Knowledge in Transit

What big questions and large-scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies…