ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Early Modern Intersections of Knowledge

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

In the 2017 article “The History of Science and the History of Knowledge,” Lorraine Daston described the evolution of our discipline from an exclusive focus on the Scientific Revolution to what she calls the history of knowledge. Behind her claim is the fact that, in the past decade alone, historians have written about early modern alchemy, craftsmanship, the environment, magic, navigation, and so on. But where and how did different kinds of knowledge intersect with one another? What new ideas did such interdisciplinary meetings generate, if at all? And what social and institutional patronage supported them? With a few exceptions—Pamela Long and Domenico Bertoloni Meli being two notable examples—, the bridges between areas of knowledge remain to be further explored. This panel explores these questions by examining cases from the sixteenth-century Americas to the early modern Mediterranean. The papers in the panel cover the social and intellectual influence of anatomists in Galileo’s circles; the medicinal plants used by Nahuas and Spaniards in sixteenth-century Mexico; the technicians appointed by the Medici family to the Duchy of Tuscany's first river management office; and the global itinerary of Ignacio Muñoz (c. 1610–1686), the Dominican friar who disassembled a Galileo telescope in Mexico City. Together, these contributions explore what can be gained by studying the intersections of knowledge in the early modern period.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Claire Conklin Sabel, University of Vienna

Individual Presentations

• Redefining the Natural in Early Modern New Spain - Marlis Hinckley, University of Notre Dame

• The Capomaestro at Work: Profiling a Sixteenth-Century Tuscan River Technician - Caroline Elizabeth Murphy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Galileo Among the Physicians: Intersecting Anatomy and Mathematics around 1600 - Nuno Castel-Branco, All Souls College, University of Oxford

• Polishing the Lens at Last: New Evidence on Galileo’s Telescope Construction from Ignacio Muñoz, O.P. (c. 1608/1612–1686) - José María Moreno Madrid, University of Limerick

Session Organizer

• Nuno Castel-Branco, All Souls College, University of Oxford