ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Navigating Matters: Reflections on an Oxford-Made Ivory Nocturnal in Munich

• In Event: Shifting Perspectives: Hands on Instruments Approaches (with Gloves) to Writing a History of Scientific Practices I

English Abstract

This paper focuses on an extraordinary object housed at the Deutsches Museum in Munich: an unsigned, Oxford-made, ivory nocturnal, purportedly fashioned in the eighteenth century. While nocturnals can be found in various other museum collections, those instances are invariably made of metal (typically brass) or wood. The use of ivory as a material for construction is perhaps especially noteworthy due to the nocturnal’s provenance: Oxford was neither a center for ivory products nor for scientific-instrument-making. As such, the nocturnal in Munich appears to be a material and geographical outlier and raises numerous questions, including: who made it and why?; what it was it used for and by whom?; how do we account for the use of ivory as opposed to the more commonly employed brass or boxwood; and how do we make sense of its unexpected origin in Oxford, or its elaborate design, especially compared to the more simplified wooden nocturnals typically produced in England?
In the absence of written records detailing its biography, this paper shifts focus to the nocturnal itself as a primary source to help answer these questions and uncover its history. Put differently, I will take a material culture approach—gleaning clues and gathering evidence from a close study of the object (and others like it) and the elements and materials of which it is composed—and combine it with a more traditional reading of textual and visual sources from the history of nocturnals specifically and that of scientific instruments more generally. I tentatively argue that the nocturnal may have served as an educational tool for a wealthy and mathematically-inclined member of eighteenth-century English consumer culture.
To sum up, in addition to shedding light on the object's history, and paving the way for further research, this paper aims to serve as a case study in navigating matter.

Author

• Celine Camps, Columbia University