Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century

Scholars in Action addresses the complexities of the culture of knowledge, focusing on the scholar, or savant, as its main actor. The book explores how, and to what end, savants in the 18th Century collated, produced, critiqued, propagated, diffused, and applied knowledge.
Investigating scholars’ diverse practices of knowledge, the volume’s six sections are organised around central scholarly activities: rising and advancing, reading and judging, perceiving and reacting, printing and communicating, observing and experimenting, as well as advising and serving.
Based on a wide range of sources and looking at a great variety of savants, an international group of 40 authors open up new perspectives on eighteenth-century scholars and scholarship.

Contributors include Kirill Abrosimov, Gunhild Berg, Thomas Biskup, Holger Böning, Simona Boscani-Leoni, Barbara Braun-Bucher, Laurence Brockliss, Florence Catherine, Lorraine Daston, Simone De Angelis, Bettina Dietz, Clorinda Donato, Claudia Engler, Iris Flessenkaemper, Daniel Fulda, Marian Füssel, Martin Gierl, Rainer Godel, Karl S. Guthke, Thomas Habel, Caspar Hirschi, László Kontler, Urs Leu, Annette Meyer, Marion Mücke, Miriam Nicoli, Andreas Önnerfors, Hole Rössler, Anne Saada, Torsten Sander, Hartmut Schleiff, Ulrich Johannes Schneider, Reinhart Siegert, René Sigrist, Justin Stagl, Regula Wyss, and Simone Zurbuchen.

André Holenstein, Ph.D (1989), habilitation (1999) is Professor of Swiss History at the University of Bern. He has published on the history of statebuilding, popular resistance, economic knowledge, and collective memory from the late middle ages to the early 19th century.
Hubert Steinke, M.D. (1995), Ph.D. (2003) is Professor of History of Medicine at the University of Bern. He has published widely on Haller, the Republic of Letters and on medical theory and practice from the 16th to the 19th century.
Martin Stuber, Ph.D. (1996), is associated with the Institute of History at the University of Bern. He has published widely on the history of forestry, the network-based scholarly communication and the production of useful knowledge in the 18th and 19th century; in particular, he explored Albrecht von Haller and the Bernese Economic Society (Oekonomische Gesellschaft).