Descartes Centre Colloquium with Eric Jorink and Richard Calis

How can we write the history of science?

In the past few decades, historians working in a variety of fields have challenged the obsolete—but enduring!—narrative of scientific progress that dominated much scholarship on the history of science in the twentieth century. Instead, scholars have focused on scholarly practices, approached science as historically and culturally contingent, identified the “stuff” of science, and looked beyond household names to ask new questions about how scientific knowledge is made, how it circulates, and which other types of knowledge are suppressed in the process.

In this session historians of science Eric Jorink and Richard Calis discuss their recent books to think further about how we can write the history of science today. They will introduce their work, respond to one another, and explore topics such as the recent shift from scientists’ ideas to their working practices, the potential of archival research for the history of science, and how processes of canonization change our understanding of ‘normal science at work’.

Please note: there will also be a table where anyone who has published an interesting publication recently, can show it.

Eric Jorink is a senior researcher at Huygens Instituut and holds the Teylers-chair ‘Enlightenment and Religion’ at Leiden University. He has published widely on the scientific culture in early modern Europe, including the culture of collecting, the relation between art and science, and the emergence of radical biblical criticism. Since 2021, he leads the international research project Visualizing the Unknown: Microscopical Observations, Scholarly Networks, and Scientific Communication in Europe (1650-1730). His book Onder het Vergrootglas: Antoni van Leeuwenhoek en de Royal Society and an English translation will be published by Uitgeverij Prometheus in 2025.

Richard Calis is Assistant Professor in Intellectual History at Utrecht University. Trained as a classicist and historian, he works predominantly on the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of the early modern world. Most of his research revolves around questions of cultural exchange, and how people make sense of the world around them. He obtained his PhD from Princeton University in 2020 and was a Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge. His work has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Past and Present, and The English Historical Review. His first book, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius (1526-1607), was published by Harvard University Press in January 2025.