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 repo
