ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

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 third panel, contributions focus on the challenges and oppositions between practitioners and scholars, (a.) in medicine, as practitioners were generally labelled as charlatans, (b.) in mineralogy, as the work of quarriers was important in the development of artistic attention, (c.) in botany, as the practices connected to herbaria and herbals were a key aspect in the foundation of modern botanical sciences.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Tina Asmussen, Ruhr University Bochum / German Mining Museum Bochum

Individual Presentations

• The ‘learned practitioner’: professors of secrets and the medical marketplace of late Renaissance Italy - Ruben Celani, University of Notre Dame, IN

• The quarrier and the forge: sculpture’s instruments in Renaissance mineral arts - Genevieve Warwick, University of Edinburgh

• Drying, Mounting, and Knowing: Herbaria between Practices and Science - Lucie Strnadová

• James Sowerby and the White Waterlily - Ulrich Stegmann, University of Aberdeen

Session Organizer

• Fabrizio Baldassarri, University of Rome 3