Place: Zoom - Note that this talk will be held online only.
Time: 11:30-13:00 CET
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In 1667, Nicolaus Steno published a new history of the Earth that made him known today as the founder of modern geology. The title of the book, however, had little to do with geology. Instead, it announced a study of myology, the science of muscles. Yet, rather than muscle drawings and descriptions, it is filled with geometrical diagrams and axioms that make it look like Euclid’s Elements. Strikingly, it was also in this book that Steno named—for the first time in print—the previously known female testicles as ovaries. How did this heterogenous book come about? And why did the anatomist Steno go from performing dissections to working on mathematics and writing about rocks? These questions speak to broader themes in the history of science related to interdisciplinarity. How have different areas of knowledge intersected throughout history? And, perhaps more important, how well do modern views of polymathy apply to the early modern period? Historians have rightly spoken of the seventeenth century as “a golden age of polymaths”—and Steno’s breadth of knowledge seems to fit this description. But was Steno really a polymath in his time? This talk argues that while at the surface early modern scholars were polymaths, at a deeper level polymathy meant different things. It challenges the assumption that everyone was a polymath through the notebooks, publications, and correspondence of a seventeenth-century anatomist and his networks.
Nuno Castel-Branco is a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He completed his Ph.D. in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in 2021 after earning a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Physics at the University of Lisbon. Previously, he worked as a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His research has been generously supported by institutions such as the Fulbright Program, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Royal Society, and, more recently, the John Fell Fund from the University of Oxford. His first book, The Traveling Anatomist: Nicolaus Steno and the Intersection of Disciplines in Early Modern Science was published by the University of Chicago Press on 7 October 2025. His writing has also appeared in publications such as Isis, Renaissance Quarterly, and Annals of Science, as well as in Scientific American, Physics Today, and The Wall Street Journal.
