ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

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 first panel, contributions focus on agriculture and botanical science, concentrating on agricultural instruments and tools, and practices, from the reception of ancient agriculture in the Renaissance to the intersections between the wisdom of rustics and gardeners and the science of botanists throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Aleksandar Shopov, SUNY Binghamton

Individual Presentations

• «Duris agrestibus arma»: Agricultural Instruments in Translations of Virgil’s Georgics - Francesco Davoli, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

• Agricultural Instruments and Botanical Science in Renaissance Italy: The Knowledge of Rustics - Fabrizio Baldassarri, University of Rome 3

• 'Engines of divine art': Tools, Work, and Weed-Making in the Early Royal Society - Francis Taylor

• Garden Waste: How Modernity Discarded Gardeners’ Knowledge in 18th Century Treatises on Agriculture - Sarah Benharrech, University of Maryland

Session Organizer

• Fabrizio Baldassarri, University of Rome 3