Early Modern Science

Nick Wilding, Georgia State University, "Galileo Machinator" 
Dear colleagues,
I wanted to try something new: I have just, over the last few weeks, and mainly in the last few days, written what I hope to be the start of my new book, commissioned several years ago by Reaktion Press and subsequently derailed by the pandemic. I've included the initial proposal with (p.2) a Postscript sketching out what I'm now trying to do. The text is only lightly footnoted, probably contains mistakes, typos, etc, so please don't bother proofreading, just read. What I would really value is a discussion about the general approach - I'm trying to use forgeries to write a biography, but don't know yet whether this works.
Thank you for your time and thought.

Tianna Uchacz (Texas A&M University)
 
"Reading Between the Lines: Ornament Prints and the Tacit Know-How of Material Translation"
 
In the sixteenth century, leading European artists and enterprising printmakers began to issue engraved series of designs for grotesque ornament. Marketed broadly to “lovers of art,” these prints showcased inventive elaborations of strapwork, garlands, floral motifs, hybrid animals, and masks. In many cases, the print series included a title page touting the utility of the designs for artisans ranging from painters and embroiderers to sculptors and goldsmiths. The material affordances of paint, thread, wood, stone, and metal, however, are distinct, as were the tools, techniques, and design traditions necessary to work with them. This paper considers what can be gained by seeing ornament print title pages as technical texts or "recipes" of sorts. The reconstruction of historical making techniques can help historians understand period claims for the utility of ornament prints, parsing the rhetoric from the material reality of translating design across media in early modern Europe.

George Elliott (Brown)
 
"Nullius in Verba: A Saltbox Scientist in his Chamber Laboratory"
 
In this dissertation chapter, I build on the work of historians of early modern European alchemy and science as well as English colonial alchemy to describe the social history of seventeenth-century New England laboratories and their alchemical practitioners. While work has been done to understand the presence of alchemists within New England, their daily practices and meaning remain less understood, especially compared to their European peers. Using the surviving records of the minister-turned-alchemist Gershom Bulkeley, I argue for the entanglement of experimental and domestic lives within the homes of the region’s social elite. Bulkeley constructed and stocked an alchemical laboratory within his Wethersfield, Connecticut household, a saltbox home situated in the center of the town. There, he produced and experimented with alchemical medicines for his medical practice for more than 30 years. However, his daily work expanded beyond this central room as he trialed fertilizers in his saltbox garden and conducted meteorological observations through his windows. I argue that all such experimental activities across the saltbox’s many spaces fell interspersed between the hours of Bulkeley’s other domestic life lived amongst family and the household’s enslaved. 

Pamela H. Smith and Naomi Rosenkranz (Columbia University)
 

Secrets of Craft and Nature from the Making and Knowing Lab: Hands-on History of Science
 
In 2020, the Making and Knowing Project published Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640. This sixteenth-century French manuscript contains 340 pages of instructions and observations on artistic techniques. In addition to a transcription and English translation of the entire manuscript, Secrets of Craft and Nature features hands-on investigation and reconstruction by students and scholars in the Making and Knowing Lab. This research, now accessible in the edition’s 130 essays, provides many new insights into sixteenth-century art, craft, technology, and daily life.
 
This session will give an introduction to using and navigating Secrets of Craft and Nature and its associated teaching resources (hands-on lesson plans, syllabi, and student projects) that the Project has made openly available on its Sandbox. We hope everyone might have a chance  before the session to browse the Edition: https://edition640.makingandknowing.org and the Sandbox: https://cu-mkp.github.io/sandbox/), and to come with questions.

Melissa B. Reynolds, "The Past and Future in Print" 
 
You can find the pre-circulated paper below. The session will take place over Zoom, which you can access on the date through the link on this page.
 
If you have any questions leading up to the event, please do not hesitate to reach out to the coordinators. 
 

Yijie Huang, "The pluralism of mechanism and the emergence of a pulse clocklike in late seventeenth-century England"

Our first meeting of the 21/22 academic year will be next Wednesday, October 13th, at noon EST. We will be discussing Georges Farhat's WIP on Louis Savot’s (ca. 1579-1640) galenic perspective on the art of building. The article has been uploaded and a zoom link for the meeting will be made available on the working group website.

Ashley Gonik, Doctoral Candidate at Harvard University
"Printed Calendars, Inside and Out"

Luke Freeman, Doctoral Candidate at University of Minnesota  
“Bernard and Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses des tous les peuple du monde (1723-1743)"

Anita Guerrini, Horning Professor in the Humanities emerita at Oregon State University and Research Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara
“Giants, Fossils and National Identity in Early Modern France"

Hyeok Hweon Kang, Visiting Scholar and D. Kim Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University
“Saltpeter on the Move: From China to Korea, Between Global Intelligence and Local Experiment, 1592–1635”

 
Arnaud Zimmern will present his WIP titled "Bacon on Boldness, or How to Promise the Prolongation of Life."
 
You can find the pre-circulated paper below. The session will take place over Zoom, which you can access on the date through the link on this page.
 
If you have any questions leading up to the event, please do not hesitate to reach out to either coordinator. 
 
Megan Piorko mpiorko@sciencehistory.org
Katie Reinhart kmr@chstm.org

 
Sietske Fransen will present her WIP titled "Publishing Science in the Seventeenth Century: The cases of Father and Son Van Helmont."
 
The pre-circulated paper is available below. The session will take place over Zoom, which you can access on the date through the link on this page.
 
If you have any questions leading up to the event, please do not hesitate to reach out to either coordinator. 
 
Megan Piorko mpiorko@sciencehistory.org
Katie Reinhart kmr@chstm.org

Dear Early Modern Science working group,  
Our next meeting will take place next week, Wedensday October 14 at noon EDT. Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh will be presenting "Monuments, hermeneutics, or astronomy? China and the invention of Enlightenment history, ca 1650-1760" followed by discussion. 
Please find the pre-circulated paper under the "Readings" tab. The session will take place over Zoom, which you can access on the 14th through the "Participate" tab on this page.
You are welcome to contact the organizers, Megan and Katie, with any questions leading up to the event. 
 
Looking forward to seeing you all next Wednesday, 
 
Megan Piorko mpiorko@sciencehistory.org
Katie Reinhart kmr@chstm.org

 
Tamara Caulkins will present her WIP titled "Practical Geometry: The World in Diagrams at the Court of Louis XIV." 
 
You can find the paper abstract under the "Readings" tab, and is now available for pre-circulation. The session will take place over Zoom, which you can access on the date through the "Participate" tab on this page.
 
If you have any questions leading up to the event, please do not hesitate to reach out to either coordinator. 
 
Megan Piorko mpiorko@sciencehistory.org
Katie Reinhart kmr@chstm.org

Simon Werrett will present his WIP titled "Kitchen Oeconomy: Food, Thrift, and Experiment in Early Modern England" exclusively through Zoom. A link to join will be provided before the meeting. Please find the pre-circulated paper available for download under the "Readings" tab.
 
If you have any questions leading up to the event, please do not hesistate to reach out to either coordinator. 

Megan Piorko mpiorko1@student.gsu.edu
Katie Reinhart kmr@chstm.org

J.B. Shank will present his WIP titled “Europeans Telling of the World’s Beginnings Around 1700. Between Science and Religion, Prose, Verse, and Scripture, and Image and Text.”
 
These papers is currently available under the "readings" tab. The event will be happening via Zoom, and a link to the meeting will be provided the week of the event. 
 
Megan Piorko mpiorko1@student.gsu.edu
Katie Reinhart kmr@chstm.org
 
 

Donna Bilak will present her WIP titled "Materials, imagination, and making knowledge"
 
These papers will be precirculated to the group. Please RSVP to the Early Modern Working Group Coordinators at least a week before the event. 
 
Megan Piorko mpiorko1@student.gsu.edu
Katie Reinhart kmr@chstm.org
 
WIP paper attached

Our final meeting for the fall will cover "Part III: Excess" in Science in the Age of Baroque.

Our second meeting will cover "Part II: Vision" in Science in the Age of Baroque.

(Note Special Day) The group will being discussion of Science in the Age of the Baroque (Springer, 2012), edited by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris. The first set of readings will be Part I: Order. 

Note New Time
Harun Küçük, Introduction and Chap. 3 of work-in-progress on Ottoman science. 
Please note that we are changing the time for the April and May meetings from noon to 5 pm (Eastern).

Three (relatively) recent takes on questions central to the historiography of the scientific revolution:
Daniel Garber, "Why the Scientific Revolution Wasn't a Scientific Revolution, and Why it Matters" (2016)
Peter Dear, "Historiography of Not-So-Recent Science" (2012)
Robert Westman, short selection from The Copernican Question (2011)

We discussed a selection of articles from the June 2017 special issue of History of Science on Iberian science.  Maria Portuondo, who wrote the introduction to this issue, joined us from Johns Hopkins.  To keep the reading at manageable quantity, we picked articles that engage particularly with historiographical questions.  Interested readers may want to check out the rest of this very interesting  journal issue. 
Click on the Downloads tab on this page for the pdfs of the articles.
Readings:
María Portuondo. “Iberian Science: Reflections and Studies”

Juan Pimentel and José Pardo-Tomás. “And yet, we were modern. The Paradoxes of Iberian Science after the Grand Narratives”

John Slater and Maríaluz López-Terrada. “Being Beyond: The Black Legend and How We Got Over It”

Henrique Leitāo and Antonio Sánchez. “Too Much To Tell: Narrative Styles of the First Descriptions of the Natural World of the Indies.”

* Note Special Day

We discussed two papers by Richard Oosterhoff (University of Cambridge, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities [CRASSH]) on Renaissance practices of reading and advancing knowledge claims in mathematical and astronomical texts.

1) "A Book, a Pen, and the Sphere: Reading Sacrobosco in the Renaissance,"
History of Universities 28, no. 2 (2015): 1–54.

2) "Idiotae, Mathematics and Artisans: The Untutored Mind and the Discovery of
Nature in the Fabrist Circle," Intellectual History Review 24 (2014): 1–19.

Discussion of Matthew Crawford, The Andean Wonder Drug: Cinchona Bark and Imperial Science in the Spanish Atlantic, 1630-1800 (Chicago, 2016)
The author joined us.  We focused on the Introduction, Chap. 1 and Chap. 4
Please find a pdf of these chapters under "Current Download"
 

 
Discussion of two recent articles in Isis:
J. Andrew Mendelsohn and Annemarie Kinzelbach, “Common Knowledge: Bodies, Evidence, and Expertise in Early Modern Germany,” Isis, June 2017:259-279.
 
Evan Ragland, “‘Making Trials’ in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Academic Medicine,” Isis, September 2017: 503-528.

POSTPONED Sophie Weeks, "The role of mechanics in Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration," from Zittel, Engel, Nanni, and Karafyllis, eds., Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and His Contemporaries.

"A Second Look: Leviathan and the Air Pump," published in Isis, volume 108, No. 1, March 2017. 

Readings included a recent essay review from Isis by John Henry, a chapter from David Wootton's Invention of Science, and some extracts from Floris Cohen's Rise of Modern Science Explained.

Bob Westman of UCSD and André Goddu of Stonehill College discussed with group participants their recent work on Copernicus.

Robert S. Westman, Copernicus and the Astrologers, Dibner Library Lecture, December 12, 2013, Smithsonian Libraries. (Available here.)

André Goddu, “Ludwik Antoni Birkenmajer and Curtis Wilson on the Origin of Nicholas Copernicus’s Heliocentrism,” Isis, v 107, no 2, June 2016, pp. 225-253. (DOI: 10.1086/687031)

Participants in Consortium Working Groups attended remotely a symposium held at the University of Minnesota. The symposium will produce a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History on the topic "Beyond the 'Scientific Revolution:' Thinking Globally about the History of Modern Science." The presenters were:Jorge Canizares Esguerra, UT Austin Hal Cook, Brown Harun Küçük, UPenn Carla Nappi, UBC Ahmed Ragab, Harvard Kapil Raj, EHESS Paris Daniela Bleichmar, USC JB Shank, UMN Program and details

The group discussed Peter Dear's "Afterword" for the Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Science and Mary Baine Campbell's chapter on "Literature" from The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 3, Early Modern Science (2006), edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston.

We read the first two chapters from David Wootton's recent book, The Invention of Science, L. Daston's review (from the Guardian), and A. Wulff's review (from the Financial Times).

The group discussed Kleber Cecon's "Chemical Translation: The Case of Robert Boyle's Experiments on Sensible Qualities," Annals of Science, Vol. 68, No. 2, April 2011, pp. 179-198, as well as Pamela Smith's "In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, and Meaning," West 86th, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring-Summer 2012), pp 4-31.

The group joined the "Science Beyond the West" group for a special event: Dimitri Gutas and H. Floris Cohen discussed Cohen's recent book, How Modern Science Came Into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough (Amsterdam University Press, 2011).

Planning meeting for 2015-2016

Sue Wells of Temple University introduced her draft chapter, "'The Anatomy of Melancholy' and Early Modern Medicine."

Nahyan Fancy of Depauw University introduced his paper, "Avicenna, Ibn al-Nafis, and New Developments in Physiology in Western Eurasia, 1200-1560"

Harun Küçük of UPenn introduced his draft paper, "The Compass and the Astrolabe: Religion and Empirical Knowledge in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire."

Bruce Moran of the University of Nevada, Reno introduced his draft paper "Preserving the Cutting Edge: Traveling Woodblocks, Material Networks, and Visualizing Plants in Early Modern Europe"

Elly Truitt introduced chapter six, "The Trouble with Taxa," from Daryn Lehoux's What did the Romans Know? An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking.

Alisha Rankin of Tufts introduced her draft paper, "To Cure a Thief: Testing Poison Antidotes in Early Modern Europe."

Darin Hayton of Haverford College introduced his paper "Byzantium: the Other East."

Joel Klein of Indiana University introduced his "Daniel Sennert and the Quest for a (Nearly) Universal Medicine".

Nicholas Harris of UPenn introduced a chapter from his dissertation Better Religion through Chemistry: ‘Izz al-Din Aydemir al-Jildaki and Alchemy under the Mamluks.  This chapter examines the alchemist al-Jildaki’s legacy, and, more broadly, discusses the implications of the omission of early modern Arabic alchemy from the history of alchemy.

Darin Hayton of Haverford College introduced the "Introduction" to his book Astrology and Politics in the Holy Roman Empire

Joel Klein of Indiana University introduced selections from "Communities of Learned Experience: Epistolary Medicine in the Renaissance" by Nancy G. Siraisi

Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve"

Selections from Ann Blair's "Too Much to Know"

Elly Truitt introduced her draft chapter "From Texts to Technology: Mechanical Automata in Courtly and Liturgical Pageantry".

Nicolas Wey-Gomez of CalTech introduced selections from his "The Tropics of Empire. Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies". Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Ed. Jed. Z. Buchwald. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2008.

Jonathan Seitz introduced a discussion of digital editions, their advantages and disadvantages and the possibilities they offer for new uses. The group also planned the rest of the year's meetings.

Susan Wells of Temple introduced "Oratory and Rhetoric in Renaissance Medicine" by Nancy Siraisi and "Rhetorical and Medicine in Descartes' Passions de l'âme: The Issue of Intervention" by Nancy Struever.

Jonathan Seitz of Drexel introduced selections from "The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy" by William Eamon

"Politics and Astrology in Renaissance Hungary" by Darin Hayton, Haverford College

"'A very imperfect trial': Notes on Martin Lister's Book of Shells" by Jessica Rosenberg, UPenn

Elly Truitt introduced "The Empire of Observation, 1600-1800" by Lorraine Daston, and "Frogs on the Mantelpiece: the Practice of Observation in Daily Life" by Mary Terrall.

Elly Truitt introduced "Networks of Travel, Correspondence, and Exchange" by Steven J. Harris and selections from "Matters of Exchange" by Harold J. Cook

Elizabeth Coates Paschall's Scientific Revolution: Enlightened Experts and Healing Authority in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia by Susan Brandt, Temple University

Accountancy and Systole by Michael Neuss, Columbia University