Article ID: CBB000950505

The Renaissance of Peiresc: Aubin-Louis Millin and the Postrevolutionary Republic of Letters (2008)

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This essay argues for the emergence of a cultural and epistemological divide between amateur savants and members of the Royal Academy of the Sciences in late Old Regime and revolutionary France and suggests that the amateur ideal rose in significance even as intellectual activity came to be increasingly centralized in the postrevolutionary era. At the crux of the tensions between the amateur ideal and the professionalizing reality in the immediate postrevolutionary period stood Aubin-Louis Millin and his journal, the Magasin Encyclopédique. The essay examines, in particular, the revival in the pages of the Magasin Encyclopédique of interest in Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the seventeenth-century icon of an amateur ideal in which investigations in the natural sciences and scholarship were private, decentralized, often provincial activities. Although the sciences in the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras were often perceived as forward looking and dismissive of the past, this essay finds that a sentimental and nostalgic attachment to the past---to a myth of Peiresc---continued to play an important role in the identity of postrevolutionary men of letters.

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Description On the interactions and roles of amateur savants and members of the Royal Academy of the Sciences in late Old Regime and revolutionary France.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000950505/

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Authors & Contributors
Wesner, Samantha Stinson
Geoffrey Wall
Angela Ferraro
Sandro Tirini
Hye-Min Lee
Vetter, Jeremy
Concepts
Science and society
French Revolution of 1789
Professions and professionalization
Science and politics
Amateurs
Biology
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
Enlightenment
17th century
21st century
20th century, late
Places
France
Levant and Near East
Russia
North Africa
Germany
China
Institutions
Académie Royale des Sciences (France)
Paris. Jardin Royal des Plantes
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