ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Genealogies of Learning and Communities of Practice: New Perspectives on Early Modern Knowledge

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

Recent studies have broadened our understanding of early modern knowledge cultures, including artisans, households, and vernacular texts. But we still know relatively little about the ways in which such bodies of knowledge were established and passed on within communities of practitioners. This panel explores these questions by focusing on genealogies and communities of knowledge, that is to say, by paying attention to specific regimes of material practice – from textual work and image-making to bedside training – and how they build bodies of knowledge and pass it on to future generations. This framing opens up the conversation to a wider spectrum of early modern knowledges and knowers. The speakers – historians of art, science, and medicine – will present their case studies on French midwives and instrument makers, Mexican apothecaries, Spanish and Japanese surgeons, and German chemical practitioners. We will start by examining how these communities collaboratively established genealogies of legitimate expertise and practice, by building or re-shaping textual traditions, through apprenticeship or other training contexts, and combinations of these modes in multi-sited, multi-media regimes. Through this comparative view and the ensuing discussion, we aim to spark new questions about the relationships between text and practice, manuscript and print, learned and vernacular, and the fluid boundaries between apparently distinct cultures of knowledge.

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Chair

• Maria Pia Donato, CNRS/IHMC, Paris

Participants

• Tillmann Taape

• Maria Luz López Terrada, INGENIO (CSIC–Universitat Politècnica de València)

• Scottie Buehler, SHSU

• Paula De Vos, San Diego State University

Session Organizers

• Elaine Leong, University College London

• Tillmann Taape

• Jack Hartnell, National Gallery, London