Illustrious Connections: the Premises and Practices of Knowledge Transfer Between Switzerland and the Italian Peninsula

ILLUSTRIOUS CONNECTIONS: THE PREMISES AND PRACTICES OF KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER BETWEEN SWITZERLAND AND THE ITALIAN PENINSULA Clorinda Donato Introduction and Preliminary Reflections on Italian-Swiss Scientific Networks The study of networks in eighteenth-century knowledge transfer continues to change our thinking about how knowledge is created, grown and moved. Networks have forced scholars to examine the dynamic relationships existing not only between ideas, but just as importantly, between the people and structures that housed and nurtured them and the genres and languages through which their ideas were expressed. Connections between people, places, institutions, ideas and cultures of transfer often defined the future of intellectual pursuit and its aftermath. It is in this spirit that we undertake this consideration of one of the most illustrious connections for a scientist residing in the Italian peninsula in the eighteenth century, that of being able to use, or “drop” the name of Albrecht von Haller in one’s communication with others, in the dedication of one’s publications or in the preface to one’s work. Of even greater value was the appearance of one’s name and work among “le grand Haller’s” own notes or letters, an event that would assure fame for posterity, which is precisely the case for those Italian scientists who could claim Haller as an illustrious connection. As a working premise, then, this article starts from the present and moves backwards to chart why certain second-tier figures have succeeded in clinging to a place in the annals of history and science, a place from which they continue to advance, be read, and researched, with the likelihood that their own intrinsic value and their contributions might be discovered. For scientists in Italy, contact with Haller opened up the prospect for precisely this type of future. Indeed, Albrecht von Haller was the most esteemed name of a contemporary scientist among the erudite community in the Italian peninsula in the eighteenth century. While a number of the epistolary exchanges between Albrecht von Haller and Italian scientists have been edited, providing the raw data that comprises their © Clorinda Donato, 2013 | doi:10.1163/9789004243910_024 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Clorinda Donato - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 12:31:25AM via free access 536 clorinda donato exchanges, the reciprocal benefits of these relationships have not been previously investigated. Nor has there been an attempt to assess these exchanges against the backdrop of the similarities and differences between scientific exchange in Italy and Switzerland. The publication of correspondences between Haller and a fellow anatomist such as Giambat- tista Morgagni in Padua sheds light on the scientific debate in the discrete milieu of Padua’s illustrious scientific context, yet it stops short of explain- ing how this exchange may have proliferated to affect the lives of other persons of letters and science whose career trajectories were affected by the relationship between Morgagni and Haller, for example, and whose ideas were transferred to others who would eventually enter the “flow” of ideas and relations that served to move information and knowledge. Such movement, though somewhat difficult to trace through the complex set of relations that united Italian scientists topographically in the Italian peninsula, offers unique results when properly documented. In the Ital- ian peninsula’s polycentric manifestation of lumières, not all scientists and men of letters enjoyed as consistently a laudatory reception across urban and provincial centres of learning in Italy as did Albrecht von Haller, which makes him the ideal prism through which to track reception and action. This juncture in Haller studies, with data available on his wide circle of contacts, provides a unique opportunity for examining the social topography, origins, careers, reputations, successes, mentors and protégés of the Italian scientific community at the half way mark of the eighteenth century; and while it also enables us to further understand the pivotal role played by Haller in the scientific imagination of many eighteenth-century Italian intellectuals, studying the delicate interplay and shifting needs and fortunes in each camp reveals a far greater network of interdependence than first imagined. Such a reassessment is necessary now, for scholarship on intellectual and cultural transfer between the Germanic and Italian worlds of the eighteenth century has made significant strides in recent years, thanks both to a new generation of scholars whose interest lies in tracking the place and movement of Enlightenment reciprocally over the Alps, but thanks, also, to the availability of increasing numbers of sources where this transfer can be charted.1 Yet the difficulty of reading, understanding and analyzing the Italian Enlightenment continues, due to the limited number of scholars 1 See Giulia Cantarutti, Stefano Ferrari and Paola Maria Filipp (eds.), Il Settecento tedesco in Italia. Gli Italiani e l’immagine della cultura tedesca nel XVIII secolo (Bologna 2001). Clorinda Donato - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 12:31:25AM via free access illustrious connections 537 who can read primary and secondary sources in both Italian and German in order to properly situate these sources within the Republic of Letters. Today, the circulation of sources to and from any number of centres in a vast network of scholarly production is traceable in correspondences, scholarly journals and reviews, monographs and contemporary trans- lated editions. And while numerous scholars have written monographs and articles documenting the relationship between Albrecht von Haller and the Italian scientific community, that information has been largely unknown in the English and French speaking worlds, for it has appeared primarily in German and Italian publications. Limited to a small group of specialists, then, this evidence has made much headway, even among the likes of historians of geography such as Charles Withers, whose recent and otherwise excellent monograph, Placing the Enlightenment, makes errone- ous claims about Albrecht von Haller’s Italian medical network: For the physician and botanist Albrecht von Haller, for example, letter writ- ing was a means to secure his own social position as a professor in Göttingen between 1736 and 1753. While there, Haller established and benefited from a web of correspondence across northern Europe especially, with correspondents in Hanover and in Bern particularly important, but with southern Europe figuring hardly at all. Haller’s work with Swiss botanists in Zurich and in Basle on the Swiss flora, the Enumeratio Methodica Stirpium Helvetiae Indigenarum (1742), one of many such books on native flora based on local fieldwork and agreed taxonomic principles, depended on correspondence. Haller drew upon others’ works in this respect—on the Russian Johann Georg Gmelin’s Flora Siberica, for example—as part of his plans to establish a botanical garden in Göttingen. Although Haller’s botanical network was strong, his medical one was weak, with only one man of science south of the Alps. His letters to the Padua anatomist Giovanni Battista Morgagni were of a different sort: currying personal favor, keeping the Italian abreast of the state of anatomical research in German institutions . .2 Instead, Haller’s network of Italian correspondents and the frequency of the exchange between them were far more extensive than With- ers had imagined and served a far nobler purpose than that of merely the correspondence of a fan club. Indeed, a study of “the great Haller” and his ongoing epistolary relationship with one of the least understood Enlightenment contexts—that of Italy—serves to instruct us about how the Republic of Letters really became just that, for the movement of 2 Charles W.J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago 2001). Clorinda Donato - 9789004243910 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 12:31:25AM via free access 538 clorinda donato information and knowledge from the best known hubs of enlightenment, i.e., London and Paris, to new places where a confluence of information flowing from a variety of sources might suddenly establish new centres from which knowledge moved in new directions. Latin, Translation, and the Italian-Swiss Network The Repertorium zu Albrecht von Hallers Korrespondenz 1724–1777 docu- ments the greatest expansion of Haller’s contacts in Italy during the years in which he worked as commissioner [Magistrat] in Bern and Roche start- ing in 1753. During this period, contacts with Italian scientists in northern and central Italy began and grew. Though scores of Italian doctors and scientists corresponded with Haller and the vast majority of them exchanged no more than two or three letters with him, others, such as Caldani, who replicated many of his experiments, exchanged copious letters with him. The variety of these exchanges is indicative of the existence of secondary and tertiary networks involving Italians. Some of them had migrated outside of Italy due to religious persecution, but they remained in contact with Italian scientists, functioning as conduits for information about and from Haller to other Italians. The vast majority of these letters is written in Latin.3 Though Haller wrote primarily in French to the rest of his network in the

Load more