Wrestling with Nature uses the increasingly popular case-study format to provide a cultural history of science from ancient Mesopotamia to the present-day United States in fourteen essays. The book as a whole aims at filling a perceived gap in previous histories of science by examining the terms used by people investigating nature to describe their activities, and asking what those terms meant in their original context. Each essay interacts with a wide range of thematic interests, many of which appear to have been written through to produce a collection of texts which speak to each other – a hallmark of a well-edited work. The chapters are also valuable as stand-alone essays based upon a wide range of primary material and chiefly focusing upon the history, with historiographic issues either briefly covered or referenced in the footnotes. The short, six-page introduction and lack of an editorial conclusion mean that the reader is left to draw out different narratives. I was drawn to the nuanced account of a changing disciplinary world surrounding the study of nature. This is a narrative of specialization and exclusion moving from the study of nature as part of an all-encompassing theology to ‘modern science’ and its narrow (sub)disciplinary landscape.

Most chapters begin with a justification of the importance of their contents explicitly in relation to modern science, and when the reader reaches Chapter 13 the reasons for this are spelled out clearly: Wrestling with Nature is, and intends to be, a search for the ‘distinguishing characteristics of contemporary science’ (p. 367). As such, and given the confines of space, it is inherently exclusive, sidelining areas of natural study which are not seen by the authors as ancestors of modern science. The only interaction with the human and social sciences, therefore, comes on the occasions when they attempt to leverage scientific status; alchemy and natural magic appear only as ‘not-science’, and a wide range of other disciplines, from chorography to political economy, which also impacted on scientific methodologies and contemporary meanings of nature, are left entirely unmentioned. The fact that there are absences in a work of this length is inevitable; however, the identity of those subjects eschewed gives a clear indication of the authors' conception of nature, and inherently limits the story told.

The essays are divided into four sections which are both chronologically and methodologically distinct, the explicit aim being to focus on the questions which the authors feel were the areas of greatest contestation in defining the meaning of nature in the period and place concerned. In the first section we see Rochberg's account of how Mesopotamian astronomy was produced in conjunction with celestial divination, followed by chapters on the application of various schools of thought to the natural world in Greco-Roman times (Lehoux); the relationship between God, causality and nature though the Arabic Middle Ages (McGinnis); and the increasing specialization and redrawing of disciplinary boundaries through the Latin Middle Ages (Shank). The second section, which focuses on ‘what used to be called the scientific revolution’ (p. 5), charts the emergence of three disciplines which were central to the development of science thereafter: natural history (Harrison), mixed mathematics (Dear), and natural philosophy (Heilbron). Each traces how the disciplinary contexts which had developed over the previous three millennia were once again redrawn as the role of observation and medicine became increasingly central. Throughout the first two sections, in short, a wide range of different approaches to the study of nature are identified, emplaced and depicted.

The third section discusses the creation and demarcation of scientific disciplines during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the study of the boundaries between ‘science’ and ‘other’. In the first case, where the boundaries are taken to be non-ideological in nature, the development of medical science is charted in the context of a battle for authority within medicine itself (Numbers), and there is a discussion of the boundaries between pure and applied science, or later on science, engineering and technology (Kline). Second, in the case of more ideologically loaded boundaries, the relationship between science and religion in America is traced as both problematic and productive (Roberts), and the fundamentally rhetorical use of the term ‘pseudoscience’ from the nineteenth century to today is delineated as a method of preserving and strengthening scientific orthodoxy (Thurs and Numbers).

The final section charts the growth of science's cultural authority through method (Thurs) and public exclusion (Lightman), effectively closing the narrative. The two chapters argue, fairly conventionally, that modern science's cultural hegemony was achieved through methodological specialization which inherently excludes the public. The increasingly specialized disciplines and subdisciplines have become the authoritative voice on the issues they study. Livingstone's final chapter offers an essay directed squarely at historians of science, exploring the rise of intellectual geography in history of science in recent years and imploring us to maintain and develop our spatial focus.

Readers of this journal who are introducing themselves to a new time period or place would be well advised to use the appropriate essay from this collection as a starting point, and the book should also make its way onto a range of undergraduate reading lists in short order. The nuanced account of the relationship between the study of nature and religion which runs through nearly every essay is a particular asset which stands this work apart from much recent historiography, as is the focus upon emplacing scientific cultures spatially as well as historically. The work's main strength, though, is the extensive incorporation of primary source material within the edited-collection format, which enables it to combine the virtues of survey text and specialist study in one. I would echo Harrison's call in the introduction for similar studies of other parts of the world, while adding my own for the integration of other disciplines – this work could and should provide the stimulus for both.