NIEUWSBRIEF UNIVERSITEITSGESCHIEDENIS
LETTRE D’INFORMATION SUR L’HISTOIRE DES UNIVERSITÉS
1999, nr. 2
Universitaire dagen in Dublin,
5-7 november 1999
Van 5 tot 7 november 1999 was Trinity College Dublin het centrum van diverse activiteiten op het gebied van universiteitsgeschiedenis, met een colloquium, een bijeenkomst van FASTI en de algemene vergadering van de Commission internationale pour l'histoire des universités (CIHU)
1. Op 5 en 6 november had er een colloquium plaats over University and Heresy/Dissent (Dissidence), georganiseerd door het Department of Modern History van Trinity College, in associatie met het Irish/Scottish Studies Humanities Research Programme en gepatroneerd door de Commission Internationale pour l'Histoire des Universités.
Bedenker en uitwerker van het colloquium was Helga Robinson-Hammerstein. Ze formuleerde de doelstellingen van het congres aldus:
Universities were established as institutions essential to the preservation of state and society by providing stability and continuity in the education of political and cultural elites. Yet, almost invariably they became centres of heretical thought, stimulating dissent and offering intellectual amunition to revolts at critical stages in the history of a country, in fact helping to bring about the crises they had been created to avoid. This primary manifestation of heresy will be explored by some of the conference papers.
Some contributions will deal with secondary connection between universities and heresy/dissent: that forged by the official duty of professors to give expert advice to secular and ecclesiastical authorities. Through the very process of definition and clarification 'heresies' became associated with the institution with which the experts were associated and caused acrimonious divisions within that institution. The consequences of such divisions were wide-ranging and had general political consequences.
An essential tertiary link between universities and heresy/dissent is that identified by later historians, but not necessarily discussed in terms of heresy/dissent and the role of universities at the time. This problem will be addressed in some of the conference papers; but it is also bound to emerge in the discussions in various ways.
Sprekers waren:
Jacques Verger (Paris), Naissance de la censure universitaire (XIIIe-XIVe siècles).
Laurence Brockliss (Oxford), The collegiate university and dissent.
Ad Tervoort (Dublin/Amsterdam), Heresy in Italian universities in the sixteenth century.
Elizabethanne Boran (TCD), Malignant scholars: dissent and the reformation of the university of Oxford in the mid-seventeenth century.
Mordechai Feingold (Blacksburg, VA), Science and heresy in seventeenth century British universities.
Christopher Finlay (TCD), Enlightened philosophy and the university in Scotland in the early work of David Hume.
Michael Brown (TCD), Creating a canon: Dugald Stewart's Scottish enlightenment
Mark James Lilley (TCD), Commissions of enquiry to Scotland's universities; the nature of concern in the seventeenth century.
Jean-Paul Pittion (Tours), The right to dissent: The reformed academy of Saumur between church and state.
Donald J. Withrington (Aberdeen), Higher Education without religion: the Scottish universities and their influence in university developments in England and Ireland, c.1820s - c. 1850s.
Stuart Wallace (Edinburgh), 'The first blast of the trumpet': the Blackie case 1839.
Desmond Ryan (Edinburgh), Between loyal clients and revolutionary assassins: radical politics in the Italian university in the early 1970s.
Discussion: Heresy or Dissent in Universities with contributions by Ruggero Maceratini, Sheldon Rothblatt, Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, H. Robinson-Hammerstein et al.
De akten van dit congres worden gepubliceerd in History of Universities. Ze zullen in de loop van 2000 moeten verschijnen.
2. Ronde tafel in het kader van het FASTI project (zie Nieuwsbrief 4(1998)2, p. 26-28 en 5(1999)1, p. 19-20), rond de thema's 'universitaire vieringen', 'universitaire historiografie' en 'universiteitsarchieven'. Onder de inspirerende leiding van Sheldon Rothblatt werd door een twintigtal mensen actief gedebatteerd.
De discussie over universitaire vieringen werd ingeleid door Helga Robinson-Hammerstein. Als test-case werd de viering van 400 jaar Trinity College in 1992 onder de loep genomen. FASTI wil in eerste instantie komen tot een bundeling van artikels die gewijd zijn aan het fenomeen universitaire vieringen. Vervolgens is het de bedoeling om door een analyse van 'herdenkingsbundels' een beter inzicht te krijgen in het fenomeen.
Het thema 'universitaire historiografie' sloot nauw aan bij het vorige. Aan Hilde de Ridder-Symoens was gevraagd informatie te geven over de achtergronden van de serie A History of the University in Europe en uit te leggen met welke historiografische problemen de auteurs te kampen hebben gehad.
De Oostenrijkse universiteitsarchivaris Walter Höflechner (Graz) tot slot heeft een overzicht gegeven van overwegingen en richtlijnen die genomen zijn om de Oostenrijkse universiteitsarchieven meer toegankelijk te maken. Het uiteindelijke doel van discussie- en informatierondes omtrent de universiteitsarchieven is om een internationaal aanvaardbaar model uit te werken, dit in nauwe samenwerking met de internationale groep van universiteitsarchivarissen.
3. De Commission Internationale pour l'Histoire des Universités heeft in de marge van het congres te Dublin haar Algemene Vergadering gehouden. Naast traditionele agendapunten als de benoeming van nieuwe leden, toekomstige activiteiten, financiële en organisatorische kwesties, stonden twee belangrijke punten op de agenda, nl. het congres te Oslo in 2000 en de voortgang van het tijdschrift History of Universities.
Tijdens het XIXe Congrès International des Sciences Historiques dat te Oslo plaats heeft van 6 tot 13 augustus 2000 houdt de Commission Internationale pour l'Histoire des Universités haar congres op donderdag 10 en vrijdag 11 augustus. Het thema is Transformation and Continuity in the History of Universities - Transformation et continuité dans l'histoire des universités. Meer informatie over het thema kan men lezen op de website www.oslo.uio.no (affiliated international organisations, nr 16 als men de Engelstalige versie kiest). In februari zal het definitieve programma bekend zijn. Een zestigtal sprekers uit de hele wereld hebben zich aangemeld. In de volgende Nieuwsbrief zal het programma opgenomen worden.
Tijdens een vorige algemene vergadering van de Commissie was beslist - uiteraard in overleg met de redactie van History of Universities - dat het tijdschrift (of beter jaarboek) onder de verantwoordelijkheid van de Commissie zou komen. Op verzoek van de huidige redactie werd besloten om deze te herstructureren en te vernieuwen. De kernredactie zal bestaan uit hoofdredacteur Mordechai Feingold uit Blacksburg (Virginia), redacteur recensies Marc Lilley (Dublin) en redacteur bibliografie Marc Nelissen (Leuven). Over de samenstelling van de eigenlijke redactie wordt nog nagedacht en onderhandeld. Overleg met Oxford University Press is bezig. De affiliatie van het tijdschrift met de Commissie zal geen enkele invloed hebben op de inhoud; de redactie van het tijdschrift zal een onafhankelijke koers blijven varen. Een strenge selectie met 'peer reviewing' moet garant staan voor de kwaliteit van het tijdschrift.
(Hilde de Ridder-Symoens)
Science
and technology in the European periphery (STEP)
A
newly founded international research group
The history of the transmission of the new scientific ideas from the 'center' to the 'periphery', especially during the last five centuries, is a subject which deserves further investigation. Europe is going through profound transformations and these changes create a new context for (re)examining a host of issues associated with the transmission of the sciences. Recently, new nations states have come into being, new borders emerged, new institutions appeared, and old institutions restructured themselves. These changes will induce many scholars to look again at the past, and science in Europe will be among the subjects to be systematically examined. The work that has already been done, as well as the newly available sources, combined with a more open intellectual environment and increases in funding for trans-national and trans-cultural contacts might offer an unprecedented opportunity for a critical re-examination of the historical character of science and its institutions in regions and societies in Europe for which there has been little or no work at all.
How should we try to study the long-standing question of the tension between particular local practices and the trends of the progressive homogenisation of an international scientific community. How has this tension been particularized in the framework of a Europe aiming to dictate global policies, while at the same time it was facing the shifting of boundaries among nations and cultures? And, in addition, how should we deal with the old problem of the transfer of scientific knowledge, in a historiographical context offering a great variety of approaches?
In fact, one of the most intriguing challenges for historians of science, technology and medicine is, perhaps, to try to chart their own thematic atlas within this geographically expanding and culturally diverse Europe, whose present configuration provides a unique opportunity for symbiosis between established and emerging communities of historians of science. Members of newer communities will soon have to decide how to recast what have often, and for many years, been local topics in ways that can be linked to contemporary historiography of science.
Such was the problematic which led to the establishment of a new international research group called 'Science and Technology in the European Periphery' (STEP). The group was established by historians of science from Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Russia, Sweden and Denmark who met in Barcelona at the beginning of June 1999. The following are some of the issues pertaining to the intended activities of the group.
Reconsidering the 'centre-periphery' model which has been the dominant mode of dealing with the studies on the transfer of scientific knowledge.
Bringing to the fore the concept of scientific appropriation and attempting to study various local discourses.
Examining systematically the relationship between science, politics and the rhetoric of modernization in societies at the European periphery.
Joining forces to find out more about scientific travels.
Using networks to further our understanding of the dynamics of the various scholars from the societies in the periphery of Europe.
Intensifying the efforts to catalogue and make available to the international community the archival material in the peripheral countries
Future activities of the STEP group
1. Reconsidering the 'centre-periphery' model which has been the dominant mode of dealing with the studies on the transfer of scientific knowledge
Although a simple bipolar distinction between centre and periphery is useful for broadly delineating the situation, it is incapable of capturing many salient details. There are many centres and many peripheries, and they change in time, spaces, and disciplines. Depending on the subject one is discussing, a place may at one and the same time be both centre and periphery. A centre may, over time, change into a periphery, and vice versa. And a single country may contain both centres and peripheries, thereby making purely national distinctions of dubious use. To examine such issues requires discussing the ways in which ideas that originate in a specific cultural and historical setting are introduced into a different milieu with its own intellectual traditions as well as political and educational institutions. Recent scholarship in the history of science has displayed the importance and richness of a comparative approach involving the consideration of the differences, influences and hybridations between different national traditions.
2. Bringing to the fore the concept of scientific appropriation and attempting to study various local discourses
Although the concept of the transfer of ideas can be useful and even fruitful for further research, one must always recognize that ideas are not simply transferred like, as it were, material commodities. They are always transformed in unexpected and sometimes startling ways as they are appropriated within the multiple cultural traditions of a specific society during a particular period of its history. Indeed, a major challenge for historians who examine processes of appropriation across boundaries is precisely to transcend the merely geographical, and to concentrate especially on the character of what one might call the 'receiving culture'. The practical outcome of a historiography based on the notion of appropriation is to be able to articulate the particularities of a discourse that is developed and eventually adopted within the appropriating culture.
Appropriation processes should include strategies of legitimisation and legitimating spaces which often lie outside the borders and the function of formal institutions. They also include public controversies and the role of local audiences, as well as particular features and strategies of resistance. We should look at the scholars of the periphery not as passive agents whose only function was to distribute locally the well-packaged goods delivered to them from the centres of Europe, but rather as active subjects who received many goods with no particularly clear directions on how to dispose of them locally. Appropriation involves also eclecticism between ongoing programmes and existing traditions.
3. Examining systematically the relationship between science, politics and the rhetoric of modernization in societies at the European periphery
In the attempt to analyse the role of science and technology in peripheral local contexts, some scholars have often found it quite difficult to escape national --sometimes, even nationalist—and regional rhetoric and constraints. There are, furthermore, quite a few cases of parochial history. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that scientific discourses in the periphery have been often closely linked to political ideology, to public rhetoric of ambitious programmes of modernization and the construction of nation states. These are not phenomena encountered only in the countries of the periphery. Debates on the 'good or bad' scientific level of a particular region or nation, have often distorted the public images of science as well as the way in which historians of science have presented the 'second class admired heroes', who in the adversity of a 'backward country' were able to travel and get in contact with prestigious luminaries of the 'centre' of the international community. We should try, then, to further examine new conceptual and practical tools (appropriation, travels, networks, databases) which might help us to write the history of local scientists in the periphery escaping from distorting influences of political discourses and here-worship
4. Joining forces to find out more about scientific travels
Detailed studies of scientific travelling shall provide alternative ways of avoiding a too hierarchical vision of the centre-periphery problem. Prestigious scientists from the centre travelled to the various regions of the periphery. Scientists from the periphery used to have important contacts with colleagues in the leading centres. If primary sources are sufficiently available, the historical reconstruction of a scientific travel might provide very interesting data of the detailed mechanisms of assimilation of diverse scientific experiences in different cultural contexts.
Scientists of every age have sought to overcome their geographical limitations and to establish personal and epistolary relationships with scholars from other countries and cultural traditions. In that context, travel represents perhaps most clearly the propensity of the early modern scientist to escape from the narrow limits of his own geographic-intellectual reality.
A collective research on scientific travels of not very well known members of the peripheral scientific community will be one of the first projects of the STEP group.
Relatively recent work in the historiography of science has developed various models of networks, which might be of some potential use for our purposes. Scientific practices progressively acquire a homogeneous character through the consensus of the practitioners. This can be understood as dependent on the dynamics of the international network of practitioners, and, hence, the categories of centre and periphery cease to be so dominant in the explanatory schemata.
There are, of course, relevant nodes in the network that emerge as a sort of new centres to attract the interest of foreign scholars. In addition, networks might help us to revisit the traditional ways of presenting the local-universal tension in science. In that sense an 'obscure' local practitioner represents a useful complement of the work of a great luminary in a particular scientific discipline.
6. Intensifying the efforts to catalogue and make available to the international community the archival material in the peripheral countries
The immense and largely unexplored richness of the archives and libraries situated in the countries of the European periphery are not readily accessible. Of these collections we often do not have reliable catalogues and descriptions and this situation has forced the local and international communities of historians of science to focus their attention upon nineteenth and twentieth century science. Our libraries are full of valuable materials and the application of new technology combined with the systematic use of databases, will help us to assess the richness and variety of this complex heritage. National databases combined with new common bibliographic research tools shall increase in the future our knowledge of the 'Geography of Science in Europe'
7. Future activities of the STEP group
After the foundational meeting of the STEP, which was held on the 1st of June 1999 in Barcelona (Spain), a specific agenda of further academic activities and research aims was established.
Foundational members of the STEP are: Marco Beretta, José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez, Ana Carneiro, Paula Diogo, Antonio García Belmar, Kostas Gavroglu, Dimitri Gouzevitch, Irina Gouzevitch, Arne Hessenbruch, Berna Kilinç, Anders Lundgren, Agustí Nieto Galán, Manolis Patiniotis, Ana Simões, Brigitte van Tiggelen.
The members of a permanent team would be responsible to be the contact persons for each country: (Marco Beretta (Italy), Antonio García Belmar (Spain), Irina Gouzevitch (Russia), Arne Hessenbruch (Denmark & Norway), Berna Kilinç (Turkey), Anders Lundgren (Sweden), Manolis Patiniotis (Greece), Ana Simões (Portugal), Brigitte van Tiggelen (Belgium). A steering committee (STEP-SC@uv.es) will coordinate all future STEP activities:
Kostas Gavroglu: kgavro@cc.uoa.gr
Marco Beretta: imberet@box4.tin.it
Antonio García-Belmar: antonio.garcia@uv.es
José Ramón Bertomeu: jose.r.bertomeu@uv.es
Agustí Nieto-Galan: a.nieto@cehic.uab.es
Regular workshops focused on particular subjects were considered to be one of the central aims of the activities of the STEP group. In that sense, we plan to meet in Lisbon, in September 2000, to prepare a collective volume on scientific travels to/from the periphery. We also plan to organize a symposium in the XXIst International Congress of History of Science to be held in Mexico City in July 2001, that would provide an excellent opportunity to make STEP more visible, especially since the central theme of the Congress is 'Science and Cultural Diversity'. The International Laboratory of History of Science, to be held in Athens, 2002, will also provide an excellent environment to discuss, for example, texts as means of transmission of the new knowledge and examine their structure, language, themes, illustrations, etc.
One of the main obstacles that historians of science from non English speaking countries have to face is the ignorance of their activity outside the respective national boundaries. The diffusion of the national bibliographical production on the history of sciences by using existing and new communication tools was something emphasized by all the participants in the STEP foundational meeting. A bilingual data-base on secondary literature, with small English abstract and key words, was suggested as a future activity of the group. In order to recover and to make available important and unknown collections of textual and material sources, the group also plans to build an international data-base of primary sources and secondary bibliography of the peripheral countries. A Web page (www.uoa.gr/step), now under preparation, will also provide a way to spread information of our activities.
(Brigitte Van Tiggelen)
Op 20 oktober 1999 organiseerde de Landelijke Coördinatiegroep Academische Collecties (kortweg LCG; hierin zijn vertegenwoordigd de universiteiten van Leiden, Groningen, Amsterdam, Utrecht en Delft) de bijeenkomst ‘Verder met academische collecties’ in de aula van de UvA. Op deze dag presenteerden de universiteiten de stand van zaken met betrekking tot besteding van de ‘Nuis’gelden, dat zijn de extra middelen die toenmalig staatssecretaris A. Nuis, voor het behoud van academische collecties beschikbaar heeft gesteld. Op dit moment zijn bij de genoemde vijf universiteiten diverse behoudsprojecten aan de gang voor in totaal een bedrag van 12 miljoen gulden. In de loop van het jaar 2001 zullen de laatste projecten worden afgerond.
Deze concrete activiteiten hebben binnen het LCG ook de discussie nieuw leven ingeblazen over welke toekomst er nu is voor de universitaire collecties. Op 20 oktober waren een aantal sprekers uitgenodigd om hun visie te geven over het toekomstige gebruik van de academische collecties. Referaten werden gehouden door ondermeer Melle Daamen, directeur van de Mondriaan Stcihting, Rik Vos directeur van het Instituut Collectie Nederland, Manus Brinkman, secretaris-generaal van ICOM en Wim van der Weiden, directeur van Naturalis.
Aan het eind van de dag is de publicatie Universitaire Collecties en Cultuurschatten, deel 3 gepresenteerd. Het boekje bevat een aantal interviews met personen van binnen en buiten de universiteit. De ondervraagden geven hun mening over wat nu de volgende stappen met betrekking tot academische collecties in Nederland zouden moeten zijn. Het beeld dat uit die interviews naar voren komt is, dat de aandacht voorlopig ook nog op het behoud en beheer van collecties gericht moet worden, maar dat de universiteiten zeker niet het ontzamelen, het afstemmen en het selecteren uit het oog moeten verliezen. Het is noodzakelijk dat dit in gezamenlijk overleg gebeurt, ook met ander grote verzamelaars zoals de Rijksmusea. Dit om te voorkomen dat er opnieuw grote achterstanden ontstaan maar vooral om in de toekomst over een verantwoorde wetenschappelijke collectie Nederland te beschikken. Tevens moet in een volgende fase de aandacht veel meer worden gericht op het bereiken van een groter publiek. Dat kan via de universitaire musea, maar ook via moderne informatietechnologie. De collecties zouden een veel grotere rol kunnen spelen in de voorlichting en profilering van wetenschap en universiteiten.
De publicatie Universitaire Collecties en Cultuurschatten, deel 3 is te bestellen via de universitaire musea.
(Franck Smit)