Constructing the persona of the Naturwissenschaftler – German book reviews on galvanism

Abstract

Scientific book reviews were an important genre in late-18thcentury German journals. The mostly anonymous reviewers regarded themselves as voices of the scientific community, judging the quality of new publications for its benefit. However, as this paper shows, some reviewers aspired to more than judging the books’ content. The reviewers of Christian Heinrich Pfaff ’s, Alexander von Humboldt’s, and Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s monographs on galvanism, published between 1796 and 1805, used the language of epistemic virtues and vices to present their readership with their ideal scientific persona meant to support the development of the empirical sciences.