ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

UNEARTHED I: The Many Lives of Res inanimatae

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Stones, rocks, minerals, and their “juices” constitute the mineral kingdom—ubiquitous yet largely overlooked precisely because they are deemed inanimate. But what happens to European history when the inanimate and the subterranean are moved to the centre of analysis? This panel recentres natural objects long treated as inert background matter, examining how fossils, stones, and minerals—and the precious natural and artificial objects fashioned from them—were conceptualised, collected, valued, exchanged, and circulated in the period ca. 1550-1800.
By probing the shifting boundaries between natural and archaeological specimens, between human, animal, and inorganic, and between emerging geological knowledge and new classificatory regimes, the panel interrogates the epistemic and material conditions that made these objects intelligible. Speakers will address questions concerning extraction, mobility, loss, and recovery, and the multiple lives of mineral matter in early modern Europe. Through a series of case studies, we trace how cultural, political, and epistemic transformations reshaped understandings of the natural and the artificial, the animate and the inanimate—asking what these shifts reveal about early modern worlds and their entanglements with the deep material substrates that sustained them.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Sachiko Kusukawa, Trinity College, Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• Beauty Classified - The Hopetoun Walker Collection of Decorative Stone - Rene Winkler

• The Museum of Fossils: Göttingen and Natural Histories of the Globe, ca. 1770-1799 - Jeremy R. Schneider

• Shipwrecks and the maritime underground - Elsje van Kessel, University of St Andrews

Session Organizer

• Monica Azzolini, University of Bologna