In the magisterial essay on ‘Historiography of the history of science’ that opens this excellent new Companion to the History of Science, Lynn K. Nyhart observes that while scholars in the field have frequently borrowed methodological approaches from other disciplines, they ‘have often shied away from direct theoretical statements in favour of a more empirical style that integrates analytical insights into narrative structures’ (p. 8). This tendency to sugar the theoretical pill with narrative often makes history-of-science monographs much more engaging and readable than equivalent academic books in other fields such as literary criticism (and I say this as someone who works primarily in that discipline), but it is necessarily tempered in this Companion, for which Bernard Lightman has assembled a superb roster of many of the leading figures in their respective specialisms. The volume's foregrounding of historiography is evident not just in Nyhart's opening overview, but in the very structure of the book. As Lightman notes in the ‘Introduction’, the Companion’s ‘object is to survey recent developments that have resulted from the effort to re-envision the field’ in the 1980s and 1990s (p. 2), and it endeavours to do this by largely abandoning the chronological approach adopted in previous surveys of the discipline such as the ongoing Cambridge History of Science series (2003–). Instead, Lightman's Companion is organized around analytical categories, focusing on four particular areas that have come to dominate recent historiography: (i) ‘Roles’, (ii) ‘Places and spaces’, (iii) ‘Communication’ and (iv) ‘Tools of science’.

This structure, with each of these categories comprising a section of around ten chapters, enables the Companion to address current issues such as identity, practice, the movement of knowledge, and material culture from a number of different perspectives that, helpfully, are often mutually illuminating. To take only one example of this, while Aileen Fyfe's chapter on ‘Journals and periodicals’ in the ‘Communication’ section affords an incisive synopsis of the development and significance of these key vectors of scientific exchange and dissemination, periodicals and related serialized media are also integral to the arguments of several other chapters. They are, for instance, important resources for self-fashioning and the cultivation of careers in the chapters by Valérie Chansigaud on ‘Scientific illustrators’ and Paul White on ‘The man of science’ in the ‘Roles’ section, and conspicuous agents of institutional authority and prestige in Denise Phillips's chapter on ‘Academies and societies’ and Lukas Rieppel's on ‘Museums and botanical gardens’ in the ‘Places and spaces’ section. Indeed, few of the chapters in the Companion can really be read in isolation, with, for example, White's superb account of the gendered scientific vocation adopted in Britain and America during the nineteenth century needing to be supplemented by, at the very least, the chapters on ‘Amateurs’ (by Katherine Pandora) and ‘The professional scientist’ (by Cyrus C.M. Mody) for its historiographic claims to resonate in a broader context.

With a bracing brusqueness, Nyhart notes that, notwithstanding its ‘increasingly sophisticated historiography’, much recent work in the history of science, and particularly that on popular science, still retains a ‘parochial focus on nineteenth-century Britain’ (p. 13). The Companion, although edited by a leading specialist on Victorian Britain, largely resists such parochialism, both temporally and spatially. Its focus instead extends from the ancient world, exemplified in Nathan Sidoli's account of ‘Learned man and woman in antiquity and the Middle Ages’, the opening chapter of the ‘Roles’ section, to the new frontiers of ‘big-data positivism’ (p. 472) discussed in Matthew L. Jones's chapter on ‘Calculating devices and computers’, which, especially when read as part of the ‘The tools of science’ section alongside chapters on older technologies like microscopes and telescopes, helpfully historicizes the often hubristic claims made for our contemporary digital revolution. In their attention to science as a global phenomenon, the various contributions to the Companion almost always move beyond the hoary old unidirectional model of centre and periphery, with Kapil Raj, in an excellent chapter on ‘Go-betweens, travelers, and cultural translators’, instead emphasizing the ‘global interconnections, intercultural encounter, and negotiation’ enacted by the liminal figure of the ‘go-between’ (p. 39, original emphasis). Similar arguments are also articulated by Rieppel about European museum collections, which are shown to be products of circulation and mediation, and by Marwa Elshakry and Carla Nappi in their instructive chapter on ‘Translations’. The only exception is in Phillips's chapter on ‘Academies and societies’, where the stringent centralization of Napoleonic France ensures that those provincial scientific institutions far away from the ‘powerful center of Paris’ remain merely ‘voices from the periphery’ (p. 230). It is actually rather reassuring that not all of the chapters conform to exactly the same historiographic standpoints, as, inevitably, certain theoretical models will work better for some historical situations than for others. And again this comparative insight into different historical and geographic circumstances becomes most evident by reading the different chapters in the Companion alongside each other rather than as self-contained entities.

Although the individual chapters, which Lightman describes as ‘synthetic, midscale studies rather than microstudies’ (p. 2), are uniformly excellent, the Companion to the History of Science, when read as a whole or even section by section, really is more than the sum of its parts.