Anne-Lise Rey's edited volume of thirty essays in French is the fruit of a symposium organized by the Société française d'histoire des sciences et des techniques in 2007, devoted to the plurality of approaches within the French tradition of history of science. All too often, the historian of science is a poorly shod shoemaker indeed: Rey's introduction highlights the necessity to reflexively interrogate our own epistemologies as a necessary step in the reconstruction of science's rationality. According to her, investigating the most practical aspects of the historian's craft could make obsolete the partition between the three traditions of historical, philosophical and sociological history of science – and furthermore between Continental and Anglo-American styles of research. Practices are therefore promoted to a touchstone's status, drawing together what had been wrought asunder, the rational and the social, and distinguishing vain quarrels from fruitful discussions.

To substantiate this statement, the book heavily focuses on the practices of science writing, especially on rhetorical devices, building upon Gilles-Gaston Granger's theoretical works: the opposition between the three old traditions could therefore be overcome with the affirmation of a fourth party, something like a literary history of science. This approach is addressed through the notion of ‘style’, defended by Michel Paty as a way to combine analyses of objects with reflexive analyses, and ultimately to conceive what makes sense in the historical dimension of science. Nonetheless, Anastasios Brenner discusses this position, criticizing ‘style’ as too narrow a concept, and pleads for its integration into ‘historical semantics': this line of research would enable us to overcome the opposition between analysis and synthesis, between logic and history. Those theoretical positions' fruitfulness is examined through a handful of enlightening case studies: Fernand Hallyn dedicates a powerful essay to the trope of enumeration in Copernicus's works; Rey proposes a new analysis of Leibniz's dynamics, reconstructing the demonstrative processes ensuring its theoretical underpinning; Hélène Bah-Ostrowiecki focuses on the narrative accounts of experiments published by Pascal; in a Foucauldian and Barthesian twist, Maxime Rovere questions the very notion of ‘author’ through the concept of ‘Cartesianism’; Evelyne Barbin shows how a Bakhtinian ‘historical dialogism’ could lead to a better understanding of classical infinitesimal calculus's texts; Véronique Le Ru studies Voltaire as a popularizer of Newtonian physics who used history of science as an art of persuasion.

The affirmation of a fourth tradition asks a most pressing question: what precisely is at stake in the choice of an analytical method? The case study given by Gérard Simon precisely addresses this issue: focusing on the possible analyses of Kepler's laws, it clearly shows how different epistemological attitudes can produce distinct lines of intelligibility. Drawing on this, Michel Blay and Robert Locqueneux plead for a conception of science's history focused on the history of the genesis of theoretical constructions and the reconstruction of the scientists' processes of thought. Whereas the former author, in a kind of unnamed internalism, poses the immanent evolution of science as the very core of its history, the latter insists on the fact that historians need to imbue themselves not only with the oeuvres, but also with their contexts, in order to recognize the goals and interests they had. Pascal Duris and Michel Cotte, on the other hand, call for the multiplication of methods and insist on leaving room for serendipity, substantiating their point with references to their own researches. Beyond the principled theoretical positions, the historians of science are historians: their heuristic methods should not be elaborated a priori but according to their objects of study, and, through these, according to their sources.

In consequence, the volume dedicates penetrating essays to the sources themselves, their materiality and hermeneutics: Sabine Rommevaux analyses the case of medieval mathematical manuscripts, retracing the multiple forms taken by Euclid's Elements, and Anne Houssay dedicates an enlightening case study to the non-textual sources of musical instruments' technological history. Within the same field of questioning Fabien Chareix, David Rabouin and Bernard Joly's essays focus on the historical procedures of qualification and disqualification of texts, underlining how some sources have been privileged to the detriment of others – because they appeared less rational or less accessible to historians – respectively in the history of Huygens's physical theory, mathesis universalis and chemistry. The history of history of science therefore seems to be a necessary reflexive activity to understand which choices, on the corpora or on their analyses, could have led to misinterpretations: François Pineau focuses on Paul Tannery's works on Hellenic science, demonstrating how and why he renewed the history of pre-Socratic thought; Ronan Le Roux undertakes to elucidate the theory of machines' influence on the technical history of technology; Patrick Petitjean studies the geopolitical turmoil facing the International Academy of the History of Science from the 1930s to the 1950s. On a more theoretical level, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent pleads for a critical history of science devoted to changing science's social image and the way it is taught.

Those reflections lead to a reassessment of the relations between history and history of science: despite its name, the latter discipline has long been intellectually and institutionally closer to philosophy, and thereby stood away from many historiographical novelties. Conceptual importations may therefore be heuristically productive: Philippe Hamou and Claude Blanckaert emphasize the interest of epistemic representations produced by the scientists' considerations, the philosophers' epistemologies, and the cultural picture of science co-constructed through popularization; Antonio A.P. Videira and Marta de Almeida explore comparative biography with the cases of Emilio Ribas and Guido Beck in Brazil; Jérôme Lamy focuses on how concepts like longue durée can be applied to the analysis of scientific institutions through the case study of the Toulouse Observatory. Beyond conceptual stakes, the most historicist approaches seem particularly rewarding because they allow one to delineate precisely which place should be given to the social dimension: that is especially the case of Christian Gérini's essay exposing the results of his very thorough analysis of the Annales de Gergonne, and Nathalie Richard's enlightening reflections on the intellectual projects of Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan and Alfred Maury from an ‘adisciplinary’ standpoint.

By its sheer diversity this book is a useful ‘panopticon’ of French-speaking history of science – which presents itself as mainly, and humbly, ‘historical’. Through this plurality a relative community of epistemological requirements emerges, refusing any kind of ‘presentist’ study of science and trying to build a dialogue between the various historicist angles. Alas, if the volume resolutely takes the side of historicism, the intellectual habitus of most of the authors makes it still a historicism by and for philosophers.