version 31/08/2008 1 CIRCULATING KNOWLEDGE OR SUPERSTITION? THE DUTCH DEBATE ON DIVINATION KOEN VERMEIR 1 During the last days of May 1696, the famous Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632- 1723) was busy peering through his microscope at a piece of hazel rod. After careful scrutiny and consideration, he concluded that hazel “has a particularly large amount of very little horizontal vessels.” 2 Van Leeuwenhoek had been drawn to a closer study of hazel and other kinds of wood, because of a particular controversy in his environment. Indeed, some of his friends were engaged in a debate on divination, and they had called for his help to resolve their disagreement. Leeuwenhoek’s intervention was part of an international controversy about the divining rod. The Dutch reception of this controversy gives us a beautiful picture of the ways in which natural philosophy was practiced and disseminated in the Low Countries at the turn of the seventeenth century. It offers us an idea of the scientific demonstrations going on in Dutch bourgeois domestic settings, the personal contacts by which scientific claims were transferred, as well as the ways in which controversies were initiated and perpetuated. This sometimes intense and venomous controversy between advocates and opponents of the divining rod developed in journal publications, books and pamphlets, enrolling the local doctors, literati and savants, but also drawing in intellectuals of international stature. In discussing this episode in the history of wonders, I will take the notion of ‘circulation of knowledge’ seriously. Asking whether ‘knowledge’ – both skills and theoretical knowledge – is something that can be circulated has led me to distinguish three crucial levels in the circulation of knowledge. The first level of circulation comprises the circulation of material objects. Meanings are not transmitted as abstract entities but are always already ‘embodied’ in material objects that can be circulated, such as books, sounds, drawings, specimens, instruments or human bodies. 3 The materials that are handed on, the problems encountered in the circulation process, the changes to which they are subject, all warrant careful study, because the material objects are co-constitutive of the meanings and knowledge claims that they embody. A second level of the circulation of knowledge is the reception 1 CNRS (UMR 7219, SPHERE); Univ Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, F-75013 Paris, France. 2 Leeuwenhoek, “Leeuwenhoek to Rabus, 1 June 1696,” in Boekzaal, 522-525. 3 I cannot elaborate here in detail how information and knowledge claims can be embodied in material objects. Even the case of texts, in which this kind of embodiment seems obvious, is not evident at all. On the contrary, issues of readership, interpretation and appropriation make the ‘embodiment’ of information in texts a very intricate issue (as is evident also from seventeenth-century discussions of Bible interpretation, literal and ‘true’ meaning). The theory of embodiment I adhere to here is Wittgensteinian in nature. ‘Embodiment’ refers to the practices in which the material objects are embedded, between which these objects travel, and from which these objects derive their (changing) meanings. When a certain knowledge claim, a piece of information or meaning is ‘embodied’ in an object, it means that this object plays a specific, meaning constituting role in a certain practice. halshs-00609394, version 1 - 18 Jul 2011