Ann M. Blair

Ann M. Blair is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University.

What were your early intellectual interests?

In retrospect, a life might seem to follow a pattern, but at each moment along the way, you just go forward with what seems like the best decision. In other words, I never had a grand plan. I arrived at Harvard as a freshman in 1980, with two suitcases, from Switzerland. Within the first week, I decided I should take sophomore standing, based on my thirteenth year of school typical of the Swiss system, and in order to do that, I had to choose a concentration. I chose History and Science, partly because it was a hedge against having to make a decision. The concentration called for courses in history, the science of one's choice, and history of science. My science was math, and I thought of my history as medieval. My goal as an undergraduate was to read about all the schools of thought that I didn't know much about. I perceived, rightly or wrongly, that the History Department at that time wasn't very oriented toward the study of ideas. Therefore, history of science appealed to me as a way of approaching intellectual history. So I had an orientation toward intellectual history from early on.

One factor that influenced my interest in an earlier period of history was surely that I grew up in Geneva, where the Reformation was always perceived as an especially exciting period. During a number of summers, I worked as an official tour guide of the city of Geneva — my languages were French, German, and English. I would climb on a bus of people taking an organized tour that included Geneva, and we'd drive around the city for a couple of hours while I'd rattle off the sights, and then I'd get off that tour bus and onto another one [laughs]. I think growing up in Geneva pulled me naturally toward the sixteenth century.

What was it about intellectual history that drew you to the field? Were there particular questions or themes that interested you?

Because I was studying the history of science, science became a theme. I've never been particularly keen on political thought, which has dominated intellectual history. Other than that, as an undergraduate I didn't think of myself as focused on particular themes but rather on an encyclopedic desire to understand the sweep of intellectual history. Naturally I had in mind the European tradition, though I also took Donald Fleming's course on American intellectual history. But global perspectives were not prominent then. Even so, I enjoyed and pursued a lot of variety. I wrote my senior thesis on the French anti-Aristotelian Petrus Ramus, a sixteenth-century pedagogue who got flak in his time for turning every problem into a dichotomous diagram. That was my first introduction to reading early modern Latin treatises and to the sense of responsibility — both frightening and exhilarating — that comes from reading a text that has not been translated or commented on before.

Within the Harvard years, I also spent one year at the University of Geneva in 1981–82. That year was an important one, because at Geneva you chose one field as your principal focus along with two minor fields. I chose history, then philosophy of science, and in third place Sanskrit, from which I'm sorry to say I haven't managed to retain anything! Focusing on history at the University of Geneva (or elsewhere in Europe, I suspect) was to join a discipline with a strong sense of identity. The way students were introduced to history generated a real esprit de corps around the phrase "we historians!" By contrast, my experience at Harvard didn't have rousing moments of disciplinary identity formation.

After graduating I went to Cambridge, England, for a one-year MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science. That was my first introduction to the "strong programme" in the social history of science. I became especially interested in the principle of symmetry — of attending to the "failed" developments in science on the same terms as the ones that had a longer legacy. I took a bit of philosophy of science (with Mary Hesse no less) and concluded that I would stick with history! I was called a "keen American" for attending more lectures than was the norm. I wrote my MPhil thesis with Simon Schaffer, on the seventeenth-century mathematician Isaac Barrow. It was a wonderful year, living like an undergraduate and working like a graduate student. But the crucial formative phase for me was graduate school at Princeton.

What are some key intellectual moments that stand out from your time at Princeton?

I realized only in retrospect that the late 1980s were an exceptionally good time for early modern European history at Princeton, with five terrific faculty members in the History Department and John H. Elliott at the Institute for Advanced Study. We also had a large cohort of grad students in early modern Europe, many of whom focused on France. Natalie Z. Davis's seminar on France in the sixteenth century was delightfully memorable. She would combine readings, primary and secondary, that seemed puzzling when they were assigned but then came together brilliantly in the discussion. We sometimes met at her house. At one such meeting, she printed out copies of a handout for all ten of us on her printer, bypassing the photocopier — in the era of the dot-matrix printer this was a first! Robert Darnton was finishing up The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-revolutionary France at the time, and his seminar introduced us to some of his research and sources for that project among many other topics, which was great fun.

Ted Rabb offered an excellent wide-ranging seminar for which I wrote a paper on historiography in seventeenth-century France. I remember coming up with a real argument only as I was writing the conclusion just hours before the paper was due and then frantically revising it. I am still grateful today for hard deadlines because they concentrate the mind; I find oral presentations — lectures or conference papers — useful in that way, in addition to the pleasure of getting immediate feedback. I also took a seminar with Lawrence Stone on the causes of the English Civil War and experienced vividly the point that coursework in graduate school is often about historiography more than history. I did not know much about what happened in the English Civil War, and we were plunging right into complex layers of historiographic debate. At some point — embarrassingly far into the semester — it dawned on me that it might help if I read a nice encyclopedia article on the Civil War [laughs]! It was a good seminar in which we were encouraged to argue back and forth across different interpretive positions. Tony Grafton offered a graduate seminar on the Holy Roman Empire only when I was in my fifth year, but I attended for the fun of encountering a remarkable reading list full of primary sources I had never read.

After generals I taught for a semester in Bill Jordan's medieval history...