Terra Incognita. Alain Corbin

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Terra Incognita

      A History of Ignorance in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

      Alain Corbin

      Translated by Susan Pickford

      polity

      Originally published in French as Terra Incognita: Une histoire de l’ignorance. XVIIIe–XIXe siècle © Editions Albin Michel – Paris 2020

      This English translation © Polity Press, 2021

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      All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4627-5

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Corbin, Alain, author. | Pickford, Susan, translator.

      Title: Terra incognita : a history of ignorance in the 18th and 19th centuries / Alain Corbin ; translated by Susan Pickford.

      Other titles: Terra incognita. English

      Description: Cambridge ; Medford : Polity Press, [2021] | “Originally published in French as Terra Incognita: Une histoire de l’ignorance. XVIIIe-XIXe siècle (c) Editions Albin Michel - Paris 2020.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A leading historian opens up a new terrain for understanding the past: the history of ignorance”-- Provided by publisher.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2020055368 (print) | LCCN 2020055369 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509546251 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509546268 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509546275 (epub) | ISBN 9781509548033 (pdf)

      Subjects: LCSH: Science--Social aspects--History--18th century. | Science--Social aspects--History--19th century. | Ignorance (Theory of knowledge)--Social aspects.

      Classification: LCC Q175.46 .C6713 2021 (print) | LCC Q175.46 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/309033--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055368 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055369

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      Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Acknowledgements

      My thanks to Fabrice d’Almeida for helping me produce the book; Sylvie Le Dantec, who worked on the text; and Anouchka Vasak, who read the manuscript with an expert eye.

      Ah, what hundreds of volumes we might fill with what we don’t know!

      Jules Verne, Autour de la Lune [Round the Moon], 1869

A Comprehensive History Implies the Study of Ignorance

      The first duty of all historians is to identify lacunae and to inventory and measure gaps in the knowledge of earlier generations and, by the same token, discrepancies in the social reach of what facts were known. We cannot fully understand our forebears without some idea of what they did not know, either because no one knew it, or because they in particular were not in a position to know it. This method can be applied to a wide range of fields: think, for instance, of anatomical knowledge, diseases and treatments. It would be an impossibly vast undertaking to write a fully comprehensive history of everything humans have not known and to approach the field in overall terms. To map out what our ancestors did not know, the historian must focus on a single field of endeavour and probe its blind spots and lacunae.

      This book focuses on our planet, exploring its mysteries past and present, and the intensity and eventual decline of the modes of terror and wonder it aroused. This means interpreting the history of science and discoveries by studying how the gaps in our ancestors’ knowledge were filled, and consequently how the imaginaries and dreams they sparked faded away.

In studying discrepancies in the social reach of knowledge, it is important to draw a clear distinction between various types of scientific unknowns. Some things could only be dreamed of, not explored, such as the seabed and the polar ice caps. Others were observable but inexplicable, such as earthquakes, volcanoes and dry fogs. Yet others were resolved by forms of exploration that slowly restricted the boundaries of ignorance, such as the rise of mountaineering and expeditions to the unmapped hearts of certain continents.

      To make my point perfectly clear, let me turn to Jean Baechler. He has argued that in small prehistoric communities, everyone knew the same things. In the village where I grew up, set in the rolling Normandy countryside, most of the country folk who gathered in the local cafés after Sunday mass could easily join in conversation, since they all knew more or less the same things: livestock farming, traditional crafts, what they had learned at primary school and, in the case of the older men, their wartime experiences. Apart from the priest, the doctor, the primary school teacher, the vet and the notary, they all had the same gaps in their knowledge – and even then, an electrician and car mechanic had recently set up shop, further stratifying the local knowledge base to a small extent.

When we read Balzac, Goethe, Dickens and Stendhal, we have to make an effort to understand and imagine the way they thought about our planet, which they saw as a mysterious place, all the more frightening for being beyond comprehension. The depictions of the earth they would have been familiar with were fundamentally shaped by the vestiges of past cultural beliefs; those with little or no schooling must have found it truly terrifying. From the eighteenth century on, knowledge