If the history of Spanish science has been a spectral history, this is due to how it has been conceived and described. The past is always evanescent, awaiting its re-construction or re-invention by historians. In the present case, ghosts did not haunt Spanish science in the past, and certainly not in the age of ‘science before science’ or ‘Spain before Spain’. If spectres have been dominant in the hegemonic image of Spanish science, this is because, unlike other countries, it failed to reinvent science in the nineteenth century—the century of science, of the consolidation of history as an academic discipline and of the nation state. This was when science became a rather spectral activity in Spanish culture, obsessed as it was with different strategies for constructing the nation and short-sighted if not blind to the fundamental role that science and scientists were playing in other national contexts in Europe and the Americas.

Peer reviewed