ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that a particular variety of overlapping subsets – namely, informal scientific networks active at a local and regional level – were crucial elements in the production and circulation of natural knowledge in the early modern world. Excessively high social status could in fact endanger, rather than guarantee, one’s “ingenuity.” As Diacinto Cestoni wrote, Francesco Redi the philosopher ingenuously “acknowledged that he was wrong” about the generation of certain insects, but Francesco Redi the courtier refused to make his confession public. Low status never prevented Antonio Vallisneri from trusting and crediting the observations of collaborators who had proved their “virtue” and shown themselves to be “ingenuous investigators” of nature. A number of Bernardino Bono’s letters included sets of instructions on “how to observe small things with a microscope”. In the early eighteenth century many parts of Europe, sometimes literally round the corner, continued to be almost as “exotic,” foreign, and even hostile as distant continents.