Knowledge in the Making: Notebooks as Historical Sources
This collection of papers from Ambix explores the use of laboratory and lecture notebooks as historical sources across several centuries of alchemy and chemistry. Unlike the considered content of printed scientific texts or formalized manuscripts, notebooks capture information and knowledge in the process of its generation, often providing a rich source of insight into the author’s methods and processes of thought. However, the entries in a notebook as recorded may be intended for sharing with a small audience familiar with their idiom and notations – or possibly for the reference of the author alone – leaving the historian with the task of deciphering, figuratively or even literally, the information they contain and its import within the larger context of contemporary sciences. The articles in this collection make central use of notebooks as historical sources to illuminate the development of chemical ideas and their communication within limited and well-versed circles.