Paola Govoni: Un pubblico per la scienza. La divulgazione scientifica nell’Italia in formazioneUn pubblico per la scienza. La divulgazione scientifica nell’Italia in formazione by Paola GovoniReview by: rev. by Patrizia DelpianoIsis, Vol. 96, No. 1 (March 2005), pp. 131-132Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/433018 .

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BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 96 : 1 (2005) 131

The editor has dispersed many figures fromthe original into the translation. They would bevery helpful had the editor also included an in-dex map as to their locations. How are the read-ers to know where the figures are from? Theyneed a detailed map of the Austro-HungarianMonarchy (preferably one at 1/75,000) to findsome of the locations. Many locations men-tioned in the translated text are also not found inany of the maps given in the translated version.Four figures were added: two portraits of Mojsi-sovics, one map of the Alps (Fig. 3: in which theSwiss Helvetic units are incorrectly labeled asUltrahelvetic and the French Dauphine´/Subal-pine Chains as Helvetic) and one simplified geo-logic map of the Dolomites (Fig. 7).

The commentaries, although written by re-spectable authorities, are entirely inadequate.Only Peter Brack’s comes anywhere close tohelping the reader to place Mojsisovics’s workinto its historical and scientific frame.

All in all this is a book that cannot be rec-ommended to historians, to beginners in geol-ogy, or to students of history of science or ge-ology, despite its low price. Only professionalgeologists, with some knowledge of the Dolo-mites, of the German language, and with a copyof Mojsisovics’s original at hand (preferablyalso with the accompanying geologic map) canmake use of it. Mojsisovics’s great classic, eventhe part only pertaining to the Triassic reefs, isstill awaiting a proper translation.

A. M. CELAL SENGOR

Paola Govoni.Un pubblico per la scienza. Ladivulgazione scientifica nell’Italia in forma-zione. (Studi storici Carocci/27.) Roma: CarocciEditore, 2002, 351 pp., Illus., index.€23.50,$23.71.

Addressed to historians of science and, moregenerally, of culture, this book tackles a subjectthat has up until now been neglected in historicalresearch in Italy: the spreading of scientificknowledge, shorn of superstitions and false be-liefs, whose history the author analyses, concen-trating in particular on post-Unification Italy(1861–1891). In this period more and moreworks on scientific topics were produced, onlyto quickly decline after the last decade of thecentury.

The work stems from a fusion between theAnglo-Saxon tradition of the sociology of sci-ence and the Italian tradition of the history ofideas. It brings out, thus, not only the main au-thors of the phenomenon (publishers and read-ers) but also the sources used to spread scientific

knowledge (periodicals, encyclopaedias, novels,dictionaries, manuals, almanacs). A central rolewas played by scientists who identified with thevalues of positivism and who had participated inthe revolt of 1848 and then held political office:Michele Lessona, author of dictionaries and al-manacs, assisted by his wife, Adele Masi; PaoloMantegazza, who founded the periodical of hy-giene and medicine, “L’Igea” (1862), and the“Almanacco igienico popolare” (1866). Out-standing publishers include, in Milan, EmilioTreves, who launched such series as the “Scienzadel Popolo” (1867), and Dumolard, who origi-nated the series “Biblioteca Scientifica Interna-zionale” (1875); and, in Turin, Luigi Pomba,founder of the publishing house, Utet. Thespread of scientific knowledge was concentratedin Northern Italy, the area of the country in-volved in economic-industrial development, re-inforcing the traditional cleavage between thetwo Italy’s. The public was not characterized byhomogeneity: “science for all” (as it was definedin the nineteenth century) took in on the onehand expert readers (and in this sense the spreadof scientific knowledge was a form of commu-nication between specialists); and on the otherhand non-expert readers, that is, the lower andupper middle classes. “Popular science” did notreach the social groups at which it was ideallyaimed, i.e., common people such as farm la-bourers and workers.

Distinct from other European countries, inItaly the process of scientific knowledge dissem-ination was destined to fail: the fruit of the trans-plantation into the peninsula of models importedabove all from France and Great Britain, the tem-porary success of “popular science” was not suf-ficient to integrate scientific knowledge in thenational culture. There was no significant in-crease in the scientifically-minded public; rather,those readers who already had access to the ed-itorial marketplace became more familiar withscientific debates. There was no significant linkformed between science and the public, and therewas a continued separation of intellectuals fromscientists and science. Many factors explain thisfailure: the high rate of illiteracy (69 percent in1871), the fragility of elementary education, thefragmentation of research centres, and the ab-sence of a national scientific community. Em-blematic of this failure was the broken dream ofthe review, “La Natura” (1884–1885), whichwas an initiative of Mantegazza and Treves, in-spired by different French and English patterns.

Not all the problems raised in the introductionfind an answer in the book: in particular, the gen-der perspective appears more claimed than real-

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132 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 96 : 1 (2005)

ised in practice. However, taking a comparativeand historical approach allows the author toplace the spread of scientific knowledge in Italyinto the European context and to identify its or-igins in the Age of Enlightenment, thus diggingout some peculiarities of the Italian cultural tra-dition. Interested in the links between science,education and economic development, the au-thor invites us to see the spread of scientificknowledge as one aspect of the education of thepeople, in which scientific ideals—with ambi-guity and not without rhetoric—intertwinedwith political aims.

PATRIZIA DELPIANO

Holly Henry. Virginia Woolf and the Discourseof Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy. xiii �208 pp., illus., bibl., index. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2003. $55.

In Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science,Holly Henry focuses on an important period inthe cultural history of astronomy, the twentyyears or so following Edwin Hubble’s 1923 dis-covery that the universe extended beyond ourgalaxy. In Britain and in the United States, Hub-ble’s discovery generated public fascination withnew telescopic technology and with questionsregarding the relationship of human beings to thecosmos. It also stimulated and shaped the imag-inations of modernist writers, including VirginiaWoolf, whose work is the primary focus of thisbook. Henry offers in-depth analysis of severalof Woolf’s works, including the short stories“The Searchlight” and “Solid Objects” and hernovelsThe Waves, The Years,andThree Guin-eas.Henry argues that the new view of the uni-verse emerging through advances in astronomyshaped both Woolf’s narrative techniques andher political perspective.

The dominant image in this new view was theEarth as a globe suspended in space; the domi-nant theme the dwarfing of human history andhuman beings by the scale of cosmic time andthe vastness of the universe. Henry characterizesthe central change as “a modernist decenteringand re-scaling of humans” (p. 41). Woolf’s nar-rative techniques reflected this decentering in heruse of multiple and alien perspectives and inwhat Henry terms a “scoping strategy” of “stag-ing her plots and characters against the backdropof the broad vistas of intergalactic space” (p. 51)and viewing characters as through a telescope.Woolf’s political perspective reflected concernabout the prospects for continued human exis-tence and the ideal of global unity suggested bythe image of the Earth from space.

Henry contextualizes Woolf’s responses toearly twentieth-century advances in astronomyby relating them to popular culture in Britain andAmerica and to a number of contemporary writ-ers, including Bertrand Russell, Olaf Stapledon,and Vita Sackville-West. Woolf seems to haveresponded most strongly to the scientist and pop-ular author James Jeans, whose work influencedWoolf in multiple ways but perhaps most nota-bly through Jeans’s concepts of “the scientist asa cinematographer who creates pictures of theuniverse” (p. 94) and of “humans’ ephemeral andnon-privileged position within the frame of cos-mological space and time” (p. 55). Although thecontemporary context of Woolf’s responses toastronomy is well developed, the study could bemore effectively contextualized in other re-spects. For example, Henry recognizes that thedecentering and rescaling that so influencedWoolf and her contemporaries was not the firstsuch response in human history: “Each new gen-eration of telescopes opens up an age of discov-ery and helps to shape popular perceptions of thehuman relation to cosmological phenomena” (p.11). She does not, however, compare the earlytwentieth-century decentering to earlier decen-terings or clearly answer the question of exactlyhow the twentieth-century decentering was dis-tinctively modernist. Similarly, although Henrymentions investigations into Woolf’s interest in“physics, Darwinian evolution, psychoanalysis,and the philosophy of science” (p. 2), she giveslittle idea of how Woolf’s responses to and ap-propriation of the tools and perspectives of as-tronomy compared to her responses to other sci-entific subjects.

At times, the study itself seems a little “de-centered.” For example, although the title sug-gests a focus on astronomy, some of the mostinteresting analysis concerns Woolf’s responsesto a wide range of visualization technologies, in-cluding the cinematograph and handheld camera.The individual chapters approach Woolf’s rela-tions to other writers and to visualization tech-nologies from varied perspectives, a strategy thatreveals the complexity and richness of Woolf’sinteractions and responses but does not providean entirely coherent picture. The book wouldbenefit from more synthesis, in particular a con-cluding chapter to weave together the threads ofthe analysis.

All in all, Henry’s book demonstrates that therecent cultural history of astronomy holds con-siderable interest. Her work is likely to draw anew readership to Woolf, Jeans, and several ofthe other authors she treats. Many historians,however, will likely feel that her work more

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