When Mary Cholmeley married Henry Fairfax in 1627, she carried to her new home in Yorkshire a leather-bound notebook filled with medical recipes. Over the next few decades, Mary and Henry, their children and various members of the Fairfax and Cholmeley families continually entered new medical and culinary information into this ‘treasury for health.’ Consequently, as it stands now, the manuscript can be read both as a repository of household medical knowledge and as a family archive. Focusing on two Fairfax ‘family books,’ this essay traces on the process through which early modern recipe books were created. In particular, it explores the role of the family collective in compiling books of knowledge. In contrast to past studies where household recipe books have largely been described as the products of exclusively female endeavors, I argue that the majority of early modern recipe collections were created by family collectives and that the members of these collectives worked in collaboration across spatial, geographical and temporal boundaries. This new reading of recipe books as testaments of the interests and needs of particular families encourages renewed examination of the role played by gender in the transmission and production of knowledge in early modern households.

The essays in this special issue of Centaurus examine overlooked agents and sites of knowledge production beyond the academy and venues of industry- and government-sponsored research. By using gender as a category of analysis, they uncover scientific practices taking place in locations such as the kitchen, the nursery, and the storefront. Because of historical gendered patterns of exclusion and culturally derived sensibilities, the authors in this volume find that significant contributions to science were made in unexpected places and that these were often made by women. The shift in focus to these different sites and different actors broadens the spectrum of what counts as science and where science happens. That is, in moving beyond the parameters of formal academic structures, this special issue seeks to recast the ways in which the production of science itself is defined and to engage readers in the redesign of the boundaries of our discipline.

This article explores the production and consumption of phrenological knowledge for and by middle-class women in the USA during the early and middle decades of the 19th century. At a time when science itself had few boundaries, women became readers, consumers, proselytizers and practitioners of this knowledge system, outside of a scientific academy. This paper argues that phrenological beliefs about sex differences enabled and encouraged women to be users. Phrenology allowed women to negotiate gender and by encouraging followers to ‘know thyself,’ phrenology blurred the lines of expertise, creating a fluid interplay between users and producers of knowledge. This article then shows how categories of women users–practitioners, consumers and feminists–implemented or rejected elements of phrenology as they sought to affirm or amend prescribed gender roles. As the industrial economy seemed to divide public and private, production and consumption, masculine and feminine, phrenology allowed women and men to stand within and between these binaries. At the same time, some women used phrenology to classify themselves and others in a socio-natural hierarchy and further engrained scientific racism in American culture.

This essay illustrates how members of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), and most prominently among them Milicent Shinn, a University of California, Berkeley graduate, created an unprecedented network of at-home scientific observation of infants that spanned the North American continent. Shinn and her female peers were inspired by contemporary scholarly enthusiasm for the physiological and mental development of infants and toddlers. During the last decades of the 19th century men of science discovered in their own and others' offspring, to borrow Charles Darwin's phrase, ‘objects of natural history.’ This analysis of unpublished archival materials reveals how the ACA's collective at-home observation of babies transformed the nursery into a laboratory and mothers into scientific observers. The practices developed by Shinn and her network of college-educated mothers blurred distinctions between university and home, expert and amateur. The most visible outcome of the network's enterprise was Shinn's 1907 authoritative study, The Development of the Senses in the First Three Years of Childhood.

In the early decades of the 20th century, women's access to the historical discipline followed fundamentally two paths. For the first time, some (a small minority) entered the profession as academic historians; others worked outside or on the margins of academia, pursuing their research interests as independent scholars. What did being an independent scholar mean for these women? Was it always a form of externally imposed marginalization? My paper argues that this is not the case. First of all, being an independent scholar did not necessarily mean marginality. Some of these women scholars exerted a deep influence on 20th century historiography, and their work is still influential today. Quite apart from posthumous fame, moreover, it should be noted that the lack of academic affiliation did not necessarily preclude for some of these women the possibility of recognition and influence during their lives. Secondly, we should be careful not to assume that being an independent scholar was invariably an externally imposed marginalization. Some of these women scholars can be defined as ‘obligatory amateurs,’ because they were frustrated in their attempt to pursue an academic career. But others, in contrast, deliberately chose independent scholarship over an academic job, and can thus be defined ‘amateurs by choice.’ What was the motivation behind this choice? I argue that an important factor was the resilience of the amateur tradition in historical writing. The amateur tradition offered a strong counterbalance to women's marginality in academia and a source of positive values and models for their participation in the intellectual life.

This article examines how four feminists belonging to the broadly defined left-wing of the Wilhelmine-era German women's movement – Henriette Fürth, Johanna Elberskirchen, Ruth Bré and Grete Meisel-Hess – engaged with scientific knowledge to redefine early 20th century understandings of the female sex drive. It contextualizes these authors' efforts to redefine the sex drive within contemporary sex reform politics and changing scientific understandings of human sexuality. The article illuminates how these four feminists used scientific knowledge to redefine the female sex drive as a simultaneously physiological and psychological phenomenon that was active, desiring and naturally in need of satisfaction. It further shows how these feminists mobilized this definition to assert women's ‘biological right’ to sexual emancipation and self-determination. However, this article also examines the conflicts this particular representation of the female sex drive provoked within the broader German women's movement, as well as the political restrictions it imposed upon feminist demands as a result of the biopolitical, racialist and heterosexist valences of fin-de-siècle sexual science. This article points up both feminists' contributions to scientific knowledge about sexuality and the difficulties of using science to advance feminist causes.

This paper discusses descriptions of color theory in a series of lapidaries by Nıshābūrı, Tūsı and Kāshānı, written in 1196, ca. 1258 and in 1300, respectively. The texts are almost identical and seem to originate from Nıshābūrı. They describe a color theory that deviates from the Aristotelian account in several ways. They represent one of the first instances in which it is stated explicitly that by mixing black and white, grey is produced. This contradicts the Aristotelian dogma that such mixtures may produce all other colors. The texts are the first to refer explicitly to a hue scale, recognizing that by mixing blue and yellow in different proportions, colors are produced that change gradually from blue, via green, to yellow. Only tonal scales, obtained by mixing a color pigment with black or white, had been described before.

In spite of the description of a hue scale in this text and tonal scales in another text by Tūsı, it is shown that the authors of these texts did not yet distinguish between differences in lightness and differences in hue.

Methodological recommendations common during the last 30 years have not prevented the emergence of views which are arguably no less caricatured and incorrect than was previously the case, even when account is taken of the heavily biased, mainly nationalistic, accounts concerning Lavoisier from the century after 1835. This article considers many of the categories of Lavoisier's achievement in chemistry, considers some of the more startling issues in the recent historiography, including negative accounts by Bensaude-Vincent (1993), Siegfried (1988), Kim (2003) and Chang (2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012), and contributes towards a process of identifying a judicious view.

This paper is devoted to an outline of certain aspects of international scientific cooperation and exchange between Eastern and Western European countries from 1950 to 1989, with an emphasis on mathematics, biochemistry and neuroscience.