ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Practitioners, Artisans and Instruments in the Making of Premodern Science, II

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

In recent historiography, the centrality of practitioners and artisans in the construction of premodern science has drawn significant attention. The intersections between practices and theories, the science of scholars and the wisdom of laypeople, have outlined important trading zones that shape the diverse areas of premodern disciplines of knowing, revealing the importance of marginal voices, contested truths, and epistemic disobedience. The goal of these three panels is to focus on this pragmatic turn, revealing the importance of the materiality of artifacts and instruments and the practices of female and male workers, apothecaries, experts-cum-knowledge, artisans, rustics, farmers, miners, fishermen, herdsmen, and other lay experts thus contributed to reconfiguring nature, laying important—though mostly neglected—foundations for the emergence of premodern science.
In the second panel, contributions focus on the practices connected to mathematical instruments, especially navigation and carpentry, shedding new light on the relationship between artisans and scholars by means of a global focus on the intersections between European science and the wisdom of peoples in the Americas.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Jane Wess

Individual Presentations

• Inside the Workshop: Images of Early Modern Mathematical Instrument Makers - Boris Jardine, University of Cambridge

• Mathematical Knowledge in Premodern Atlantic Iberian Carpentry Traditions - Sebastián Molina-Betancur, Independent scholar

• Artisans of the Ocean: Atlantic pilots, local knowledge and global networks in Early Modern Iberia - Antonio Sanchez, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

• Brass works: Material exchange and the origins of the London instrument trade (1540–1660) - Joshua Nall, University of Cambridge

Session Organizer

• Fabrizio Baldassarri, University of Rome 3