading task of assigning her a place in the

canon of western mathematical rationality. My interest lay rather in the ex-

ploration of the ways in which knowledge is made andmade authoritative under

specific historical circumstances. I was interested in credibility, the credibility of

knowledge and people. How could Agnesi establish herself as a credible math-

ematician in the mid-eighteenth century, when women were routinely banned

from scientific academies, universities, and indeed from formal higher educa-

tion? Which factors had made it possible for her to gain a status that was

routinely out of reach for women? And why would a talented woman like her

devote herself to mathematics, rather than poetry, music, the fine arts, or even

natural history – i. e. areas in which the presence of women would be less

problematic, and that intersected salon life in amore obvious way?Whatwas her

own understanding of the meaning of doing mathematics?

First of all, one should notice that the banning of women from early modern

scientific institutions was less systematic than is usually assumed, at least in

some Italian cities. That a few talentedwomen could negotiate their way through

academies and universities in eighteenth-century Italy has indeed been dem-

onstrated in the exemplary works of Marta Cavazza and Paula Findlen. Cavazza

has exploredwith particular attention the Bolognese context and its institutional

complexities, 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 the

career and patronage network of Laura Bassi, the most famous learned woman,

or filosofessa, from Bologna. Bassi was awarded a university degree in 1732, and

she taught for many years experimental physics at the local university. Findlen

has also been studying a number of cases of eighteenth-century learned women

from other Italian cities and provincial settings, thus tracing the contours of a

phenomenon that was much more significant than previously believed.42

With respect to these studies, to whichmine is obviously indebted, the case of

Agnesi 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.

Massimo Mazzotti128

profoundly gendered practice of mathematics. It also invited the reconstruction

of 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 of

Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God. To understand the unusual social

trajectory of Agnesi, her science, and her existential choices, was indeed con-

ditional to understanding her world. At the same time, following Agnesi’s moves

through the web of social life was an effective way to map the set of social and

cultural resources that she could rely upon, as well as the normative systems that

framed her actions.My efforts to enlighten Agnesi, in other words, would also be

efforts to rediscover the Enlightenment of Agnesi.

In this perspective, the biographical approach appeared to me the best way to

achieve my key goals. Granted, mine was to be in many ways a peculiar kind of

biographical narrative. For example, I was not interested in trying to cover the

various periods of Agnesi’s life with the same attention, and I decided not to stick

to a strict chronological order. Rather, I focused on a few key moments, due both

to documentary limitations and my perception of their overall significance.

Also, I did not navigate at a constant analytical level, which is typical of most

biographies, 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 structures

of Milanese society and the way they were connected to transnational systems.

This way of proceeding, which is inspired by the lessons of Italian micro-history

and Michel Foucault’s ‘microphysics of power’, can serve multiple purposes. In

this way, for example, I was able to construct the thread of Agnesi’s life by

weaving it effectively into the texture of Milanese social life. Conversely, by

linking thematerial objects, gestures, andwords that surroundedAgnesi to large

social and cognitive formations, I was able to observe the ways in which these

formations entered the concrete experience of my historical actors.

In particular, this way of proceeding was functional to the exploration of the

relationship between science and religion as it was understood and experienced

by Agnesi and her acquaintances. In Hankins’s parlance, it would be Agnesi’s

own concrete experience that would guide my attempt to integrate the allegedly

inconsistent dimensions of her life. This integration, I believed, should not be

realized through the imposition of some ready-made historiographical model. I

was 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 the

outcome of such reconstructions should be necessarily an integrated, coherent

‘whole’, where everything has to make sense as in a perfect mechanism. That

cultures are best not understood as self-contained and coherent wholes is indeed


one of the most profound lessons of late twentieth-century anthropology. I thus

focused on specific moments of Agnesi’s life, her family, and her closest ac-

quaintances, turning these episodes into privileged sites for the exploration of

the concrete relationship between epistemological values and moral values in a

closely scrutinized historical situation. The experience of historical actors,

rather than the theoretical formulations of eighteenth-century thinkers, would

guide my exploration. In fact, I ended up dealing extensively with the writings of

Ludovico Muratori (1672–1750) and other theologians and philosophers, but

always 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 the

concrete relationship between science and religion? An example will clarify my

way of proceeding. As I was trying to understand why Agnesi should choose to

embark on such an unlikely task as writing a textbook of calculus, I began

looking at the specific technical features of her book.My expectationwas that the

very style and content of the book could provide me with precious indications

about Agnesi’s intentions and goals. The book presents indeed some distinctive

features 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 is

written in Leibnizian algebraic notation, but the thinking behind it seems always

genuinely geometrical, as was proper in the Newtonian tradition. It is not a

coincidence that the Instituzioni would attract the interest of some British

scholars at the turn of the nineteenth century, at a time of bitter disputes about

the respective merits of the two competing approaches.43

Agnesi’s geometrical inclination, which was definitely running against the

main trends of continental mathematics, is confirmed by other features of the

book. For example, she leaves out everything that has to do with the possible

applications of calculus to describe physical phenomena and solve problems in

the experimental sciences. A choice that seems to have puzzled contemporary

specialists 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).

Massimo Mazzotti130

mechanics as well!’.44One should not think thatAgnesi ignored themanyways in

which calculus was being deployed in those years, from celestial mechanics to

hydrodynamics, and which were indeed driving the development of new

mathematical concepts and techniques. As emerges from her correspondence

and 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’, she

wrote to awell-knownmathematician, ‘for, as Your Excellency has seen, I did not

want to get involved with physical matters. I left aside all those problems that

depend 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 most

intriguing features of the book, namely its exclusive focus on what Agnesi

perceived as ‘pure mathematics’. She was interested in practicing and teaching

those 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 open

references to the works of the now forgotten Charles Reyneau (1656–1728) and

the Oratorian mathematical school that had gathered around Nicolas Mal-

ebranche are further signs of her inclinations, as is the list of mathematical

books in her personal library. To sum up, Agnesi seems to have been primarily

interested in mathematics as an intellectual exercise, at a time when the great

majority of mathematicians were actually driven by the amazing versatility of

the new algebraic methods in capturing features of the empirical world. This

choice had significant implications, not only at the level of style, but also for the

logical structure of the book, and for the way in which she treated some key

arguments, like the nature of infinitesimals.46

In order to provide an historical interpretation for the distinctive features of

Agnesi’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 as

well. For this purpose I used letters and archival documents that described the

possessions of the Agnesi family, including things they owned and spaces in

which they lived – and the way they used them.What stood out in these patterns

was not only the unusual conversazione in which Pietro Agnesi staged with great

care the performances of his gifted daughters – Maria Teresa was a respected

harpsichordist 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.


cific religious institutions and spiritual traditions.47 The association with the

Theatine priests of the nearby church of San Antonio was particularly strong,

and was crucial in shaping the religious experience of the Agnesi, and of Maria

Gaetana in particular. Her devotion was ascetic, profoundly anti-baroque, and

oriented towards the ‘century’ – i. e. the world, rather than the safer spaces of the

church, the cloister, and the family houses. Agnesi divided her time between

charity work, which increased significantly after the publication of the book,

prayer, and meditation. Since her childhood she had been practicing the austere

form of spirituality fostered in texts such as The Spiritual Combat by the The-

atine Lorenzo Scupoli, a counter-reformist bestseller that would accompany

Agnesi for the rest of her life.48 In its direct, unsophisticated style, The Spiritual

Combat portrays the human being as the battleground of opposite forces: the

self-destructive senses and passions, and the well-trained intellect, which can

guide the will to achieve a worthy spiritual life. Self-control is key in this form of

devotion, hence the emphasis on exercises designed to train the intellect and the

will against the deception of the passions and the senses. Agnesi spent long hours

immersed in meditation, at home and in front of an altar on the right side of the

church of San Antonio. There she contemplated the representations of objects

related to the passion of Christ, such as the column, the ropes, and the nails, as a

means to enter into meditation on the holy mysteries. These material objects

facilitated Agnesi’s participation in Christ’s suffering, her imitation of his pure

love, up to the final self-annihilation in the divinity, that particular state that she

would refer to as ‘mystical marriage’, or ‘transforming union’. Agnesi described

her own ascetic techniques in The Mystic Heaven, where she guides the reader

through various contemplative stages, up to the mystical marriage and the

contemplation of theHoly Trinity. In this process everything seems to acquire its

real meaning, and reveal its true value. The successful contemplation and the

Christomorphic transformation require the cooperation (Agnesi says ‘con-

spiracy’) of both sensibility and rationality, will and intellect. ‘While the human

mind contemplates in marvel [the virtues of Christ]’, she wrote, ‘the heart

imitates themwith love’. In this perspective the intellectual dimension, although

not valuable per se, is a necessary component of the spiritual experience of the

believer. In fact, the soul is brought to the first mystic heaven by ‘the gifts of

intellect and wisdom’.49 Agnesi is consciously adhering to a tradition in which

the intellect is described as ‘the eye of the soul’: it must be strengthened through

exercise, 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).

Massimo Mazzotti132

prayer, and concentration. Only a clear intellect can guide the will to a fulfilling

spiritual life. Clear intellect means an intellect freed from the pollution of the

earthly 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, as

they ‘infect’ the will, and ‘blind’ the intellect. To keep one’s intellect lucid and

clear 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 Mystic

Heaven, where she deploys ascetic techniques to meditate on the passion of

Christ. But the same techniques could be deployed to control feelings and

imagination in every moment of one’s life. One key element of these practices of

self-discipline is the capacity of ‘attention’. This was understood as the ability to

concentrate for a prolonged period of time, while directing the searchlight of the

intellect towards a single object, in order to both inspect its structure and

transcend its materiality, moving from the thing as we perceive it to its more

profound meanings and associations. Thus, for example, through attention one

can move from the contemplation of the cross and the nails to that of the

mysteries of the passion of Christ. This is the same ability, Agnesi believed, that

makes the natural philosopher fully aware of the power of God by separating the

material 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 theme

that appears often in both devotional and epistemological texts around 1700, and

it plays a central role, for example, in the philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche.

Agnesi does not show much interest in Malebranche’s metaphysics, but she is

definitely interested in the ways he tries to connect intellectual activity and

spiritual values through hybrid concepts like attention. For Malebranche, at-

tention is not simply the ‘occasional cause’ of our knowledge, it is a ‘natural

prayer’ 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 spiritual

value precisely because they refine our capacity of attention.51 When Agnesi is

writing her book, the Oratorian tradition was all but discredited in the eyes of

leading European mathematicians. It was not only their Cartesian assumptions

that looked outdated, but also their attempt to integrate traditionalmetaphysical

concerns into modern science. Agnesi was able to drop the heavy apparatus of

Malebranche’s metaphysics, and the cumbersome style of an author like Rey-

neau, while rescuing their fundamental goal of investing key aspects of modern

science 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).


incarnation of the feminine virtue of modesty – Agnesi produced an in-

troduction to the most advanced mathematics of her age that was also, to those

who shared her religious form of life, a training ground for ‘attention’, a most

valuable ascetic ability. Agnesi was convinced that mathematics, and geometry

in particular, held a unique epistemological status, due to the certainty of its

propositions, and the ‘evidentness’ of its truths which are apprehended solely

through intellectual intuition. For her, calculus was the most sophisticated kind

of geometry to date, the one that would require the highest level of concentration

to master – indeed of ‘attention’. Training young students in this discipline

meant 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 skill

to control the imagination’, Malebranche had written in a similar vein, ‘and a

controlled imagination sustains the mind’s perception and attention’.52 I soon

realized that the mental state of ‘attention’ was also at the center of much of the

production 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 in

pictorial form. His style is decidedly distant from contemporary decorative

rococo, and his choice of themes is equally peculiar. Above all, he seems inter-

ested in portraying saints and natural philosophers, capturing them in that

particular state of absorption that Agnesi considered to be a prerequisite for the

exercise of attention and, therefore, for the acquisition of both true knowledge

and 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 I

followed her gestures and mental exercises from the family prie-Dieu, through

the parish churches and Sunday schools of the neighborhood, up to Vienna and

Rome. 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 as

that 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 the

Agnesi’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 moral

and aesthetic discourse that informed their collection, which was shared by the

Archbishop 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.

Massimo Mazzotti134

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 and

scientific life ofmy early eighteenth-century actors. In my study, I decided to use

the 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 of

the intellect and the imagination that are at the core of Catholic Enlightenment.

This cultural movement, which expressed the priorities and aspirations of a

significant portion of the European Catholic elites during the first half of the

eighteenth century, has been thus far ignored by the history of science. At the

cost, I believe, of seriously limiting our understanding of the contemporary

mathematics and natural philosophy.

IV. Conclusion

It is now time to return to biography, and to draw some conclusions. In the

previous pages, I have tried to give an idea of the ways in which I used the

biographical approach inmy book on Agnesi. I moved from the recognition that

the rigidly dualistic narrative – life and science – that characterized most bi-

ographies of the past, especially in mathematics, needs to be abandoned. But

what should replace it? Rather than integrating the various dimensions of

Agnesi’s life under some superior point of view or unifying principle, I have

tried to understand how the interaction between these dimensionswas perceived

by Agnesi herself. In particular, I have shown how – in her experience – certain

boundaries that would appear obvious and rigid to later commentators (between

religious and scientific practices, for example) were rather fluid. The point for

me was not to argue that there exists a relationship between science and religion

in some abstract sense, but to show empirically the way in which actors like

Agnesi constructed and used this relationship. A biographical approach and

good old archive-based family history have also been key to my understanding

of the functioning of the Agnesi conversazione, and of the network of alliances

and resources, material and symbolic, that supported the career and credibility

of this talented woman.

Overall, I believe that the persisting doubts about the status of scientific

biography 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.


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 features

of historically given systems of power and distributions of knowledge. The

studies of patronage systems in science are a good case in point.55 This wave of

scholarship is underpinned by theoretical insights derived from the new social

sciences of the 1960s, and in particular from micro-sociology and other inter-

pretive trends that have profoundly redefined the meaning and scope of ‘the

social’. This transformation has concerned primarily our understanding of the

long-debated relationship between structure and action, and of the very notion

of agency. This rethinking of the social has gone a long way in bridging of the

distance between individual action and social structures. The emergence of a

performative understanding of social structures, for example, has made it

possible to explore social institutions and normative systems through the ex-

periences of individuals. That is because we now tend to think of structures as

embedded in these experiences; they do not exist independently and outside of

them. In this perspective, biography is not an obstacle to the social and cultural

study 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 has

already been shown by a number of recent studies, such as the fine biographies

by Mary Terrall (Pierre Louis Maupertuis), Ted Porter (Karl Pearson), and

Giuliano Pancaldi (Alessandro Volta).56 In her contribution to the debate on the

status of scientific biography, Terrall states that she ’wanted to write the story of

his [Maupertuis’] career as a story of the meaning and practice of science in this

period’, while Porter insists on biography as a way of historicizing the category

of ‘scientist’, and to recapture ‘the ways that scientists found meaning in the

world and attached moral value to their work’. As for Pancaldi, his biographical

narrative 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 social

and 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).

Massimo Mazzotti136

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 that

this move does not imply a return to the ‘myth of personal coherence’, and to

Bourdieu’s ‘illusion biographique’. Rather, he argues for an ‘open biography’

that, using an array of narrative techniques, does not conflate individuality with

an essential character, or personality.58 Although it remains unclear how this

could be achieved in practice, I think that Söderqvist’s argument has themerit of

directing the debate towards the question of agency, how we should understand

it, and how it should enter our historical narratives. In fact, I believe that one of

the key challenges for historians and social scientists in the near future will be

precisely that of constructing biographies that keep together the discourse of

individual responsibility with the rejection of individual agency as some kind of

mysteriousmetaphysical power. In other words, I believe that one should aim for

narratives in which the everyday discourse of human beings operating as free

agents acting voluntarily coexists with the awareness of them being mutually

accountable and dependent creatures, and with the pervasiveness of collective

action in social life. We need new words and new narrative strategies to best

explore 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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