The Foundation and the First Decades of the Activity of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in the Works of Russian and Foreign Historians of Science. Part 2

The article is devoted to the critical analysis of the foreign historiography of the foundation of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The authors focus on German and Anglo-American historiographic traditions. The authors analyze the works of M. Posselt, V. Stieda, A. Vucinich, S. Werrett, M. Gordin and others. The article shows the the development of approaches to the highlighting of the problem of the foundation of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The Western historiography was initially dominated by German historians of science who were mostly interested in the role of foreigners (primarily Germans) in the history of the foundation of the Academy of Sciences. The authors of the article show that German historians followed the approach developed in Russian pre-revolutionary historiography. However, both British and American historians of science worked within this approach in the 1950–1970s. In this regard, the authors of the article draw attention to the interpretation of the history of Russian science by A. Vucinich and show its relations to the positivist historiography. An important result of the study concerns the identification of the fact that transformation in the Western historiography of the foundation of the Academy of Sciences was associated with new posmodern methodological strategies in cultural studies and in sociology. Theauthors show that contemporary Anglo-American historians tend to use the social analysis of M. Foucault, N. Elias and other influential contemporary sociologists, which significantly enriches the historiography of the foundation of the Academy of Sciences.

THE TRADITION OF ALCHEMICAL AND ASTROLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE WITHIN AND AROUND THEOPHAN PROKOPOVYCH’S LIBRARY

The important role of the alchemical and astrological tradition in the formation and trans-formation of science as a social institution in the Early Modern period is researched in detail in Western historiography of science. At the same time, the Ukrainian aspect of this pan-European phenomenon needs further intensive study.The article deals with the alchemical and astrological component of Ukrainian science of the High Baroque era on an example of Theophan Prokopovych (1677 – 1736). The analysis of the ca¬talog of Prokopovych’s library confirmed that the alchemical-astrological and magical-physical knowledge belonged to the sphere of interests of the scholar. His activity, in addi-tion to cosmogonic reasoning and mathematical calculations, also had a practical compo-nent. Books from the library’s holdings included works of late alchemy, which allowed Pro-kopovych to be aware of the latest ideas, trends, and achievements in this and related fields of knowledge. This is reflected in the formation of the worldview and creative work of the scholar.A comparison of the facts of biographies, the essence and direction of creativity, and the relationship of the authors mentioned in Prokopovych’s treatise “Natural Philosophy or Physics”, testified to the existence of the united pan-European scientific and information space, within which the tradition of late alchemy was formed and transformed during the 16th-18th centuries. Theophan Prokopovych also belonged to this tradition, and his works reflected the state and essence of Ukrainian alchemical knowledge of the High Baroque era. Prokopovych’s own views on problems of alchemy and astrology are a topic of special re-search.

Skulls, Tree Bark, Fossils

Studies of material objects in the field of memory studies have followed diverse epistemological and disciplinary trajectories, but their shared characteristic has been the questioning of philosophical assumptions concerning human relations with inanimate things and lower-level organic objects, such as plants, within the Aristotelian hierarchy of beings. Rather than accept at face value their categorizations as passive or deficient in comparison to the human subject, critical scholarship has reformulated the place and role of nonhuman entities in culture. This essay examines the nexus of materiality and memory in the work of the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, with the focus on the questions of mnemonic affordance of things and plants. The essay proposes that Didi-Huberman’s project can be approached from the perspective of “undoing” the key binaries of Western historiography of art and material culture: surface/depth, exteriority/interiority, visibility/invisibility, and malleability/rigidity. Focusing on imaginal representations of memory objects in Didi-Huberman’s two essays Bark and Being a Skull, the essay situates these texts within the context of his philosophical reading of Aby Warburg’s iconology, and argues that Didi-Huberman’s undoing of the binaries that have traditionally structured thinking about materiality and memory could be productively approached as a philosophical project of transvaluating surface.

Beguines of Languedoc — “other” Beguines and the cult of their saints

The religious movement of the Beguines in Languedoc in the first quarter of the XIV century is a unique phenomenon of the development of the ideology of spirituals — ideology that arose within Franciscanism. Using his example, it is possible to clearly trace how the ideology of educated intellectuals, who developed it and discussed it within their own order, passed to groups of representatives of the urban population. The new adherents of the teaching developed it within the framework of their idea of how a “classical” religious movement should be built — their own saints, martyrs, martyrologies and holy relics appeared. In Western historiography, in the presence of a large amount of collected material, the activities of individuals who have left written evidence of the development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit are actively studied, however, there is no connection between how these ideas were practically introduced into the minds of people far from intellectual disputes and their development within urban population groups.

Jan Philip van Thielen and his flower garland paintings

The subject of this research is the artworks of the Flemish painter Jan Philipp van Thielen – a prominent author of the pieces depicting flower garlands in the XVII century, but so little-known nowadays. His name is unjustly forgotten in Russian historiography, although his paintings exhibited in the national museums; although in Western historiography, his popularity has grown in recent decades. Special attention is given to the painter’s works in different genres (religion, portraits, mythology), which are framed by a flower garland accentuating and symbolizing the central images. The scientific novelty of consists in ratification of art of the once renowned and now almost forgotten painter Jan Philipp van Thielen, as well as in the proof that he was one of the most popular flower painters in Flanders, and his patrons and customers were such high-rank aristocrats as Diego Felípez de Guzmán 1st Marquess of Leganés (1580-1655), and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria (1664-1662), both art lovers and philanthropists. The acquired results demonstrate that Jan Philip van Thielen painted flower garlands in different genres. In the art of Flanders of the XVII century with remarkable success the showed the beauty of garlands and their use for enhancing the religious or moralizing meaning of the central images. His works are widely exhibited not only in museums, but also in auctions, which once again proves his important role in the painting of the XVII century.

Methodological pursuits of the Soviet historians: “Marxist structuralism of A. Y. Gurevich (in the works of 1960s)

This article is dedicated to the problem of seeking new ways in interpretation of the empirical material through the prism of the methodology of “structuralism” undertaken by a range of Soviet historians in the 1960s. The object of this research is the works of the medieval historian A. Y. Gurevich, who created a series of methodological articles on the “Soviet structuralism”. His opinion is most vividly reflected in the articles “General Law and Specific Pattern in History” (1965) and “The discussion on pre-Capitalistic Social Formations: Development and Structure” (1968), which marked the “methodological turn” in his works, and currently serve the object of this analysis. The conclusion is made that that the works of A. Y. Gurevich methodologically correspond to the concept of “structuralism”, although with peculiar orientation towards Marxism. The author demonstrates that the key parameters of methodological work of the historian were determined not by the influence of Western historiography, but by the revision of Marxist dogmas. The system of structures, described in his works, required a different theoretical field, which later found reflection in a number of other works of the historian of rather applied nature. The author believes that an unsuccessful attempt to “renew” the Marxist theoretical thesaurus leads A. Y. Gurevich to the methodology of sociocultural history.

FIN DE SIÈCLE, MODERNISM, MULTIPLE MODERNITIES AND DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THEM IN THE RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

The paper covers the discussions about the Modern Style and Modernity in the Russian historiography. The terms Modern Style, Modern Style Culture, Fin de siecle determine the turn of XIX-XX centuries, while the concept of Fin de siècle is quite popular in the Western historiography. As for the term "Belle Époque" is concerned it is less common in the Western historiography. The theory of multiple modernities raises the question of autonomy of the social institutions' evolution and the development of the cultural and symbolic area, including in the late-Imperial Russia. The combination of westernization and Empire modernization triggered different sociocultural trends: Empire construction was the primary imperative for some, while others voted for the reforms bringing together Russia and European modernity models, and the revolutionary westernization served to be the third force. It is seen to be quite reasonable to distinguish the rationalization and traditionalism in a modernized society, including in the art. Modernism which re-interprets all previous basics of the arts and has its purpose "to be" rather than "to mean" comes from philosophical, scientific, social, and political prerequisites.