ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Minescapes Across History: Renaissance Mining and Its Eighteenth-Century Legacy in Medici Tuscany

• In Event: Minescapes 4: Minescapes over the Longue durée

English Abstract

What is the legacy of minescapes, and how did scientific actors use similar concepts to describe past mining activities? The case of the medical practitioner, botanist, and naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti (1712–1783) offers a compelling way to address these questions. Living through the political transformation from the Medici to the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty, Tozzetti turned to the historical traces embedded in the landscape and its communities to reaffirm the importance of the natural sciences in the eyes of Tuscany’s new rulers. His polyvalent training and extensive scientific network, combined with wide-ranging travels to mining sites in northern and southern Tuscany, culminated in a set of articulated proposals centered on reviving abandoned mines. During the mid-sixteenth century, the Apuan Alps and the Versilia region had been central to Medici mining policy, fostering periods of intensive extraction that ultimately failed to realize Medici ambitions. As he moved through these areas rich in historical and natural insights, Tozzetti drew on observations of leftover materials, ruined smelting furnaces, and – most importantly – the oral testimonies of local communities who preserved knowledge of past mining activities across generations. By uncovering how history and natural knowledge intersected in eighteenth-century scientific practice, this paper shows how historical actors conceptualized what we would now call minescapes, and how such understandings shaped their interpretation of the long history of mineral extraction.

Author

• Gabriele Marcon, University of Vienna