Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age; Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work; Geographies of the Romantic North: Science, Antiquarianism, and Travel, 1790–1830

Abstract

At a 1960 A.C.L.S. symposium on measurement, Thomas Kuhn proposed the idea of a "second scientific revolution," one characterized by the quantification of the Baconian sciences like the study of heat, electricity, and magnetism beginning in the last third of the eighteenth century and continuing into the first half of the nineteenth century.Though not a feature of Kuhn's account, this revolution in scientific knowledge came to be associated with changes in the social structure of scientific practice, especially as taken up by historians of science like Roger Hahn, Enrico Bellone, Bernard Cohen, and others. All of these accounts associate this second revolution with the proliferation of professional men of science supported by an expanding institutional structure of academies, institutes, universities, and other specialist organizations and by an apparatus of print media to publish and disseminate their findings.The idea of this second scientific revolution, one coinciding so nicely with the rough chronology associated with "Romanticism" in the British literary sphere, has, of course, not escaped the attention of literary scholars. The past twenty years have brought much high quality scholarship on the relationship between Romantic science and literature that has revealed just how familiar Romantic-era authors like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats were with the sciences of their times. This has produced an increasingly common view of the mutual -though not necessarily harmonious or amicable -co-production of this second scientific revolution by literary and scientific writers alike. To the veritable explosion of work in this area, we can now add three new studies, linked as their titles would indicate by their interest in science and the sciences, but also working to move the conjunction between Romantic science and literary co-production towards new areas like the "Romantic North" discussed by Angela Byrne, and towards new emphases, especially the relationship between the "arts and sciences" in Jon Klancher's work, and science and antiquarianism as represented by Byrne and Noah Heringman. These three studies also refine our awareness of the institutional contexts of knowledge production during this period, and re-insert labor into our understanding of knowledge production, what Noah Heringman and Jon Klancher both call, after Alan Liu, "knowledge-work."

Health humanities and British Romanticism

“…Perhaps for parallel reasons, Romanticists working on medical topics are rarely interested in medicine as a nascent institution or therapeutic praxis. Instead, they gravitate toward what Jonathan Sachs, in a 2014 review of three new interdisciplinary monographs, calls “the making of particular knowledge and the institutions that shape it” (Sachs, 2014, p. 483). The literally undisciplined fertility of Romantic‐era medical epistemology seems to fascinate scholars.…”