Lecturers > Scott Mandelbrote

Name
Scott Mandelbrote

College
Peterhouse

What is your field of history?
Early modern intellectual history, particularly the history of scholarship and the history of science.

How did you come to specialise in this area?
I was interested in the historical background of disciplines as a schoolboy, particularly in the history of science and of theology. As an undergraduate, I was keen to read texts and to maintain a wide intellectual engagement, which this sort of history seemed to provide. Unlike many historians, I don’t secretly wish that I had been a politician.

What sort of source material do you tend to use, and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
I use a wide variety of sources: printed books and pamphlets; manuscripts and manuscript correspondences, even inventories and wills. I also use material sources, including images, buildings, and, on one occasion, garden archaeology. Books themselves are, of course, material sources. It is usually possible to find out a great deal about the people in whom I am most interested, so there are inevitably problems of selection and also the problem of differentiating between the priorities one may have as a historian and the priorities of one’s subjects. Generally speaking, the less you know about an individual in the past, the more dangerous historical interpretation becomes. On the other hand, since context is necessarily limited by the randomness of survival, there is always a danger that apparent connections may be misleading, however persuasive the evidence may appear. It is possible to believe that one has read so much that one can indeed ‘hear them talking’: unfortunately, however, this is precisely what one cannot do.

Which individuals, events or forces are especially important in your area of history?
I’ve spent quite a bit of my life with Isaac Newton, whose importance in human culture and achievement seems obvious to me (but on whom I began working entirely by accident). I’m very interested in the transformations of textual (especially biblical) authority that took place in the early modern world, in the process of the transmission of knowledge in that society, and in the changing impact of the printing press.

How has your field developed over the course of your career?
When I began work in the 1990s, almost nobody in Britain would have claimed to be interested in ‘the history of scholarship’. The discipline of intellectual history remains dominated by the study of political thought, but there is a wider conception of what intellectual history may mean, largely as a result of the diffusion of the work of a couple of American scholars. In the history of science, by contrast, the easy acceptance that there was such a thing as ‘science’ in the early modern world has been successfully challenged, which is good for our understanding, but has magnified other pressures that mean that fewer historians of science and budding historians of science are interested in events before 1800.

Which areas of your field most urgently need further exploration?
There is a marked imbalance in scholarship, with a bias towards England, Italy, and France. Too little attention has been paid to the relationship between the republic of letters and the wider world, and far too little time has been spent on the transmission of ideas in manuscript (including the passage of texts from the Middle East to Europe). We lack synthetic accounts of most areas of early modern intellectual activity, outside the history of political thought and the histories of science and medicine, which are not invalidated by whiggish assumptions.

What characterises good history?
Good history should last: it should be well written, while recognising the complexity of the past, and firmly grounded in evidence that is not readily available to all. Flashy arguments and theoretical perspectives sell books, make careers, and pack lecture rooms, but they usually tell us more about our current obsessions than they do about the past. Similarly, it is very easy to play for cheap laughs by drawing attention to the oddity of the past. While this may have the effect of underlining the difference between them and us, it remains, all too often, an example of ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ that E.P. Thompson rightly sought to overcome.

How did your understanding of history change during your time as a university student?
My current historical interests are not well represented in any undergraduate curriculum, and the undergraduate education that I had was, in many ways, very old-fashioned. I don’t regard either of these things as being necessarily bad: as an undergraduate, I was exposed to a wide variety of high-quality historical writing, much of it not recent, and to topics in which plenty of source material was readily available to the undergraduate. I was encouraged by supportive teachers, who were relatively unconstrained in what they could indulge since there was little in the way of a formal syllabus. As a result, I learned that there were many effective ways of being a historian and many different things that historians can do. Since my friends who were studying English literature were discovering the then-fashionable ‘new historicism’, I tried very hard to explore the relationship between literary texts and the historical topics that I was being asked to write about. At the time, it seemed important to try to make historical writing witty. This bemused some of my teachers (even though I was able to take a course on ‘literature and politics in early modern England’), and would probably bemuse me now. Nevertheless, it was useful to think about ways in which historians might learn from non-historians. I didn’t realise how very difficult it can be to write history until much later!

Where should somebody interested in your area of history go for further information?
The best practitioner writing in English in my field is the Princeton professor, Anthony Grafton. His short books, Forgers and Critics and What was History?, both represent accessible starting points. The Coming of the Book, by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, has just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary but remains fresh and topical in its vision, if not always precise in its data. There are several web-based projects that connect with my interests, above all the Newton Project, which I help to direct.