Amid the massive changes to science and education wrought by the coronavirus, this collection of essays is a timely reminder that the institutions where scientific knowledge is produced have always had profound influence on the type and nature of that knowledge. As Giulia Giannini lays out in the foreword, this volume attends to the rise of scientific academies in early modern Europe, linking them to the social and institutional contexts that preceded, enabled, and circumscribed their scientific activities.

Beginning with the context of research in institutional settings, the first two essays lay out the historiographic stakes of studies of scientific activities in English universities and Parisian academies. Mordechai Feingold asserts that we have anachronistically mischaracterized the character of scientific research in early modern English universities and pushes us to remember the religious and humanistic goals of seventeenth-century universities and the gentlemanly and generalist thrust of the early Royal Society. Stéphane Van Damme reviews recent scholarship to move our understanding of Parisian science away from strict patronage relationships toward a more dispersed network of actors interacting in person, in print, and through manuscript correspondence. The final essay in this section is Pietro Daniel Omodeo's case study of the correspondence of the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius in terms of the symbolic capital inherent in scientific exchanges. As Omodeo points out, the institutionalization of scientific work in centers like London and Paris left other intellectuals scrambling for legitimacy on the European scientific stage.

The second section of the book focuses broadly on the social and political forces that went into founding and shaping scientific academies. Giannini explains the uneven and staggered flow of information about Saturn between natural philosophers at the Accademia del Cimento in Florence and the Montmor Academy in Paris. Some of these same Italian and French networks feature in Dalia Deias's account of the first three decades of the Paris Observatory, which also had expansive global research agendas building on Jesuit missionary work in Asia. Aurélien Ruellet and François Mallet take a comparative approach to examine how aristocratic civility shaped the early London and Paris scientific academies in different ways, paying particular attention to how aristocratic scholars moved between and through intellectual spaces. Diverging from the traditional territory of France, England, and Italy, Luís Miguel Carolino's essay presents a richly contextualized account of the Royal Academy of Portuguese History, which aspired to a particularly Portuguese vision of the institutionalization of knowledge making for a Catholic, imperial state. In each of these essays, the authors are attentive to the ways that formal and informal networks of correspondence contributed to the formation of scientific academies and how these institutions in turn engaged with changing forms of state power.

The final grouping of essays turns to the details of the experimental work carried out in scientific academies and the epistemological stakes of how these results were published. Vera Keller's essay uncovers the quirky and revealing case of debates surrounding a goat horn published in 1677 in the journal of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum. Keller reveals that instead of proposing an epistemology of consensus around natural-historical matters of fact, the Miscellanea Curiosa instead facilitated the role of doubt in promoting scholarly conversation and experimental agendas. Through a case study of experiments on mineral waters conducted at the Royal Society and the Paris Academy of Sciences, Michael Bycroft's essay introduces readers to a research agenda he describes as “material-driven experimentation,” and he uses this approach to reassess many of the comparative assumptions about these institutions. The final essay, by Noah Moxham, presents a close analysis of the Royal Society's publishing strategy between 1663 and 1695, distinguishing between the society's distinct agendas for producing and communicating knowledge during these early decades.

In lieu of a traditional conclusion, the volume ends with a series of short commentaries coauthored by Jürgen Renn and Florian Schmaltz that focus on the life cycle of scientific academies: their composition, emergence, development, and demise. The collection of essays coheres as a whole, with a strong emphasis on actors in London and Paris and topics like astronomy and natural history. Throughout there is a deep interest in beginnings and the methodological importance of not projecting fully established habits or agendas onto protean institutions. This is a volume for specialists interested in the history of science and intellectual sociability in early modern Europe who will appreciate both the granularity of the essays and Brill's continued dedication to printing footnotes and reproducing quoted text in original languages.