Doctoral Dissertation Research: Supernatural Disasters: The Flood, the Apocalypse, and a New Science of the Earth, 1680-1730

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project documents and analyzes the emergence of geology as a scientific discipline in the decades before and after the turn of the eighteenth century. It does this by reconstructing the international networks of scholarly exchange in which this new field of inquiry arose, and by identifying the major cultural, intellectual, religious and political forces that shaped its methods, content, and goals. One of its major contributions will be to revisit this important period in the development of the earth sciences by taking seriously the apocalypticism of some of its key practitioners. Historians have long noted the preoccupation with Noah's flood which many early geologists displayed, but little attention has been paid to the fact that future catastrophes, usually imagined as apocalyptic in character or significance, were also a topic of interest and debate. Recognizing that it was then a live question whether the earth's future was a legitimate topic of natural inquiry significantly reorients the way that scholars currently understand the historical development of the earth sciences as well as the historical relationship between science and religion. Understanding why the flood became a legitimate object of geological investigation while the apocalypse did not will shed light on the process by which people tried, and sometimes failed, to bring various phenomena under the purview of the natural sciences in the early modern period. Pursuing the question of how and why certain things were 'naturalized' while others were not tallies with the question of how new scientific disciplines were constituted. Towards that end, this project seeks to reconstruct how local conversations across Europe (and Europe's colonies) merged into a largely unified, international discipline in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, discussing individuals both famous and obscure, and employing new evidence and new analytic approaches to gain a fresh perspective on an old story. Natural disasters, real and imagined, were and remain objects of fascination for scientists and laymen alike. They are often charged with religious meaning in addition to, and often in competition with, the meaning assigned to them in the natural sciences. They are often interpreted in political ways as well. This study, which focuses on the science of disaster at a key moment of disciplinary configuration, also seeks to understand why natural disasters carry the set of meanings they do and thus why disasters play out in contemporary culture in they way that they do. Although the project is intended primarily as a contribution to our historical understanding of the scientific culture of early modern Europe, the issues it treats are ones that continue to reverberate in contemporary society. Recent highly-visible natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina have only stirred the controversy surrounding the predictions of future disasters, most notably those associated with the projected effects of global warming. In documenting how and why the prediction of disasters was devalued at a particular point in time, light may be shed on why it continues to be controversial even to this day. Finally, the fraught relationship between science and religion in today's world can only be better understood by an appreciation of the historical roots of that tension.