Rediscovering and Unrediscovering Gregor Mendel: His Life, Times, and Intellectual Context

Two things about Mendel were "rediscovered" in 1900: His famous paper of 1865 and the story of his life and long neglect. Unlike the paper, which anyone could read in its entirety, the story came out only gradually, and many of its elements were misconstrued by Western European scientists. They pictured him as a pure scientist like themselves and were puzzled by or disinterested in his career as a clergyman, his intellectual community in far-off Moravia, and the importance to him of practical plant breeding. This paper recapitulates the process of mythmaking that followed the rediscovery, then shows how more recent historical research has been able to undo it and, in a sense, "unrediscover" Mendel.