Nuno Castel-Branco’s The Traveling Anatomist: a commentary
This second NOTCOM blog post on Steno and his context (see also Steno’s Disciple: Jacobæus, Leibniz, and the Lost Geological Manuscripts) is a revised version of a short commentary presented at the launch of Nuno Castel-Branco’s The Traveling Anatomist (Chicago University Press, 2025), at All Souls College, Oxford, on 25 November, 2025.
As the title indicates, Castel-Branco’s The Traveling Anatomist sets out to link Steno’s science to his travels. That Steno travelled is not surprising. He was certainly not the only traveling Dane in the seventeenth century and the biographies and texts of numerous academics very close to him lend themselves splendidly to rich and travelogues.
Just take Steno’s teacher and mentor in Copenhagen, Thomas Bartholin the older, who travelled Europe on a nine-your long voyage in 1637–1646. In his old age, he wrote a small treatise De peregrinatione medica (1674) as a guide to academic travel when his two sons and nephew embarked on a similar trip—it is a text that offers a valuable window into the motivations and expectations driving the industry of academic travel. Another famous example is Steno’s close friend and travel companion in 1660–1665, Ole Borch, who kept a detailed diary of their whereabouts and activities which is one of the most detailed travelogues of a late seventeenth-century. Or again, we can turn to Holger Jacobaeus—the nephew for whom Bartholin wrote his little treatise—who kept a journal during his travels through Europe with Bartholin’s two sons, recording various academic encounters with people such as Swammerdam and Steno himself, mixed up with descriptions and hand drawings of buildings and landscapes, street life, children’s games, food, and recipes.
All three—Bartholin, Borch, Jacobsen—belong to a large cohort of Danish academic travellers in the seventeenth century from, say, Ole Worm to Ole Rømer, who all followed more or less the same trajectory—the so-called “grand tour” all the way to Italy as opposed to the “small tour” restricted to Northern Europe—and all returned home to Denmark: Bartholin became professor of mathematics, and then anatomy in Copenhagen; Borch became medicus regius shortly after his return in 1646; Jakobson had already been appointed professor of history and geography in Copenhagen before he left 1674 and comfortably returned to take up that post.
With Steno, however, the situation is different. For next to these stories, Steno’s itinerary comes through as incomplete and erratic. He never really returned home. He did, of course, travel to Copenhagen in 1672–1674 to take up a position as anatomicus regius at the University of Copenhagen, but being at that point a Catholic convert, he was both treated—and himself felt like—a foreigner in his own country; and sure enough he soon turned his eyes south of the border again and returned to Italy, only to move North again in theological positions by the end of 1677, first as apostolic envoy at the Court of Hannover, and then, from 1680, as a suffragan in Münster, a position he relinquished in 1684, only to die a couple of years later, still in Germany but planning to return to Italy. There is a constitutive open-endedness to his whole intellectual identity that gives it an episodic, or picaresque if you will, character to his entire story. He never made a real home anywhere, neither geographically nor intellectually. He represents a curiously unfulfilled subjectivity, essentially defined by the continuous iteration of changing places, topics, and disciplines traced by his European career and overall intellectual identity. And this is a very important specificity to Steno’s scientific persona that Castel-Branco captures very nicely.
However, behind Steno’s fragile subjectivity, constantly on the verge of collapse, we find something more robust appear. Let me just cite one little passage from The Traveling Anatomist:
Most of the intellectual contributions of traveling scholars were made after their return home. Steno’s scientific books, however, were written in the road, in between his stays in Copenhagen, Leiden, Paris, and Florence. […] Steno’s ideas and publications drew from the acquaintances, locales, and social settings that he encountered on his travels. These encounters led him down unforeseen paths. His itineraries tied friends, patrons, and places together with the anxieties of early modern intellectual life and multiple fields of learning. (p. 6-7)
As it appears, all this is not just about how the contexts through which Steno travelled shaped his science. It is just as much about the opposite, namely, how elements of a scientific culture emerged or how “friend, patrons, and places were tied together” by the fact that Steno travelled through their various contexts. For example, Steno did not just encounter and absorb the French culture of scientific salons when visiting Paris in 1665-1666. In fact, as Castel-Branco shows, he was the central figure—the natural philosopher and anatomist around whom all gathered—in the proto-academy meeting at the home of the formidable Melchisédech Thévenot. By extension, through the missives sent to Pierre-Daniel Huet in Normandy by the provincial physician André Graindorge who attended Thévenot’s meetings while visiting Paris, Steno also became a paradigmatic figure for first, short-lived provincial scientific academy in France, the Académie de Physique de Caen (1663–1672). Or again, Steno did not just encounter and absorb the radical experimental philosophy of the loose group of researchers in Florence styled as the Accademia del Cimento when he arrived there in 1667; he importantly helped revise and restructure their work at a time when this academy was otherwise waning and falling apart.
In other words, in all his personal fragility, Steno’s is a privileged example not only of how foreign places shaped certain individuals but of how foreign individuals shaped certain places. This may sound like a trivial observation, but it is not. There are many ways in which the intellectual landscape of early modern natural science and medicine can be reconstructed and organised historically, by studying individuals, intellectual lineages, and schools; by studying institutions like universities, academies and societies; by looking at correspondences and networks, intellectual circles, constellations, controversies, and disputes. Castel-Branco’s book discreetly suggests yet another, less explored possibility: a Republic of Letters generated and “tied together” by itineraries, travels, and encounters. Certainly, some scholars have explored this option before. We could mention the work of Ole Peter Grell on figures such as Bartholin and Worm, or Ingeborg van Vugt’s work on the scholarly networks between the Dutch Republic and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Nicholas Dew’s work on Melchisédech Thévenot, or Stéphane van Damme’s recent exploration of the travellers among the erudite libertines in the early modern republic of letters like François Bernier. But it is a small club of scholars that Castel-Branco joins here, one which takes academic mobility very seriously. Indeed, on his rendering of Steno’s career, academic travel was an essential component of his science or, as Nicholas Dew once put it aptly in relation to Thévenot, his academic travel became an integral part of the natural scientific experiments, and not only his own, but also those of others.
MOGENS LÆRKE
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Biological Sciences: Anatomy
Research for this blog post was funded by the European Union (NOTCOM, ERC Advanced Grant no. 101052433). Views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the European Union nor of the ERC. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for any of the views expressed herein.
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adminnotcom (January 20, 2026). Nuno Castel-Branco’s The Traveling Anatomist: a commentary. NOTCOM. Retrieved March 15, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15izb







