Research

The questions that underlie Professor Raphael’s scholarship sit at the intersection of text and experience, specifically the relationship between knowledge obtained through manipulation of nature and the inscription of this knowledge in texts.

Her first project explored these issues in relation to Galileo, the history of mechanics and astronomy, and the history of the book and its readers. It also intersected with the history of universities, Jesuits, science and visual culture, and science and religion. 

Her current research focuses on mining knowledge and the practices that led to this knowledge being inscribed in texts. Mining Rationalities focuses on archival and administrative practice in the Iberian world. It explores administrative rationales regarding investments in mining ventures, attitudes towards resources (including labor, the environment, and technical developments), and how administrative discourse and practice related to knowledge production and its inscription in official documents.  A second subject of inquiry explores the limits of the metaphor of the mine as a “trading zone” by thinking comparatively across the geographical reaches of Europe and its overseas empires and investigating the continuing role of textual practices in the creation and inscription of mining know-how through the seventeenth century.

2021
  • “Annotating Galileo’s Discorsi and other mathematical books in Oxford,” in Massimo Bucciantini, ed., The Science and Myth of Galileo between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Europe (Florence: Olschki, 2021), pp. 25-39.
  • “Interpreting mathematical error: Tycho’s problematic diagram and readers’ responses,” in Philip Beeley, Yelda Nasifloglu, and Benjamin Wardhaugh, eds., Reading Mathematics in Early Modern Europe: Studies in the Production, Collection, and Use of Mathematical Books (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 102-123.
2020
  • “In Pursuit of “Useful” Knowledge: Documenting Technical Innovation in Sixteenth-century Potosí”. Journal for the History of Knowledge 1 (1) (December 2020): 11. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jhk.16. Part of a special issue edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge.”
    • Highlighted in a blog post on the JHOK website.
  • “Producing Knowledge about Mercury Mining: Local Practices and Textual Tools,” part of a special issue edited by Tina Asmussen on “The Cultural and Material Worlds of Mining in Early Modern Europe,” Renaissance Studies 34.1 (February 2020): 95-118.
2017
  • Reading Galileo: Scribal Technologies and the Two New Sciences (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
    • Reviewed in: American Historical Review, Annals of Science, Centaurus, Early Science and Medicine, Galilaeana, History of Universities, Isis, The Library, Renaissance and Reformation, Renaissance Quarterly.
2016
  • “Galileo’s Two New Sciences as a model of reading practices,” Journal of the History of Ideas 77.4 (October 2016): 539-565.
  • “Eclecticism as a vibrant philosophical program: Claude Bérigard and Mauro Mancini on the University of Pisa,” History of Universities XXIX/1 (2016): 1-24.
2015
  • “Copernicanism in the classroom: Jesuit natural philosophy and mathematics after 1633,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 46.4 (2015), pp. 419-440.
  • “Reading Galileo’s Discorsi in the early modern university,” Renaissance Quarterly 68.2 (June 2015): 558-96.
    • Received the William Nelson Prize for the best article published in Renaissance Quarterly during 2015.
  • “Galileo’s Discorsi as a tool for the analytical art,” Annals of Science 72.1 (January 2015): 99-123.
2014
  • “Teaching sunspots: Disciplinary identity and scholarly practice in the Collegio Romano,” History of Science 52.2 (June 2014): 130-52.
2013
  • “Teaching through diagrams: Galileo’s Dialogo and Discorsi and his Pisan readers,” Early Science and Medicine 18.1-2 (2013): 201-230.
    • Re-printed in Observing the World through Images: Diagrams and Figures in the Early-Modern Arts and Sciences, eds. Nicholas Jardine and Isla Fay (Brill, 2014).
2012
  • “Printing Galileo’s Discorsi: A collaborative affair,” Annals of Science 69.4 (2012), 483-513.
2011
  • “Making sense of Day 1 of the Two New Sciences: Galileo’s Aristotelian-inspired agenda and his Jesuit readers,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 42 (2011): 479-91.
  • Co-editor, with Nicholas Jardine, “Forms and Functions of Early Modern Celestial Imagery, Part 2,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 42.1 (February 2011).
  • “A Non-Astronomical Image in an Astronomical Text: Visualizing Motion in Riccioli’s Almagestum Novum,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 42.1 (February 2011), pp. 73-90.
2010
  • Co-editor, with Nicholas Jardine, “Forms and Functions of Early Modern Celestial Imagery, Part 1,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 41.3 (August 2010).
  • “Introduction,” with Nicholas Jardine, Journal for the History of Astronomy 41.3 (August 2010), pp. 283-286.
2008
  • “Galileo’s Discorsi and Mersenne’s Nouvelles Pensées:  Mersenne as a Reader of Galilean ‘Experience,’” Nuncius, 1/2008, pp. 7-36.

Please also visit her academia.edu page.