Science & Education (2006) 15:129 130 DOI 10.1007/s11191-005-6785-8

Ó Springer 2006

Preface This volume owes its origin to a conference on ‘Science Teaching in Early Modern Europe’ held in Florence on June 5 7, 2003. The conference was organized in response to the increasing interest in science teaching among historians of science and was aimed at giving opportunity to those working in the subject to talk each other and to offer some report on their current research in the field. The conference addressed issues relating to university teaching, to religious orders, colleges, and courts, as well as to scientific curricula, dissertations and textbooks. Speakers dealt with natural philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, physics, geography, and chemistry, while the teaching of medicine was not included in the programme, being too large a subject in itself. Some twenty participants were invited to the conference, which was organized with the support of the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence. Thanks are due to the staff of the Istituto and to the Director, Professor Paolo Galluzzi, whose advice and constant encouragement contributed to make the conference successful. Thanks are also offered to all the participants for contributing and revising, after review, their papers for publication. Institutional history of science is now a well-established area of research. Historians have produced much work on scientific societies and academies, and, as part of the on-going interest in scientific patronage, a growing number of scholars are investigating the transmission of scientific knowledge at court. Studies of colleges, such as the Gresham College and the Casa de la Contratacı´ on, have shed more light on science teaching outside the universities. General histories of universities and case studies on single universities and on professors have contributed to revise the old view of universities as hostile to scientific change. Thanks to Charles Schmitt’s pioneering work on the universities, historians of science no longer dismiss the study of university teaching as irrelevant to the development of scientific knowledge, and a more sophisticated accounts of the role of science in universities have emerged. In the last decades, science historians have investigated early modern university curricula, though scientific textbook is still a rather neglected subject. A number of historians have thoroughly investigated science teaching in Jesuit colleges, producing detailed studies on the Jesuits’ contribution to science. A strong impulse to research in science teaching came from a

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number of articles published in journals devoted to the history of science, as well as from History of Universities, which saw the light in 1981. ANTONIO CLERICUZIO Universita´ di Cassino 03043 Cassino Italy [email protected]