ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Threads of Ephemerality. Craft Knowledge, Fragmented Landscapes, and the Piedmontese Silk Industry in the Early Modern Period

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

English Abstract

This paper explores how ephemerality can be used as an analytical lens for studying technical knowledge in Italy during the early modern period. Using the Piedmontese silk trade as a case study, it examines a craft world defined by perishable materials and quickly deteriorating tools, by skills that resisted codification because they depended on gesture and tacit sensory judgment, and by local infrastructures that were themselves fragile and short-lived. Inherently ephemeral, this world survives today only in fragments: demolished manufactures, deteriorated machinery, incomplete records, altered silk samples, and embodied expertise that can no longer be reconstructed. Rather than treating these absences as obstacles, the paper argues that they are evidence in their own right of how craft knowledge was produced, maintained, and lost. By understanding ephemerality as a structural feature of silk-making rather than a limitation of archive-based research, it develops a form of “negative history” that works through gaps, ruins, and partial remains. This approach traces non-linear processes of learning, forgetting, and adaptation, and brings into focus the bodies, gestures, and local ecologies that once sustained the Piedmontese silk industry, most of which have now vanished from written sources. In doing so, the paper shows that attending to what has not endured is essential for understanding the material history of craft in the long eighteenth century.

Author

• Mario Grassi, University of Padua