In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour by Paola Bertucci (review)

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• In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour by Paola Bertucci
• Alan Marshall (bio)

In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour
By Paola Bertucci. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. Pp. 168.

Paola Bertucci’s book is a well-written and engaging study about a 1749 visit to Italy, the land of “marvels,” by the “intelligent traveler” Jean Antoine Nollet, a French “philosopher . . . [and] a man of true worth” (p. 25). Those visiting Italy in the period often came armed with stereotypes that presumed Italians were more prone than most to believe in the “marvelous” over the “truth,” and Nollet was no different. It was an era of “fabricated realities” with a contemporary craze for electrical cures, and Nollet aimed to undermine those he saw as impostors. It is this debate, over four chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, that Bertucci seeks to examine.

In fact, the manuscript diary of Nollet that lies at the center of Bertucci’s book reveals that Nollet’s scientific travels were also a cover for a more secret mission he undertook for the French state. He was there not only to battle the land of marvels but to uncover the mysteries of the Italian silk industry. We are familiar enough in our own day with such economic espionage, yet Bertucci, sensibly enough, eschews that phrase as far too modern an interpretation for what Nollet was actually up to. Instead, she argues that he was really a philosophic gentleman on a state-sponsored “intelligent” tour. While Nollet did disguise his actual intentions and often used dissimulation to gain evidence, the Italian silk industry in fact proved all too open to him as a man of letters (p. 17).

This intelligent traveler also undertook to examine the contemporary Italian enthusiasm for medical electrical cures. In this respect, Nollet was keen to undermine what he saw as Italian self-deception. In an era where wheel-cranked electric machines could bring with them not only the sparks of shock (literally, in some cases) but also an understanding of electricity’s supposed curative properties, Nollet sought to restore order and control in a printed philosophical duel. Here his reasoned “truth” about the subject of electricity could not only vanquish the Italian love of the marvelous but also [End Page 1019] remove it from the hands of quack practitioners, who were seen by him as a major threat to scientific truth as presented by the French Academy.

Nollet’s especial bête noire was Gianfrancesco Privati. Privati’s electrical medicated tubes were supposedly designed for the curing of medical ailments, but they were also a means to sell his encyclopedia. They were shown off in electrical soirées, where hand-cranked electrical magic was used to illuminate and “cure,” and also to allow the audience (both men and women) to engage in all kinds of sociability, from gallantry to seductions, in the name of science, mostly in the dark, figuratively as well as literally, according to Nollet. It was claimed Cupid himself would soon have to hang up his old-fashioned bow and arrow and instead mechanically electrify “lovers’ hearts” at such events (p. 63). The Italian electric craze even had its own print industry. Flyers, books, engravings, and pamphlets abounded, all showing the marvelous magic of the electrical and its machines. This allowed numerous dilettantes, including Privati, to pass themselves off as electrical experts in curing the sick or entertaining society’s elites.

Nollet sought to challenge this “pseudoscience” on two levels: first by his forays into a print culture that Bertucci claims was part of a fabricated controversy, a supposed paper duel between men of science and men of marvels, and second by his more private travel diary. In historiographical terms, the novelty of her book lies in this use of Nollet’s manuscript diary. However, Bertucci also works along similar lines to those previously undertaken by Shapin and Schaffer in their work Leviathan and the Air Pump (1985), where such historical “losers” as Privati are seen as just as relevant to the story as...