Historiography of Not-So-Recent Science

To the extent that we might wish to confine ourselves to the categories of activity recognized by our historical actors, it would behoove us to take the corresponding (and shifting) cultural boundaries as in some way definitive of our subject matter. [...]the history of science for the "not-so-recent" period, which follows the now conventionally meaningless 'medieval' ("older"?) period, might confine itself to those fields of endeavour concerned with necessary demonstration of their conclusions, as well as with those areas in which controversy over such scientific status took place. Yet despite the rather internalist orientation of the work at the Max-Planck that her definition invokes, Smith rightly characterizes one of the main approaches to the history of 'protoscience' as concerning the social context of endeavours already recognized as canonical in intellectualist history of science. [...]Adam Mosley's recent study of Tycho Brahe shows how Tycho's intelligence network operated to facilitate his astronomical project; but such a study would have been of correspondingly less interest had that project, and that network, not produced the astronomical theories and ideas for which Tycho has long been celebrated in traditional, intellectualist history of science.