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In the Land of Marvels

Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour

How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science.

In 1749, the celebrated French physicist Jean-Antoine Nollet set out on a journey through Italy to solve an international controversy over the medical uses of electricity. At the end of his nine-month tour, he published a highly influential account of his philosophical battle with his Italian counterparts, discrediting them as misguided devotees of the marvelous. Paola Bertucci's In the Land of Marvels brilliantly reveals the mysteries of Nollet's journey, uncovering a subterranean world of secretive and far more ambitious intelligence gathering masked as scientific inquiry.

The advent of electricity was a pivotal phenomenon not only in the history of physical experimentation, but also in the cultivation of popular scientific interest. Nollet's journey was supposedly inspired by the need to investigate, and subsequently report on, claims of the use of electrified "medicated tubes" by their Italian inventor Gianfrancesco Pivati. Motivated by economic interests in the silk industry, Nollet's journey was in fact an undercover mission commissioned by the French state to discover the secrets of Italian silk manufacture and possibly supplant its international success. The event that sparked the medical controversy—the unusual cure of a bishop—was a complete fabrication.

Bertucci insightfully contrasts published accounts of the event with private documents and discusses how eighteenth-century scientists published fictional events and results to bolster their careers, ultimately leading to long-lasting misrepresentations of scientific practice and enduring stereotypes. In the Land of Marvels reveals the constellation of historical actors, from reputed physicists to travel writers and electrical amateurs, who manipulated information to gain authority and prestige.

About the Author

Paola Bertucci (NEW HAVEN, CT) is an associate professor in the department of history at Yale University. She is the author of the award-winning Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France.

Endorsements

"Jean-Antoine Nollet went to Italy in 1749 to discredit a sensational electrical cure. Or did he? In reality, Paola Bertucci shows, he sought to garner the secrets of the silk industry for the French state. Bertucci's book does more than discover an episode of industrial espionage: it fundamentally changes our understanding of how the Enlightenment intersected with the Industrial Revolution."

- Adrian Johns, University of Chicago

"In the Land of Marvels invites us to witness the natural wonders, scientific marvels, and technical know-how of eighteenth-century Italy through the eyes of the French experimenter Nollet. Bertucci is a perceptive and learned guide for this scientific voyage, raising important questions about the gap between the public presentation of knowledge and its less visible realities in an enlightened age."

- Paula Findlen, Stanford University
Johns Hopkins University Press
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