A Portable World: The Notebooks of European Travellers (Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)

Abstract

For the past three decades, notebooks and note‐taking practices have elicited growing interest in various fields of research: anthropology, media and literature studies, history of the book, history of science. In this renewal, however, scientific travelers’ notes have not received all the attention they deserve. To be sure, historians of discovery and exploration are used to considering travel diaries and field notes as a principal resource, on the basis of which they can assess a traveler’s accomplishment or document his itinerary. From a different perspective, field journals offer rich material to literary scholars, critics, and specialists of travel writing. Notebooks of well‐known travelers like Bougainville or Humboldt are thus scrutinized in their poetic and aesthetic dimensions, from the perspective of the genesis of travel writing. Still, few studies have taken up the task, a rather mundane and down‐to‐earth endeavor, to look at travel notebooks for their own sake, as material objects, made of paper and cardboard, and meant to store observational data and to insure their availability through time and space. The paper sets out to do just that: to take a set of manuscript notebooks written by eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century French, German, and Swiss naturalist travelers and scientists on the move together with the techniques at work in their writing, as the focus of a historical investigation.