Raphaël Rabusseau. Les neiges labiles: Une histoire culturelle de l'avalanche au XVIIIe siècle .Les neiges labiles: Une histoire culturelle de l'avalanche au XVIIIe siècle. (Travaux d'HistoireSuisse, 4.) by Raphaël RabusseauReview by: By Lydia BarnettIsis, Vol. 100, No. 1 (March 2009), pp. 165-166Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/599666 .

Accessed: 23/06/2014 08:06

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Isis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.163 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 08:06:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

without necessarily taking into considerationwhether specific instances involve serious harm.Of course, most of the hundreds of earthquakesreported in France (or anywhere) were less thancalamitous, as that word is now commonlyused—but even the slightest tremor might insome circumstances jar the psyche and occasionsymbolic or portentous interpretation. Loomingpotently in the background of Quenet’s research(and duly cited) are Jean Delumeau’s studies offear in Western culture. Quenet examines themanner in which unforeseen natural events, of-ten but not always physically injurious, weredefined and understood and how their effectswere coped with. The selection of earthquakesas the subject amounts to a pragmatic narrowingdown of the broader issue.

Attesting that proper historical understandingof natural catastrophes involves seeing them as ahybrid phenomenon with both physical and so-cial dimensions, Quenet unsurprisingly placesspecial emphasis on treating earthquakes as so-cially constructed events. Synchronic analysisof what might be called the culture of seismicdisturbances frequently leads into attempts totrace cognitive shifts in the manner in whichearthquakes were understood. One of Quenet’smain arguments is that during the period underconsideration earthquakes gradually came—byway of a decline in their apprehension as singu-lar curiosities or prodigies laden with propheticreligious or political significance—to be con-structed as a new object of scientific investiga-tion and understanding. He maintains, indeed,that there was a French “discovery” of earth-quakes in the eighteenth century, beginning es-pecially in the 1740s, notably through the Acad-emie’s attention to a series of correspondents’reports on tremors in various parts of the king-dom, and coinciding more or less with the de-velopment of a new “protocol of observation” inreports on earthquakes. (Thus this apprehensionof a novel scientific object began before theeffusion of reactions to the great Lisbon earth-quake of 1755, although Quenet sees that epi-sode as an enormous stimulus in the overallprocess.) The emergence of earthquakes as anew and coherent category amounted, as thebook’s subtitle implies, to recognition of a“risk”—a social definition of a natural hazard, insome measure subject to anticipation and man-agement because conceived as compliant withnotions of probability and a regular natural or-der, thus facilitating reorientation in ideas aboutwhere responsibility for its mitigation lies.

Quenet is not satisfied to interpret these inter-related changes as straightforward consequencesof the processes of secularization or the rise of

the “protective state”—progressive assumptionof state responsibility for control over naturalhazards. Such explanations are not wrong, hesays, just inadequate. Quenet’s efforts to getbeyond such formulas succeed best, in my view,where he pushes questions of historical causa-tion somewhat toward the margins, in richlycontextualized discussions of such matters asthe evenement monstre that was the Europeanresponse to the Lisbon earthquake or the con-tention that changing habits at varied social lev-els regarding quantification and measurement(including widening familiarity with mechanicalclocks) were factors in transforming the waysearthquake phenomena were observed and re-ported.

Quenet suggests that his historical approach ormethod—what he calls at one point “la fabrique decette recherche” (p. 10)—may be as important asthe particular conclusions he draws. Central to thatapproach is the claim that earthquakes are muchmore than physical processes and events; they arecultural elaborations upon them. This lengthy andsubtly argued book makes a strong case for thevalue of such an approach.

Something went wrong in the preparation of thetwo indexes (one for particular seismic events, theother listing personal and institutional names). Thepage numbers entered are seldom correct.

KENNETH L. TAYLOR

Raphael Rabusseau. Les neiges labiles: Unehistoire culturelle de l’avalanche au XVIIIesiecle. (Travaux d’Histoire Suisse, 4.) xvi �176 pp. Geneva: Presses d’Histoire Suisse,2007. $60 (cloth).

Raphael Rabusseau’s Les neiges labiles (whichmight be translated as “The Shifting Snows”)offers a “cultural history of the avalanche” in theeighteenth century. It charts the emergence ofthe avalanche as an object of both fear andfascination in learned treatises and travel guides,natural histories and local chronicles, medicaltexts and graphic media. The interest in ava-lanches was part of a more general interest in theSwiss Alps, which, over the course of the eigh-teenth century, increasingly attracted the atten-tions of Swiss intellectuals as well as savants,artists, and tourists from abroad.

Les neiges labiles, which (at 107 pages) isreally more of an extended essay than a full-length monograph, is divided into two chapters.The first, “The Metaphors of the Avalanche,”follows the phenomenon as represented in nat-uralistic texts as well as art, literature, and travelaccounts. The second, “The Milieu of the Ava-

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 1 (2009) 165

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.163 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 08:06:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

lanche,” explores the social and economic con-sequences of avalanches and the moral and theo-logical significance they were variously givenby the “montagnards” (mountain-dwellers) wholived through them and by the “citadines” (city-dwellers) who were largely responsible for rep-resenting them to the rest of the world.

One of the more interesting aspects of thebook for historians of science is its discussion ofthe tensions between local and elite knowledgeof avalanches and the Alps. Numerous studieshave explored this tension in colonial naturalhistories; more recently, Alix Cooper’s Invent-ing the Indigenous (Cambridge, 2007) hasdrawn attention to the similar strategies bywhich landlocked European naturalists de-scribed what they found “at home.” In the caseof Alpine exploration, the naturalists who ven-tured up the mountains, from Johann JacobScheuchzer at the beginning of the century toHorace Benedict de Saussure at the end, de-scended again to report on what they had seen,portraying the Alps, with their ambiance of im-minent disaster, as a place of frightening thoughexhilarating alterity. While often relying on thetestimony of the “montagnards,” these Swissnaturalists also presented themselves to a widerEuropean audience as homegrown authorities onAlpine nature.

The “citadine” Swiss savants, Rabusseau ar-gues, were instrumental in turning the Alps andits avalanches into objects of scientific interestand also into exemplars of the sublime. Anotherstrength of the book is its revelation of the denseinterpenetration of scientific and aesthetic ap-proaches to the Alps, which are shown to havereciprocally influenced each other. Les neigeslabiles is likewise a valuable contribution to theemerging literature on natural disasters in theEnlightenment, which has challenged the pic-ture of the age as focused exclusively on theorder of nature. But Rabusseau does his book adisservice by declining to compare representa-tions of avalanches to contemporary portrayalsof volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, and other di-sasters. Scheuchzer was famous not only for hisworks on Alpine natural history but for his pro-motion of the English naturalist John Wood-ward’s diluvial theory of the earth and for hisown celebrated Kupfer-Bibel (“Copper Bible”),which gave pride of place to Noah’s Flood. TheGrand Tour is another obvious point of intersec-tion, given that so many traveling through thetreacherous Alpine passes were on their waysouth to see Vesuvius, whose activity in thesecond half of the eighteenth century made it atop tourist destination for the rich and curious.

Anglophone historians of science may not

always appreciate the single-minded thorough-ness with which Rabusseau pursues his sub-ject—leading, for example, to an overly longsection on representations of snowballs—buthis book is nevertheless a welcome contributionto our understanding of the relationships linkingnatural science to aesthetics, literature, andtravel in the early modern period. It will also beof interest to historians of the earth sciences andearly modern Swiss science.

Rabusseau’s text is supplemented by a tran-scription of a manuscript by Saussure, “Descrip-tion d’une avalanche remarquable” (1795), anda short essay by Pascal Delvaux, “La fabricationdu savoir sur les Alpes: Bibliotheques et labo-ratoire de la nature” (“The Making of Knowl-edge of the Alps: Libraries and Laboratories ofNature”), which explores the dynamic betweentextual knowledge of the Alps and knowledgegained by exploration and fieldwork.

LYDIA BARNETT

Anna Marie Roos. The Salt of the Earth: Nat-ural Philosophy, Medicine, and Chymistry inEngland, 1650–1750. (History of Science andMedicine Library, 3.) xvi � 296 pp., figs., bibl.,index. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007. $148 (cloth).

In this work Anna Marie Roos explores centralaspects of early modern saline chemistry, or“salt chymistry,” a rich and significant yetlargely overlooked subject; she does so master-fully, displaying a balance of erudition with asensitive treatment of primary source material.A study of this subject, at the confluence of earlymodern chemistry, medicine, physiology, andnatural philosophy, is long overdue. Althoughthe sheer complexity of the subject mattermakes for an ambitious scholarly undertaking,Roos handles the task well, interweaving a se-ries of microstudies into a cogent and insightfulhistorical narrative.

As the author notes, “previous histories of saltchymistry . . . have focused on common salt asan industrial and commercial material, concen-trating on its production, consumption andtrade.” The present work advances a differentapproach in demonstrating “the centrality of saltand salt chymistry to early chymistry and mattertheory,” treating it as a “nexus for studying theinterrelationships between chymistry, naturalhistory, physiology and medical sciences in theearly modern period,” especially in England (p.4). The study also contributes to the increasinglyevolving body of scholarship dealing with earlymodern alchemy, chemistry, and the transitionbetween the two in the context of the Scientific

166 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 1 (2009)

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.163 on Mon, 23 Jun 2014 08:06:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions