Natura Incognita. New Perspectives in the History of Science

Quo vadis history of science? Present in all scientific disciplines, including the history of science, are recurring themes and predominant methodologies towards which most scholars tend to converge, even if only unconsciously. Having a clear awareness of the methodological and thematic context in which we move as researchers is no easy feat, since this demands a fully comprehensive, all-encompassing perspective on the discipline—a perspective that is all the more challenging to attain. What becomes visible through the lens of historiographical reflection is the gradual consolidation of approaches that, by the early twenty-first century, had begun to take shape and have since become central to the field of the history of science: we think of the pioneering works on the importance of reconstruct-ing material and social aspects of scientific practices in order to provide a more accurate picture of the historical dimension of the scientific endeavour; we might also think of the provocative works on the need to give voice to a whole array of up-to-then invisible workers active in the creation of scientific knowledge, which, in this case, included women scientists, technicians and other marginalized professionals. In this recent past, we also see emphasis on the visual products and instruments of scientific practices that have made a stand in the debate on the sources used by historians of science, thus turning these neglected histori-cal tools into widely accepted ones. Finally, while far from being exhaustive, we see the community of historians of science opening up to new professions (Semitic languages, Post-colonial Studies, Environmental History) so as to tackle research topics that require highly interdisciplinary skills: for example, the history of Arabic mathematics and astronomy, the history of natural sciences in colonial times, and studies on the relationship between science and environmental man-agement.6 The current landscape of the history of science builds on these rich and diverse foundations and appears as a complex network of research strands, increas-ingly interdisciplinary in nature and spanning the entire historical timeline, from antiquity to the present.