ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Handsteine and the Ore Mountain: A Sixteenth Century History of Loss

• In Event: After Loss: Ephemeral Histories of Science and Technology 2 - Ephemeral Sites of Technoscience

English Abstract

This paper investigates how sixteenth-century Handsteine—objects made for cabinets of curiosity from mounted and embellished raw ore—operated as sites where subterranean labor, natural philosophy, and extractive capital converge in miniature. Fashioned by goldsmiths in the mining territories of the Erzgebirge (“Ore Mountains”), Handsteine were collected by Habsburg princes in the sixteenth century. These objects performed simultaneously as mineral specimens and tabletop industryscapes, and they both celebrated and concealed the extractive processes that underwrote imperial wealth. In scholarship, Handsteine have primarily been understood as art objects commissioned for princely Kunstkammern, and as such, the way in which they reflect local mining knowledge has been lost. By reading these objects alongside the visual and textual culture of the sixteenth-century Erzgebirge, I demonstrate that Handsteine obscure the geological knowledge of their local context through both the aestheticization and fetishization of specialized mining labor. I ultimately argue for an alternate reading, in which the accumulative logic of these objects and their material attention to bodies—both human and mineral—uncover ambivalent attitudes toward the extractive means of their making.

Author

• Emily Hyatt, Yale University