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TRANSCRIPT
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).
The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi 121
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]).
The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi 123
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.
The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi 125
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.
The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi 127
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
The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi 129
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.
The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi 131
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).
The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi 133
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.
The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi 135
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.
The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi 137