ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Brass works: Material exchange and the origins of the London instrument trade (1540–1660)

• In Event: Practitioners, Artisans and Instruments in the Making of Premodern Science, II

English Abstract

Materials remain a strikingly minor part of our discipline’s ‘material turn’. Most histories of science that consider instruments do so through a recovery of use rather than of making. This paper tackles the latter: how instruments are shaped from raw materials into practical devices, and how these processes depend upon global networks of trade. We argue that material analysis of early modern mathematical instruments—of their alloy composition in particular—can reveal insights into practices of making that are otherwise absent from the historical record. Data gathered from a single collection in Cambridge reveals, we will show, a trade network in high-quality brass that links the pre-eminent ‘Louvain School’ of instrument-making to the emergence of a rival manufacturing centre in Elizabethan London. We then consider the breakdown of this network and what this might reveal about the circulation of brass-making expertise in the middle decades of the 17th century.

Author

• Joshua Nall, University of Cambridge