How scholars talked on “Monday,” that is, in their ordinary activities as researchers, is more difficult to examine in hindsight than their “Sunday” speech (the codes of conduct examined in “Pride and Prejudice”). Although correspondences are a promising type of source material, they cannot easily be compared across time and disciplines. While referee reports don’t have this disadvantage, their availability is scarce – Nature doesn’t even have an editorial archive – while their accessibility is restricted, especially for recent decades.

The project tackles these problems by zooming in on scholarly book reviews: a genre practiced across the 20th century and across the academic spectrum, although with more intensity in some fields than in others, given the different value attached to publications in book form. The principal source for this sub-project is the journal Science (1880), which broadly covers the life and natural sciences, to which The American Journal of Sociology (1895) and The American Historical Review (1895) are added for the sake of including social science and humanities perspectives.

Focusing on four benchmark years (1900, 1933, 1967, 2000), this project examines the book reviews published in these journals with an eye to assessing the prevalence and relative importance of language of vice. What evaluative languages (errors, mistakes, vices, etc.) did book reviewers employ? To what extent and on what occasions did they invoke early modern vices? And to what extent did this differ across fields or change over the course of the century?

• humanities
• intellectual history
• scholarly self
• scholarly virtues and vices