ABSTRACT
The history of science popularization at the European periphery seems to be a project that is doubly subject to marginalization within the history of science. In both its aspects, the main event seems to be taking place elsewhere. While the ‘European periphery’ as conceived in this book is primarily geographical, it nevertheless has connotations of Edward Shils’s socio-cultural coinage, in which the periphery is defined not primarily by geography, but by distance from a central zone in which authority is invested. 2 Similarly, the history of science popularization has often seemed to be secondary to the history of ‘science proper’. Popularization, it is supposed, is what happens to scientific knowledge once it has been successfully made and passes out of the specialist realm.
