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This contribution serves to start a more thoroughgoing discussion about the phenomenon of scholarly forgetting within the humanities beyond disciplinary boundaries. How can one explain the fact that knowledge, at some point circulating in the scholarship, eventually sinks into oblivion and, in some cases, even escapes the attention of the historian of scholarship? The essay argues that each instance of scholarly forgetting should be understood against the backdrop of a complex interplay between the Vergessenspotential of the object under consideration and the working context of the forgetting community. It examines how processes of forgetting have coshaped both the humanities and how scholars think about its history. In conjunction with this, it discusses how we, as historians of scholarship, may deal with scholarly forgetting more self-consciously than has been attempted before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including food as medicine, food history, and science and medicine histories.

This paper argues for the significance of landing stages as socio-cultural sites of knowledge practice for the cross-oceanic transport of live plants. Focusing on the French attempts to collect nutmeg native to the Maluku Islands in the second half of the 18th century, it explores the role of landing stages across the Malay Archipelago where the French collaborated with local populations and where plant material was being collected, packed, and shipped. By using a praxeological approach it explores landing stages through their interaction with socio-environmental factors that conditioned them as places of applied knowledge. Here, I insist on moving away from the Eurocentric concept of the harbour by introducing the more neutral term of,landing stages', which are determined by logics and logistics being adapted according to situational possibilities and limits of historical actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history of Radcliffe College’s Zoological Laboratory, a women’s-only laboratory associated with the all-male Harvard College that became a centre for training women in animal biology. Radcliffe’s laboratory developed in the late nineteenth century in the face of Harvard’s fierce resistance to coeducation and popular scientific ideas that questioned women’s biological fitness for scientific study. This article documents how extralaboratory factors – such as masculine cultures of sociability, informal mentorship relationships and gender segregation in everyday academic life – carried over into the construction of experimental biology as a discipline. I argue that understanding how gender functioned in Radcliffe’s laboratory requires examining adjacent spaces and institutions on and off campus where scientific identities were forged, including neighbourhood boardinghouses and coeducational scientific society meetings. During this period, debates about the right approach to studying the natural world turned on competing visions of manliness in the field or at the laboratory bench. The entrance of Radcliffe women into male-dominated laboratory spaces motivated the articulation of new forms of scientific masculinities associated with the experimental rigours and professional aims of the turn-of-the-century ‘new biology’. More broadly, I contend that notions of scientific masculinity and the concurrent development of fraternal laboratory cultures served to exclude women from full participation in the biological sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the culture of mask use and mask collection in eighteenth-century Amazonia as a way of bringing together the reciprocal observations undertaken by indigenous, European, and peoples of mixed race and identity in South America during the colonial period. By focusing on masks as physical objects containing attributes that can be studied with reference to historical and contemporary indigenous Amazonian groups, it attempts to disrupt the binary opposition between observers and observed and argues for a more connected set of epistemologies in the study of the colonial world. One central proposition is that European naturalists and those who accompanied them in the tropics may have been implicated in the fluid ontologies that were proposed by the objects worn and wielded by indigenous groups. It thus becomes necessary to reinterpret European ethnographical description to account for the agency of indigenous objects and individuals, leading to a more imbricated vision of engagement and encounter than an earlier generation of scholarship has tended to portray. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1690, on the orders of Simon van der Stel, officials of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) interviewed one Nicolao Almede, a 'free black man of Mozambique' who had recently arrived at the Cape as a sailor aboard the English ship John and Mary. Almede informed his interlocutors about the country inland from the coast between Mozambique and Delagoa Bay (now Maputo Bay), into which he had previously ventured as a merchant. Although he does not mention the legendary name of Monomotapa, he does offer early descriptions of the Changamire dynasty, as well as the animals and people of the region, including its fabulous wealth. Some of the place names he mentioned are well known, while others cannot now be traced, perhaps because he was using indigenous rather than Portuguese names. The record of the interview concludes with Almede's description of mermaids, and the fact that their teeth could be had in the market at Mozambique. Together with producing a transcription and translation of the document this article explores it through a close reading to offer some speculations about the interweaving of legend and fact in the human and natural history of southern Africa in reports such as that of Almede. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This history of the disease categories "yaws" and "syphilis" explores the interplay between European and African medical cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. The assertion made by both early modern and modern medical authorities, that yaws and syphilis are the same disease, prompts a case study of the history of disease that reflects on a variety of issues in the history of medicine: the use of ideas about contagion to demarcate racial and sexual difference at sites around the British Empire; the contrast between persistently holistic ideas about disease causation in the Black Atlantic and the growth of ontological theories of disease among Europeans and Euro-Americans; and the controversy over the African practice of yaws inoculation, which may once have been an effective treatment but was stamped out by plantation owners who viewed it as a waste of their enslaved laborers' valuable time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the roles of domesticated insects in world history, with a particular focus on products created with shellac, silk, and cochineal. According to the author, the histories of these arthropod secretions present a counter-narrative to the accepted historiography of modernity. Details on synthetic substitutions for these products, including vinyl, nylon, and aniline dyes, are presented. The relationships between indigenous and European knowledge and technology are discussed.

The article discusses the writing of county natural history in England from the 1640s through the 1680s. An overview of the English antiquarian John Aubrey, including the role that the mid 17th century English Civil War played in his desire to research England's antiquities, is provided. The English county historian Robert Plot's role in the research of local English history is discussed.

The article discusses the introduction of non-European plants in Europe in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Focusing on the activities of Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes, Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius, and English pharmacist John Parkinson and on the dispersal of sarsaparilla, potatoes, and sunflowers as examples, the authors situate the sociology of biological knowledge within the broader history of globalization in the early modern period. Issues considered include the support for botanical gardens and research by the European royal houses, the importance of herbariums and herbals and other botanical literature as media of knowledge transmission, and the medicinal use of exotic plants.

Mariangela Ardinghelli (1730-1825) is remembered as the Italian translator of two texts by the Newtonian physiologist Stephen Hales, Haemastaticks and Vegetable Staticks. This essay shows that her role in the Republic of Letters was by no means limited to such work. At a time of increasing interest in the natural history of the areas around Naples, she became a reliable cultural mediator for French travelers and naturalists. She also acted as an informal foreign correspondent for the Paris Academy of Sciences, connecting scientific communities in Naples and France. Unlike other learned women of the time, Ardinghelli was neither an aristocrat nor a member of the ascendant middle class. The essay discusses the strategies she devised to build her authority and her choice of anonymity at the apex of her popularity, when she translated scientific texts by contemporary celebrities such as the abbé Nollet and the comte de Buffon. It argues that, in spite of Ardinghelli's historical invisibility, for her contemporaries she never became an "invisible assistant": she constructed layers of selective visibility that allowed her authorship to be identified by specific audiences, while protecting herself from social isolation or derision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From their distinctive experience of going around the world, maritime circumnavigators concluded that their characteristic disease, sea scurvy, must result from their being away from land too long, much longer than any other sailors. They offered their scorbutic bodies as proof that humans were terrestrial creatures, physically suited to the earthly parts of a terraqueous globe. That arresting claim is at odds with the current literature on the cultural implications of European expansion, which has emphasized early modern colonists' and travelers' fear of alien places, and has concluded that they had a small and restricted geographic imagination that fell short of the planetary consciousness associated with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But circumnavigators did conceive of themselves as actors on a planetary scale, as creatures adapted to all of the land on Earth, not just their places of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses narrative in the history of life sciences as of 2012. The author attempts to reexamine the focus on the history of life sciences that concentrated upon experimentalism since the 19th century and the decline of natural history. The article discusses the proliferation of databases and their use. The author argues that if science historians wish to remain relevant, intellectual frameworks must be offered that can bring changes into historical perspective, present new questions and challenge prior views. The article discusses science histories written by historians William Coleman and Garland Allen as well as an overview of collections in natural history from the Renaissance until 1900, including the history "Cultures of Natural History."