Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge (Bard Graduate Center - Cultural Histories of the Material World) [Reprint ed.] 1941792111, 9781941792117

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First published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2014. © 2014 University of Michigan. First paperback edition published in 2017 by Bard Graduate Center, New York City, by arrangement with the University of Michigan Press and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. This book may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] .

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Printed in the United States of America « This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 345 ISBN-13: 978-1-941792-11-7 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, Pamela H., 1957- editor. | Meyers, Amy R. W., editor. | Cook, HaroldJ., editor. Title: Ways of making and knowing : the material culture of empirical knowledge / edited by Pamela H. Smith, Amy Meyers, and HaroldJ. Cook. Description: First paperback edition. | New York City : Bard Graduate Center, 2017. | Series: Cultural histories of die material world | Originally published: Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017028748 | ISBN 9781941792117 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Intellectual life-Philosophy. | Intellectual life-History. | Knowledge, Theory of. | Empiricism. | Empiricism-History. | Material culiure-Philosophy. | Material cullure-History. | Handicraft. | Handicraft-History’. Classification: LCC AZ101 .W39 2017 | DDC 121-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028748

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Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition Senior Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Making and Knowing Harold J. Cook, Pamela H. Smith, and Amy R. W Meyers

vii xiii

xv 1

Making as Knowing: Craft as Natural Philosophy Pamela H. Smith

17

From Skills to Wisdom: Making, Knowing, and the Arts Suzanne B. Butlers

48

Between Trade and Science: Dyeing and Knowing in the Long Eighteenth Century Alicia Weisberg-Roberts

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one

two

three

How to Cure the Golden Vein: Medical Remedies as Wissenschaft in Early Modem Germany Alisha Rankin

113

Evidence, Artisan Experience, and Authority in Early Modern England Patrick Wallis and Catherine Wright

138

American Roots: Techniques of Plant Transportation and Cultivation in the Early Atlantic World Mark Laird and Karen Bridgman

164

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five

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vi Ways of Making and Knowing Inside the Box: John Bartram and the Science and Commerce of the Transatlantic Plant Trade Joel T Fry

194

From Plant to Page: Aesthetics and Objectivity in a Nineteenth-Century Book of Trees Lisa L. Ford

221

The Labor of Division: Cabinetmaking and the Production of Knowledge Glenn Adamson

243

Making Lists: Social and Material Technologies in the Making of Seventeenth-Century British Natural History Elizabeth Yale

280

The Preservation of Specimens and the Takeoff in Anatomical Knowledge in the Early Modem Period HaroldJ. Cook

302

Conrad Gessner on an “Ad Vivum” Image Sachiko Kusukawa

330

Corals versus Trees: Charles Darwin’s Early Sketches of Evolution Horst Bredekamp

357

Decay, Conservation, and the Making of Meaning through Museum Objects Mary M. Brooks

377

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eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

Epilogue: Making and Knowing, Then and Now Malcolm Baker

405

List of Contributors

415

Index

423

i

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Wvzys of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge grew out of a series of marvelously stimulating conversations between Amy R. W. Meyers and myself at the Huntington Library and Art Gallery in Southern California. We planned, with soaring ambitions that now take my breath away, a kind of ideal conference that would bring together the academic and museum worlds and combine our shared interests in objects, art history, and the history of science. Our primary objective would be to explore the relationships between processes of making and processes of knowing in the early modern world. In July of 2005, with the support of Harold Cook and his determined team (Sally Bragg in particular) at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, we held a five-day moveable feast of ideas, starting in the Chelsea Physic Garden and progressing through the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum, the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the Natural History Museum in London, the Linnean Society, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal College of Art, and finally culminating at Painshill Park. The conference was a mix of scholarly lectures and object-based sessions that brought together academic and museum scholars, curators, conservators, and practitioners of the arts to discuss the modes of knowing and making that were employed in the fabrication of the specific objects under scrutiny. We also discussed the ways in which natural materials as well as the representations of nature and its materials were deployed by the objects. One session included comparing preserved crabs from the vii

viii Ways of Making and Knowing holdings of the Natural History Museum to life cast objects in metal from the V&A and from the Royal Collections. Another session involved the joint examination of fossils, plaster casts, and historic drawings. At the Natural History Museum, London, another session considered how a specimen of precious wood (which might also be of interest to wood merchants) was collected in the field, drawn, printed, and discussed, to become part of a book as well as of a scientific field. A further session examined textiles, drawings, and prints featuring naturalistic designs in the V&A, and we discussed dyes, methods of printing, and the demand for printed textiles and naturalistic representation in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Europe. These instances of close looking, group discussion, and collective reflection were then enriched by the experience of hands-on making at Painshill Park, where participants constructed hazel wattle hurdles, dtrew bricks, and tried out their vine training skills, among other activities. In all, we held more than twenty breakout sessions, each of them carefully recorded by “amanuenses” in a protocol template we provided to then graduate students Sabiha Ahmad, Alette Fleischer, Paula Hung, Jane Seymour, Melissa Rickman, and Anke Timmerman. In both the lectures and the breakout sessions, we sought to overcome the common historiographical dichotomies between craft skill and scientific knowledge. We strove to demonstrate the ways in which natural knowledge flowed from an engagement with natural things in die realms of artisanal practice, commercial exchange, and scientific analysis. Only a few of the breakout sessions at the Natural History Museum and the V&A were published, and so they are for the first time all being made public at die following website: www.makingandknowing .org/. We hope that this publicauon might form a resource for scholars and teachers who wish to engage in cross-disciplinary object research and teaching. At a glass-blowing demonstration and discussion, which had partici­ pants shutding between the glass studio of the Royal College of Art and die glass galleries of the V&A, Reino Liefkes and Ian Hankey discussed and presented early modern glass techniques. After the conference, Ian Hankey went on to produce a film based on that session, which is now available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSBY6Lc2-hU/. In the film, Hankey narrates and demonstrates how his making experiences led to knowing, in terms of understanding both the specific properties of certain types of historical Venetian glass and the constraints it placed on the objects that were made from it. This film shows how ferule it is to root scholarly analysis in the materi-

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Preface to die Paperback Edition

ix

als of nature themselves, and then to follow them through their recipro­ cal interaction with human techniques and skill, which turn them into objects that are given meaning, used, consumed, desired, and studied by human communities. Each of these stages—the materials, the human­ material interactions through skilled practice, the resultant objects, and the meanings of their uses, consumptions, and afterlives—can be sites of study and analysis. Following the materials as they move through these processes of production and consumption can produce an integrated social, intellectual, and historical analysis. In such an analysis, neither the materials nor the skilled practice can be left out; yet, until recently, die histories of science, technology, and art have largely done just that. They have neglected these two parts of the chain of understanding in favor of focusing on discrete objects and their meanings. Perhaps this is due to the fact that these areas have become parts of other domains of study and action: materials are the site of natural scientific expertise, and skilled artistic practice is within die realm of makers, whose practice takes years of hands-on engagement to really know and is ill-suited to the seminar rooms and lecture halls of modern institutions of higher learn­ ing. Although we all now accept that mind and hand are not separate in human cognition and action, much of our language and conceptual cat­ egories—particularly in our institutions of higher education—speak and act as if they are. But now that we know that making and knowing are an inseparable amalgam in everyday life, in scholarship, and in our histori­ cal analyses, how do we go about constructing new narratives through which we can consider diem together? What I now realize from the perspective of more than a decade since the conference, during which time the study of material culture and object-based learning and research has exploded, is that we were then engaged in—I think it is not too grandiose to say—a new culture of doing research in the humanities, one that has come very much to the fore in the everyday work of what is now known as the “digital hu­ manities.” There has been much ink spent recently to articulate what is distinctive about digital humanities work, from the new kinds of compu­ tational skills that it fosters to the very large datasets with which its prac­ titioners work. No doubt these are important aspects of what define this work; however, I think that it is fair to say that one of the most important features of most DH projects is that they foster a collaboration among individuals and groups with different expertise, including crossing the previously formidable boundaries between data science and humanities faculties. As many of the projects are crowd-sourced, or more often grad-

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Ways of Making and Knowing

or student-sourced, they tend to blur the line between pedagogy and original research in new and stimulating ways. As I have found in my own grad-sourced program, The Malting and Knowing Project, which is creat­ ing a digital publication through historical research that employs texts, documents, objects, and hands-on reconstructions in a laboratory, such collaborative projects have analogs in the realm of the natural sciences, where knowledge creation through research groups is the norm. Indeed, it sometimes seems odd that humanistic fields, such as history, have be­ come the province of individual scholars, when the “big science” of the early nineteenth century had been humanities disciplines, like philology'. But the inspiration for the conference, with its seventy-plus partici­ pants from different fields, its large and diverse audience, its extremely generous and welcoming institutional hosts, and its small army of aman­ uenses, staff, and organizers, can also be found in the vision of Amy Mey­ ers and her colleagues at the Yale Center for British Art. Their insight is evident in the remarkable exhibitions that they were then planning and have gone on to mount, such as “Endlessforms”: Charles Darwin, Natural Sci­ ence, and the Visual Arts (with the Fitzwilliam Museum, 2009); Mrs. Delany and Her Circle (with Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2009-2010), Promiscuous Assemblage, Friendship, & the Order of Things (the work ofJane Wildgoose, with Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2009-2010), Compass and Rule: Architec­ ture and Mathematical Practice in England, 1500-1750 (with the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, 2010); “Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower”: Artists’ Books and the Natural World (2014), and Enlightened Princesses: Caro­ line, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World (with Historic Royal Palaces UK, 2017). These exhibitions have involved institutional and individual collaborators from the natural sciences, the social sci­ ences, and the humanities, as well as practitioners of the arts. As director of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, Hal Cook, too, has put on stimulating conferences that have brought together historians of science and medicine from around the world, as well as practitioners, individuals who had been involved in field-work, and policy-makers. An example is the conference on global health convened to support the work of Michael Marmot’s committee of the WHO, which was published as History of the Social Determinants of Health: Global Histories, Contemporary Debates (Orient BlackSwan, 2009). Of course, the three editors of this volume cannot claim to have initiated any of these developments, but we welcome them with open arms and hope that Ways of Making and Know­ ing plays a small part in inspiring more such collaborations. In this new preface, we would like to acknowledge the generous and

Preface to the Paperback Edition

xi

assiduous attention of Bard Graduate Center, most especially Daniel Lee, who has helped to shepherd the paperback of Wr/ys of Making and Knowing into being. Pamela H. Smith Columbia University, New York City Summer 2017

Series Editor’s Preface

The “material turn” is surely upon us. For more than a decade, histori­ ans of science and of the book have been demonstrating, in increasingly sophisticated ways, that the development of knowledge in early modern and modern Europe was bound up with materialities. While art historians always dealt with objects, they had often looked past dieir object-ness to focus on their “idealist” dimensions: art, artist, iconography, and patron­ age chief among them. And archaeologists, while perhaps most closely identified of all the practitioners of the human sciences with the study of material culture, also kept objects and lives apart, until about a decade or two ago, when “interpretative” or “social” archaeology emerged as a new paradigm. Indeed, the study of artifacts—or its absence—lies at the heart of the most dramatic developments in the study of history in the twentieth cen­ tury. The heirs of Karl Lamprecht in Germany and France, Aby Warburg, Lucien Febvre, and Marc Bloch (by way of Henri Pirenne), took materi­ ality seriously. But after 1929, when Warburg died, those who took on the governance of his library retained his interest in the history of culture, but not in its material forms. Conversely, with the publication of the first number of the Annales d’histoire economique el sociale in that same year, ma­ teriality remained central, but its intellectual history was ignored lest it appear as just another form of flabby Geistesgeschichte (history of mind or spirit, associated with Wilhelm Dilthey). For the next decades, cultural history was usually studied apart from its material evidence, and material evidence studied apart from its intellectual culture.

xiv Ways of Making and Knowing

Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge reflects the broader historiographical re-engagement of the intellec­ tual with die material. The essays examine art, artisans, botanists, medi­ cal doctors, conservators, and technicians. While contributing much knowledge, these essays, often cast as microhistories or case studies, also offer exemplary presentations ofjust how much that is new and interest­ ing can be achieved by looking through the historian’s two lenses, the material and the intellectual. In this way, the volume stands on its own terms and models the kinds of questions that could be asked about so many other subjects. This twofold ambition—to serious scholarship and to serious provocation—is what we hope for all the volumes in Cultural Histories of the Material World. Warburg’s “good neighbor” policy can be applied also to books in this series. The emphasis on “making” and “knowing” here in the realm of art and natural philosophy is exactly continuous with the emphasis on material evidence and the practices of collecting, describing, and com­ paring in the world of the antiquaries. That someone like Robert Hooke could describe the sort of people examined in this volume as “Natural antiquaries”—a back formation from the antiquarian study of artificialia—suggests that any good neighborliness between these two strands of empirical inquiry is not our contrivance, but is in our sources. Simi­ larly, the rapprochement of art history and history of science, as is repre­ sented in this volume, while taking art history down from the pedestal on which it was placed in the nineteenth century also ends the isolatedness of art history. From the perspective of Warburg’s (not the “Warburgian”) kunstgeschictliche Kulturwissenschafl, or our Cultural History of the Mate­ rial World, art objects and art object-making becomes a key way of mak­ ing sense of the remains of the human past. Peter N. Miller Bard Graduate Center, New York City Spring 2014

Acknowledgments

This volume has been long in the making. From the start, it has been a work of intense collaboration and collective knowledge production in­ volving literally scores of people. But, equally important, from the first moment of its fantastical conception as a conference in the sunny gar­ dens of the Huntington Library and Art Gallery through its remarkable realization in the great public museums and gardens of London, it has been a testament to friendship and the manifold pleasures of scholarly exchange. Like most pleasures, it could never have come into being without the hard work of many individuals, foremost among them the staff of the Wellcome Trust Center/Centre for the History of Medicine at Univer­ sity College London (UCL), and most of all Sally Bragg, Affiliation and Programmes Administrator at the Wellcome Trust Centre. We could not have carried off the five days of the conference in London in July 2005 without her unstinting assistance. The first glorious afternoon of this unusually peripatetic conference took place at the Chelsea Physic Garden. Proceedings then moved on to the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum; then to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew; the Natural History Museum, London; die Linnean Society; the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A); and finally to Painshill Park, near Cobham, Surrey (a restored eighteenth-century landscape park), where participants were able to engage in hands-on hazel wattle hurdle (a woven wood fence) making, brick throwing, and vine training, among other activities. At each of these institutions schol-

xvi Ways of Making and Knowing

arly lectures were read; but, more unusually, the conference brought to­ gether historians of science and medicine, art historians, literary histori­ ans, and museum scholars around objects from the museum collections to discuss the modes of knowing and making that were employed in the objects’ fabrication, as well as the ways in which nature was employed as a resource in them. For example, at one of the object-based sessions held in the V&A on “Metalworking and Meaning,” conversations took place around preserved crabs from the holdings of the Natural History' Mu­ seum, London, which were compared to lifecast objects in metal from the V&A and from the Royal Collections. At another, held in the Natural History Museum, London, a group gathered around a collection of fos­ sils, plaster casts, and historic drawings to discuss how an object, a fossil, became a commodity that was sold, drawn, engraved, printed, and pub­ lished—a trajectory by which an object found in the field, a piece of raw nature, became a scientific object. Another session at the Natural Histoiy Museum, London, considered how a specimen of precious wood (which might also be sold by wood merchants) was collected in the field, drawn, printed, and discussed, to become part of a book and a scientific field. This object-based session has itself become part of this volume in Lisa Ford’s essay, “From Plant to Page.” Similarly, Alicia Weisberg-Roberts’s essay “Between Trade and Science,” emerged out of a group discussion over a collection of textiles, drawings, and prints featuring naturalistic designs in the V&A. In providing the opportunity for such comparisons and the connections they fostered between the academic papers and the material objects, we aimed to build on new work in the history of mate­ rial culture that has sought to break down the common historiographical dichotomies between craft skill and scientific knowledge, and to dem­ onstrate the ways in which knowledge of nature flowed from an engage­ ment with natural things in the realms of artisanal practice, commercial exchange, and scientific analysis. No mere book can hope to convey the knowledge produced (some of it still being worked through eight years later) by such a rich set of lectures, demonstrations, and conversations around remarkable objects and practices of making. We can only hope this volume captures some of the sparks that flew in this intensive collaboration, and we can only recommend that every conference include object-based sessions and hands-on activities. We are tremendously grateful to all seventy plus presenters from the conference and particularly to the (then) graduate student amanuenses who recorded the twenty object-based breakout ses­ sions; Sabiha Ahmad, Alette Fleischer, Paula Hung, Jane Seymour, Me-

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Acknowledgments

xvii

lissa Rickman, and Anke Timmerman. We wish we could have included all contributions in the final volume, but it became clear to us and to the Press that a printed book is probably not the best means of conveying hands-on demonstrations and activities. As a tiny step toward exploring the possibilities for transmitting these valuable exchanges in a differ­ ent medium, glassmaker Ian Hankey has re-created his demonstration session on Renaissance Venetian glass from the conference, held at the Royal College of Art with Reino Liefkes of the V&A, as a film that is avail­ able for free download from the Bard Graduate Center website (http:// www.bgc.bard.edu/research/publications/venetian-glass.hlml). We take especial pleasure in expressing our deep gratitude to all the participating institutions and their staffs who made this remarkable gath­ ering possible: the British Museum; the Linnean Society; the Natural History Museum, London; Painshill Park Trust; Pomona College; the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Well­ come Trust; the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL (University College London); the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, in London; and the Yale Center for British Art; as well as the National Science Foundation for its generous grant #SES-0444302. At the Wellcome Trust Centre, we also thank Sharon Messenger and Carol Bowen; at the Yale Center for British Art, we owe thanks to Lisa Ford; al the V&A to Carolyn Sargentson and Victoria Coulson; at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, to Peter Crane and Nigel Taylor; and at Painshill Park to Elaine Headlam. As we have rethought and compressed the conference into this small object you now hold in your hands, we very much appreciate the enthu­ siasm of the Bard Graduate Center and its able dean, Peter N. Miller, as well as the great efficiency and good cheer of the managing editor, Dan­ iel Lee. At the University of Michigan Press, we are grateful to our editor, Tom Dwyer, and editorial assistant Susan Cronin for their help. Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, Harold J. Cook

Introduction: Making and Knowing

Harold J. Cook, Pamela H. Smith, and Amy R. W. Meyers

To speak about the foundations of knowledge always has been impor­ tant. But the subject is a difficult one that sometimes is also unsettling, for it is not always about quiet thoughts in sunlit rooms. The ancients knew this well. The goddess Athena, for instance, is best known in the modern world as a symbol of wisdom and science, but to those who en­ countered her in person, she also commanded in war. Her companion was the owl, a bird both able to see things we cannot and a fierce preda­ tor. Because we humans are mainly daytime creatures, we most often no­ tice the owl at moments between light and dark. The wisdom of the owl comes to our minds on the edge of field and wood, at dusk, aware of the movement of wild things before it sets flight to seek out warm-blooded prey, the bird that can see in the darkness. The goddess of wisdom is clearly associated with those moments when the unexpected makes itself known. Sometimes the real world is not at all what we would like it to be, but moves just out of sight, emerging unexpectedly when we approach. Nature can be beautiful as well as fierce. But it is not always kind. And so it was in the early modern world: a great deal of what we might call scien­ tific knowledge arose not from daylight moments of peaceful contempla­ tion but from the edge of darkness, with sword and shield in hand, and eyes wide open. The combination of war and wisdom embodied by Athena is still found in the associations ordinary people around the world make when they think of science. For instance, Amatav Ghosh tells of a confronta­ tion between himself (originally from India but studying for a degree

2 Ways of Making and Knowing

in Britain) and an imam from the Egyptian village where he had been living. A conversation they had begun quickly boiled over into a chauvin­ istic argument about which of their two “civilizations” was better, which caused them each to invoke the matter of superiority more generally, with their voices rising uncontrollably until they choked on their words. He writes that

at that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we under­ stood one another perfectly. We were both traveling, he and I: we were traveling in the West. The only difference was that I had actu­ ally been there, in person: I could have told him a great deal about it, seen at first hand, its libraries, its museums, its dteaters, but it wouldn’t have mattered. We would have known, both of us, that all that was mere fluff: in the end, for millions and millions of people on the landmasses around us, the West meant only this—science and tanks and guns and bombs.1 The association between science and the cunning crafting of powerful things, as embodied by Athena and her owl, remains very much alive. But her wisdom applied to peaceful activities as well. Ordinary people might add to the modern list of Athena’s gifts not only the li­ braries, museums, and theaters mentioned by Ghosh, but televisions, computers, electrical grids, and antibiotics, clean drinking water, and modern surgery. It is because wisdom arises from activity in the world that Athena combined wisdom not only with war but also with the arts, industry, and even justice: to manufacture things suitable for a goddess took a combination of superb skill and craft, allowing insight into the weighing of actions that made for a balanced view of human activity. The English w'ord craft implies not only ability with hands but understand­ ing of how to accomplish one’s purposes, as in craftiness. The Greek equivalent is “metis” (MfjtKj), meaning something like the knowledge that comes from doing things with purpose, or in a somewhat archaic English, “cunning.”2 Twentieth-century ideas of science, however, tended strongly not to consider Athena’s attributes in the round, but to emphasize her birth from the head of Zeus. In Greek mythology, Metis was the Titan and goddess of wisdom: when pregnant, Metis’s husband, Zeus, swallowed her to ensure that she would not bear a son mightier than himself; in­ side him Metis set about weaving and smithing for Athena, the daughter she would bear, and these activities caused Zeus agonies so great that

Introduction

3

he called on his son Hephaestus to split open his skull, from which emerged the full-grown Atliena clothed in the robe and helmet made by her mother and carrying the Aegis, the shield that would protect her from sword and arrow. It was a part of this myth, the idea of wisdom emerging fully formed from the head of the chief ruler of the heavens that seemed to apply to science. Relativity theory seemed to have fully emerged from Einstein’s head rather than from experimentation, and Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others involved with the Copen­ hagen interpretation of quantum mechanics also emphasized creative thinking as the foundation for the new physics. That is, the new science of the twentieth century was considered to be “philosophical” at heart, and the history of science therefore a history of concepts, even a branch of die history of philosophy. The philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead recollected the 1919 lecture at the Royal Society when Arthur Eddington announced the astronomical confirmation of Ein­ stein’s theory, with a portrait of Isaac Newton looking down on the scene while his “great adventure in thought” was replaced by a new one. It marked a watershed in the history of science, Whitehead thought. Wh ile earlier science had been marked by the discovery of “brute facts,” what made the new science revolutionary was “this union of passionate inter­ est in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation.”3 Contemporary scholars such as E. A. Burtt and E. J. Dijksterhuis began to write about the metaphysical foundations of science,4 while the Institute for Advanced Study was established in Princeton in 1930 with the explicit intention of furthering abstract thought, thus famously making no provi­ sion for laboratories for the scientists who worked there. A story still told to new institute members is that during Einstein’s period of residency there a reporter asked to see his lab, and he replied, touching his pen to his temple, “here it is young man, here it is.” In the period after the Second World War such views were amplified in Western Europe and America. Historians and philosophers of science argued strongly for the separation of what was termed “pure” science from applied science. For instance, as I. Bernard Cohen, the first pro­ fessor of the history of science at Harvard, put it: “Who, after studying Newton’s magnificent contribution to thought, could deny that pure sci­ ence exemplifies the creative accomplishment of the human spirit as its pinnacle?”5 It was a view that was certainly understandable in someone like Charles Gillispie, who, as an artillery officer with the U.S. Army in Europe, had experienced more than enough destruction and human misery, and therefore self-consciously wished to pursue a kind of history'

4 Ways of Making and Knowing far removed from die darker aspects of life; he could see in the history of science something uplifting and hopeful about the human spirit, he thought.6 People like him also shared in the widespread attempt to keep science out of the hands of politicians, which was seen as one of the major failings of both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes.7 This was an im­ portant and honorable line of argument, which was not only shaped by the Cold War but also led to much very fine academic research and writ­ ing that remains worth our serious attention. Today the argument con­ tinues to have importance, when all members of die modern university feel the pressures from government, industry, and religious and political ideologies for making research relevant to contemporary affairs in one way or another. Continuing to defend the ability of academics to follow their research wherever it may lead—whether they be scholars in die hu­ manities and social sciences or in the natural sciences—remains some­ thing of interest to us all. But these kinds of real-world entanglements have sometimes been creative, too, and whether we consider them good or bad, they form a part of the history of knowledge that requires our attention. There is danger for historians in treating investigations on the dusky edges of the as-yet-unknown simply as peaceful thoughts arising for their own sake, instead of uncomfortable dilemmas and conflicts aris­ ing from creative human engagement with need, nature, and the dark. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has, however, created many new opportunities for considering the history of science in fuller ways. Athe­ na’s emergence from Zeus’s head was, after all, the result of Metis’s wis­ dom and skill, and led to the birth of Athena’s brand of cunning. There were some attempts to interpret the history of science in this manner during the 1930s and beyond, mainly under the heading of “craftsmen and scholars,” but the philosophical idealists who dominated the field saw such efforts as supporting a Marxist interpretation, and would have nothing to do with it. For instance, in the late 1930s the sociologist Rob­ ert K. Merton’s PhD dissertation and book drew heavily on several British scientists and Marxists, among others, in making an argument for the importance of warfare and commerce in the development of English science in the seventeenth century, while a few years later Edgar Zilscl similarly used sociological and historical arguments to make a case for craft skills helping to shape scientific theories.8 In contrast, the eminent British historian G. N. Clark, who had been disturbed by the impact of some of the papers given by a Soviet delegation to the 1931 International Congress of the History of Science and Technology’, argued forcefully against the role of “social" causes in the formation of scientific ideas.9 In

Introduction

5

the postwar period two of the most powerful voices for the new discipline of the history of science, Alexandre Koyre and A. Rupert Hall, made the destruction of such ideas a very plain agenda in their work. Koyr6 wrote, for instance, that “I do not see what the scientia activa has ever had to do with the development of the calculus, nor the rise of the bourgeoisie with that of the Copernican, or Keplerian, astronomy.”10 Hall in turn argued that the skills of craftsmen were not important in the making of scientific knowledge.11 The position favoring the importance of the crafting of things for the knowledge of nature became seen as a weak subset of the “externalist” position that social changes caused alterations in scientific ideas.12 Although externalism had some proponents in the 1950s and 1960s, who began to become more vocal following the rise of the New Left in the 1970s, its main orientation remained the attempt to explain scientific ideas in terms of social processes, since a history of sci­ entific concepts remained the chief objective of die field, while the crite­ ria by which such science arrived at universal truths in turn remained a strategic bastion in the war against the politicization of science. Whatever the merits of the internalist-externalist debate, a plethora of problems occurs when dividing mind and hand in such ways. For the early modern period, at least, one of the most important problems is that the category of “scientist” removes people from any concerns about their livelihoods. It is almost as if the famous authors retrospectively admired and inserted into the canon of scientists were all full-time academic pro­ fessors with tenure and enough funding to do as they liked. This was certainly not the case until recent decades.13 Consider, for example, just a few of the most famous names of the so-called scientific revolution: Nicolaus Copernicus, Andreas Vesalius, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Gali­ lei, William Harvey, Rene Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton. Only three of these nine—Vesalius, Galileo, and Newton—can be said to have been university academics for part of their lives, and all of them left for more important places, such as positions to serve princes and governments, as soon as they could. While following in the wake of art history and related subjects there was, from the 1980s, growing attention to questions of princely patronage, it seemed to come as a surprise to Sam Westfall, one of the most distinguished historians of science of his generation, to discover for himself how many contributors to natural knowledge were engaged in medicine, technology, and crafts, and a host of other practical occupations." A second and related prob­ lem was that a conceptual history of science created artificial divisions between “science” and other subjects, obscuring the overlaps and syner-

6 Ways of Making and Knowing

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gies created by the multiplicity of activities in any one personal life and the variety of interrelationships between people engaged in such vari­ ous pursuits. There never have been impermeable boundaries to human knowledge, especially before the widespread establishment of laborato­ ries and factory-like disciplines for their full-time workers. With die end of die Cold War, however, new opportunities to reshape questions about the foundations of knowledge have arisen that make Athena’s cunning open to fresh investigation. Inspired pardy by the lead of historians of art, historians of science began to examine practices of knowledge-making rather than the theories of nature that had seemed to an earlier generation to be die salient feature of artistic and scientific activity.15 Once practices began to be examined, a new cast of characters emerged from the background to populate the history of science. Medi­ cal practitioners contracting, dealing, and bartering in the lively medical marketplace not only contributed to a decline in classical learning, but also forged new methods of scrutinizing nature.16 The practices of col­ lecting natural materials and information about the transformation and manipulation of nature by craftspeople, apothecaries, and merchants, as well as by scholars and princes, came to be seen as central to the story of die empirical new philosophy.17 Historians of science came to see how crucial the study of nature was for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century radical religious reformers (both Catholic and Protestant) as well as for the centralizing states trying to eliminate their disruptive presence. Both alchemical projectors and commercial entrepreneurs seeking attention from those principalities drew a direct connection between nature and profit.18 Those same states also sought out practitioners skilled at ma­ nipulating nature for their staging of the theater of state, upon which early modern governance so depended. They drew practitioners of the liberal and the mechanical arts with equal enthusiasm into their courts and growing bureaucracies. These and many other practical individuals from the early modern era have become a main focus of historians of science, and to a lesser extent of historians of art. By the first years of the twenty-first century, a growing interest in using material culture as a method to connect head and hand also held out increased possibilities for collaborative exchanges between curators and academics.19 To assist in further developing these important new lines of inquiry, the three of us thought that we should try to gather together academi­ cians, curators, students, and members of the public for an exchange of views. Our conversations, which began in 2001, led to an ambitious plan for a weeklong conference in London in mid-July 2005 that would take

Introduction

7

advantage of the expertise of several institutions and venues, and com­ bine hands-on demonstrations and reports from museum scholars with lectures by historians of art and science from the academy. The themes we settled on in order to connect historical objects and words were cast in the form of active verbs: collecting, preserving, healing, representing, making, and consuming, with speakers asked to address themselves to the ways in which engagement with the material world in these ways be­ came translated into knowledge. Pamela Smith was already working with art historians from universities and museums, as well as craftspeople, for her book project on art and experience in the period of the Scientific Revolution,20 and successfully managed to obtain financial support for parts of the conference from the National Science Foundation; Amy Meyers had extensive contacts in the world of art and art history, and could organize financial support from the Yale Center for British Art (in turn supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Lon­ don); and Hal Cook could bring in other historians of science, histori­ ans of medicine, and both financial and administrative support from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, with further financial support from the Wellcome Trust. The enthusiastic collabora­ tion of the administration and staff of several other eminent institutions, and their willingness to contribute resources as well, made it possible to hold the meeting at several locations: the Chelsea Physic Garden; British Museum; Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew; Natural History Museum, Lon­ don; Linnean Society; Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A); and Painshill Park; breakout sessions and small group lours with hands-on experience at the Natural History Museum, V&A, Kew, and Painshill allowed par­ ticipants to work with curators in small groups. The efforts of Ms. Sally Bragg in particular, as well as Sharon Messenger and other staff mem­ bers of the Centre, along ivith a number of graduate students from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, were critical to the organization and smooth running of the proceedings. With a long list of participants and registrants, the conference went ahead a few days after the London bombings, but with hardly any dtinning of attendance. The essays published here are not simply those delivered at the con­ ference, but a selection of essays much revised in light of the conference and further reflection, and by people from a variety of academic and museological backgrounds, so as to continue to develop die conversation from a variety of perspectives. While we have dropped explicit references to the various kinds of activities by which the conference was organized, their legacy will be evident under the surface of these essays, as it will in

8 Ways of Making and Knowing

the object-based analyses. In bringing them forward, we seek to exam­ ine the relationship between different areas of making and knowing in order to gain a better understanding of what comprised the knowledge of nature and the nature of making from the Renaissance forward, and how working with particular things might lead to generalizable knowl­ edge of use and judgment, embodying Athena and her owl in the round. Ian Hankey, in his demonsU'ation of Venetian glassmaking (available at http://www.culturalhistoriesofthematerialworld.com/books/ways-ofmaking-and-knowing-the-material-culture-of-empirical-knowledge/multimedia/), provides a particularly good example of how a full and ro­ bust knowledge of things can disappear in favor of concepts arising from outside the artisan workshop. Hankey had thought that the remarkable pieces of glass made in Venice several centuries ago demonstrated that their makers had some kind of lost skill that he and others would never be able to replicate today. Working with Venetian glass was, however, a revelation. In blowing glass, as in other artisanal activities, it is essential to get a feeling for the material, a feeling that cannot be fully articulated (hence Hankey’s use of the term “tacit skill,” which he considers prelimi­ nary to the “tacit knowledge” that is sometimes discussed in relation to science). Old Venetian glass, it turns out, handles quite differently from the kinds of glass provided for modern glassmaking workshops. It could, for instance, be shaped at lower temperatures and was remarkably forgiv­ ing in how it responded to the artisan’s actions, allowing Hankey to take risks that enhanced his own skills. Handling such a material prompted him to reconsider how the Venetians had worked, and so how someone like himself could learn to make objects as intricate and fine as they once did. The trick is, then, in the material itself as well as in the art of the maker. Hankey thinks that the problem is in how the materials with which modern glassmakers work have been manufactured not by the craftspeople but by the processes of large firms, whose managers are in turn responsible to other kinds of people and interests, and whose tasks are defined by documents and numbers. An additional problem for us is in the discourse about “art”: even in teaching art students it is difhcult and expensive to give them teacher-directed experience with materials, while at the same time they are marked by exams that require the verbal articulation of their work, all of which pushes both students and teach­ ers toward “conceptual art.” Such reflections point out starkly how very difficult—but how very important—it is for historians to consider care­ fully the material things with which actors once worked and from which they derived tacit skills and tacit knowledge that they subsequently at-

Introduction

9

tempted to articulate in the form of concepts. Only with an awareness of the material culture of the time can the historian elicit meanings that are not anachronistic and overly abstract. In her essay, Pamela Smith examines the practices, recipes, and ob­ jects of artisans to argue that they articulate a system of knowledge about nature and matter. She includes examples from the world of mining and metalworking, a number of which prominendy feature butter. Another of her sources is the notebook of a craftsman using animals in his cast­ ings from nature. It records his instructions for the capture, care, and use of various kinds of animals, as well as methods for casting them. They show how deeply embedded in making is the sense of knowing. Smith terms these interconnections between practice and the articulation of it “vernacular science.” That kind of knowing is quite different from mod­ ern scientific paradigms, and even from the kinds of learned discourses that at the time went by the name of natural philosophy, but it was criti­ cal for the development of a confident knowledge about how the world of things worked. Similarly, Suzanne Butters writes about the ways in which the bodily efforts of artists lead them to develop new skills, which then were associ­ ated with die wisdom that came from the inner transformations wrought by the sacrifices made to acquire those abilities. Their “works of art,” as we call them, were therefore not self-contained worlds but material expressions of bodies of knowledge. Alisha Rankin in turn explains how knowledge and experience were interwoven in medical recipes. In the early modern period, a German term began to appear with more frequency—Wissenschafi—a word now translated as “science” but then referred to “how-to” knowledge rather than abstract concepts. Late fif­ teenth- and sixteenth-century laypeople and medical practitioners were therefore engaged in the making of Wissenschafi when they circulated advice and information, or published books containing recipes (even when practitioners sometimes worried about whether making such knowledge public might give other people the power to do harm as well as good). Formal judgments about artisanal production further demon­ strate the convergence of making and knowledge. According to Patrick Wallis and Catherine Wright, who have investigated the records of royal and trade-based regulatory bodies in early modern England, when judg­ ing of products occurred, the nature of the physical evidence and how to interpret it seems to have been mainly unproblematic, although for some kinds of things the evaluative protocols could be quite complex and precise. There were some unexpected differences, however, with

10 Ways of Making and Knowing

apothecaries deploying an array of material procedures for testing in disputed cases, whereas university-educated physicians were content to rely almost entirely on sensory and intuitive evidence, suggesting that by our measures the “shopkeepers” were more “scientific” than the scholars. But in such cases everyone was aware of the trade-off between gaining certainty and the effort and resources required for thorough­ ness, so that common practice rather than investigative precision was the norm. In other words, to judge their own and others’ work, practitioners dtemselves deployed somewhat more developed versions of the kinds of skills that consumers also used when making judgments in the market. While vernacular science therefore certainly depended on the close con­ nection between making and knowing, it was not the equivalent of “the scientific method.” Yet efforts to find better methods of making also drove the search for fresh and accurate information. One can even see this in the relation­ ships between the production of textiles and natural history, as Alicia Weisberg-Roberts demonstrates. Weavers and dyers sought out more du­ rable, more versatile, or simply more novel fibers and dyestuffs, and in doing so not only participated in but to a large extent helped drive the global trade in these commodities. And, in turn, this trade informed and stimulated works of natural history. The search for new botanical specimens was no simple task, however, nor was the importation of living plants. Only five lists survive of the many annual seed boxes sent by John Bartrain from North America to England from about 1745 to 1769, but Joel Fry’s study of them reveals much about Bartram’s business and his vernacular taxonomy. By Bartram’s interests and means, about ninety-five kinds of woody plants were first introduced to English gardens. Further study of Bartram and those around him by Mark Laird and Karen Bridg­ man traces a shift in his work from shipping—and instructing on the ger­ mination of—fertile seeds to methods for keeping large specimens alive during transportation and transplantation. Even when specimens were readily available for study, however, the conveyance of information about them onto the page was no simple task, as Lisa Ford shows. An anno­ tated copy of Andre Michaux’s Histoire des Chenes (History of Oaks), from about 1801, allows her to follow the multiple steps made by many people from collecting, to pressing a specimen, to drawing it and describing it in words, to engraving the plate, and finally printing it in a book, all under the careful scrutiny of the author. The decorative aesthetics of the art­ ists, as well as the scholarly requirements of the author, affected the final result, showing that while “objectivity” might be about objects, it was not simple or disinterested, but immersed in the making of books.

Introduction

11

Even the making of the objects that were meant to contain and show many of the most important objects in a collection—the cabinets themselves—affected the development of objectivity. Glenn Adamson refers to this process as the “cabinetization of knowledge.” Methods for storing collected material changed dramatically between 1650 and 1750, first for the display of books and then for the display of objects, caus­ ing the emergence of specialized cabinetmakers with skills in joinery who crafted drawers and managed workshops that enabled the design of multiple pieces of furniture that were meant to appear as one grand and seamless statement. The new drawer-filled cabinets in turn closed off the viewer from the object unless the investigator had purpose enough to move to a particular drawer and open it, furthering the movement from singular curiosity to abstract type. Even the query lists explored by Elizabeth Yale demonstrate how large human communities could be embodied in the material means of listing, publishing, replying, and ac­ cumulating the masses of information in which specimens rested and took on meaning. In all such examples, the methods by which objects and information were gathered and managed transformed both knowl­ edge and epistemological values. The production of early modern scien­ tific objectivity depended not only on the objects themselves but on die material means by which they were moved, displayed, and represented in word and image. Such methods had unexpected effects in the production of scientific knowledge. For instance, one of the subjects of greatest interest to early modern naturalists was die material form of living beings, or anatomy. Harold J. Cook shows that in the 1650s new methods of preserving bod­ ies and body parts, from embalming to bottiing, were developed from the efforts of merchants and artisans; these not only allowed for “wet” specimens to supplement dry ones, but enabled a variety of investigatory methods to be elaborated that furthered die development of the anat­ omy of fine structures, which in turn transformed scientific knowledge. The abstracting of generalizations from particulars is also exemplified in Sachiko Kusukawa’s discussion of the great sixteenth-century physician and naturalist, Conrad Gessner. Gessner used drawings and images to develop the knowledge of nature, and spoke of them as “ad vivum.” But remarks he made in a letter to one of his learned friends makes it clear that his appreciation of Wenzel Jamnitzer’s “nature-cast” artwork was not intended so much to indicate that a representation was more or less die same to the eye as the form of the thing represented, but that it invoked a sense of the essence of the thing in the person beholding it. Artisans such as Jamnitzer, Gessner was saying, could inspire new knowledge in

12 Ways of Making and Knowing

well-educated men such as himself, even in instances where they had not themselves been in contact with the living tilings. Such images of objects could sometimes even represent large and abstract concepts, as Horst Bredekamp shows in die case of Darwin’s coral. Darwin’s theory of evolution is often represented as a tree, even by Darwin himself, with the ancestry' of modern creatures moving from trunk to branch, to stem and leaf. But his first sketch of the idea was inspired not only by the new aquarium-fancying of his day but by his early work on coral reefs, which showed him that soft-bodied animals could transform dieir world dramatically enough to withstand the pounding of seas in great storms, fighting off the forces of erosion so effectively that islands could form. Here is die survival of the fittest without invoking tooth and claw, a com­ plex of ideas in one image, arising from a world “semantically laden and artistically enchanted,” even if we now mistake it for something more familiar and enduring. Tangible things are transformed by time, then, dying and decaying, whatever we may try to do to preserve them, whether leaving behind hardened reefs or nothing at all. It should come as no surprise then— although it does—that die sense of alteration and ending can bring ob­ jects “to life” for the viewers. Mary Brooks begins by remarking on how excited museum visitors can become when faced with objects that do not appear to be pristine but show signs of age. But museum practice has absorbed the early modern view that dieir purpose is to conceal the marks of time: museums are, as she puts it, “machines for the destruction of time.” As cathedrals celebrating the unchanging existence of material objects, the purposes of the modem museum are to showcase certain kinds of eternal truths, many of them arising from mortal makers and their momentary knowledge, and meant in turn for the users of objects rather than merely for viewers, or “visitors” and audiences, as they are now called. Overall, then, these contributions show that the history of science is not a history of concepts, or at least not that alone, but a history of the making and using of objects to understand the world. Athena emerged only after Metis had equipped her with helmet, robe, and shield, and she became not only the goddess of wisdom but of many arts. The com­ mon view of craftspeople more or less mindlessly following a collection of recipes or rules—which are said to be fundamentally different from “science”—has greatly distorted our understanding of the growth of natural knowledge in the early modern period. More intensive exami­ nation of material practices makes it clear that the methods of the arti-

I

Introduction

13

san represent a process of knowledge-making that involved both exten­ sive experimentation and observation and generalizations about matter and nature. As increasing numbers of people came to be immersed in such activities, whether as craftspeople, medical practitioners, mer­ chants, nobles, magistrates, reformers, collectors, and even scholars, the attributes of “nature” were not only articulated in a variety of ways, and not only seen as a resource for human use, but came to be identi­ fied with a variety of “goods.” Knowing nature could of course lead to material betterment; but for many, living according to nature’s dictates also led to personal ethics and the public good. As natural knowledge became increasingly important in these various ways, it forged new con­ nections among groups, helped create new identities, brought about new kinds of claims to authority and intellectual legitimacy, and gave rise to new ways of thinking about the senses, certainty, and episte­ mology. None of this could have happened without the conversations and controversies that enabled the assessment of objects in novel ways. The cunning of Athena entered the human world not only through scholars’ rooms but through laboratories and workshops, collections of curiosities, medical practices, and even assessments of human action. Athena was as skillful as she was wise. She may have emerged from her father’s head, but only after a knowing mother had endowed her with helmet, robe, and shield.

NOTES

1. Amatav Ghosh, In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale

(New York: Vintage, 1994), 236. 2. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modem Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 269300. 3. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modem World (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1927; reprint, New York: Free Press, 1967), 13, 3. 4. Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), first published 1924; on Burtt, also see Lorraine Daston, “History of Science in an Elegiac Mode: E.A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science Revisited,” Isis 82 (1991): 522-31; E. J. Dijksterhuis, “Moet het Meetkunde-Onderwijs Gewijzigd Worden?,” Nieuw Tijdschrift voor Wiskunde 1 (1924): 1-26. later elaborated in his De Mechanisering van het Wereldbeeld (1950), published in English as E. J. Dijksterhuis, The. Mechanization of the World Picture: Pythago­ ras to Newton, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), first published 1961; more generally, H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific

14 Ways of Making and Knowing

Revolution: /I Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For a recent warning about the dangers of treating science as meta­ physics, see Gary Hatfield, “Metaphysics and the New Science,” in Reapprais­ als of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 93-166. 5. I. Bernard Cohen, The Birth of a New Physics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 184, first published 1960. 6. Recollection of his personal remarks at a meeting of the History of Science Society, about 1992. 7. A. Rupert Hall, “On Whiggism,” History of Science 21 (1983): 45-59. 8. Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), first published in 1938, but see the introduction to this edition for his puzzlement about why the “Puri­ tanism” part of his thesis came to dominate the other parts of his argument; Robert K. Merton, “Science and the Economy of Seventeenth Century England,” Science and Society 3 (1939): 3-27; Edgar Zilsel, “The Origins of William Gilbert’s Scientific Method,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1941): 1-33; Edgar Zilsel, “The Sociological Roots of Science,” American Journal of Sociology 47 (1942): 544-62. Also see Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modem Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), and Reijer Hooykaas, “The Rise of Modern Science: When and Why?” British Journalfor the History of Science 20 (1987): 453-73. 9. G. N. Clark, Science and Social Welfare in the Age ofNewton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), originally published in 1937. 10. Alexandre Koyre, Newtonian Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968), 6. 11. A. Rupert Hall, Ballistics in the Seventeenth Century: A Study in the Relations of Science and War with Reference Principally to England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); A. R. Hall, “Scholar and Craftsman,” in Critical Prob­ lems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959). 12. For comments on this well-known theme, see Steven Shapin, “Understand­ ing the Merton Thesis," Isis 19 (1988): 594-605; Steven Shapin, “Disciplin­ ing and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as Seen through the Extemalism-lntemalism Debate,” History of Science 30 (1992): 333-69; Michael Aaron Dennis, “Historiography of Science: An American Perspec­ tive," in Companion to Science in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Krige and Dominique Pestre (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002). For a sample of the argument, see Jerome J. Ravetz, “Marxism and the History of Science,” Isis 72 (1981): 393-402; R. S. Westfall, “Reflections on Ravetz’s Essay,” Isis 72 (1981): 402-5. 13. Also see Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modem Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For a recent argu­ ment that early modem science is best described as natural philosophy, the preserve of university and other clerics, see Andrew Cunningham, “How the Principia Got Its Name; Or, Taking Natural Philosophy Seriously,” History of Science 29 (1991): 377-92; Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, “De-

1

Introduction

15

Centring the ‘Big Picture’: The Origins of Modem Science and the Modern Origins of Science,” British Journalfor the History ofScience 26 (1993): 407-32. 14. Richard S. Westfall, “Science and Technology during the Scientific Revo­ lution: An Empirical Approach,” in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modem Europe, ed. J. V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 63-72. On patronage, for example, Robert S. Westman, "The Astron­ omer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study,” History ofScience 18 (1980): 105-47; David S. Lux, Patronage and Royal Science in SeventeenthCentury France: The Acadimie de Physique in Caen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Bruce T. Moran, “Patronage and Institutions: Courts, Univer­ sities, and Academies in Germany: An Overview 1550-1750,” in Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology and Medicine at the European Court, 15001750, ed. Bruce T. Moran (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1991), 169-83; Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolut­ ism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modem Italy (Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 1994). 15. The literature on the subject is large, but see, for example, Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni­ versity Press, 1991); J. V. Field, The Invention ofInfinity: Mathematics and A rt in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); J. V. Field, “Math­ ematics and the Craft of Painting: Piero della Francesca and Perspective," in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modem Europe, ed. J. V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 73-95; and Martin Kemp, The Science ofArt: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). See also Michael Baxandall, “The Bear­ ing of the Scientific Study of Vision on Painting in the 18th Century: Pieter Camper’s De Visit (1746),” in The Natural Sciences and the Arts: Aspects of Interaction from the Renaissance to the 20th Century, ed. Allan Ellenius (Stock­ holm: Almqvist &: Wiksell, 1985), 125-32, and David Summers, TheJudgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1987). 16. Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Katherine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Gianna Pomata, Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Mod­ em Bologna, trans. Rosemarie Foy and Anna Taraboletti-Segre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); David Gentilcore, Medical Charlatan­ ism in Early Modem Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and more generally Mark S. R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis, “The Medical Marketplace,” in Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450-c. 1850, ed. Jen­ ner and Wallis (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1-23.

16 Ways of Making and Knowing

17. Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Eamon, Sci­ ence and the Secrets of Nature; Findlen, Possessing Nature; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Amy R. W. Meyers, ed., Art and Science in America: Issues of Representation (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1998); Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 18. For example, Mar Rey Bueno, Los Sehores del Fuego: Destiladores y Espagiricos en la Corte de los Austrias (Madrid: Ediciones Corona Borealis, 2002): Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolu­ tion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Tara E. Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 2007); Charles Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic, and Mission al the End of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 19. Esp. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, Peter Dear, eds. The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007). For examples of earlier academic foundations, see Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. (Basic Books, 1979); Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Mod­ em Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodem Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (New York: Routledge, 1998). 20. Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

ONE

Making as Knowing: Craft as Natural Philosophy Pamela H. Smith

When the heirs of Augsburg merchant Christoph Fugger commissioned a bronze-gilt altarpiece in the 1580s, they could have had no idea that it would take three long and troubled years to complete. An account book records the material side of this process—the artisans paid, the raw materials bought, and a startling three entries for die purchase of butter.1 In a seminal article based on the study of this account book, Mi­ chael Baxandall demonstrated how such a work of art came into being— not as the labor of a single artist, but through the efforts of a series of artisans from all over Europe who learned as they went, not just from each other, but also from the molds their predecessors had produced as well as from the various failures, miscasts, and refractory materials. In an understated and completely brilliant manner, Baxandall showed that a detailed study of the making of an object can rewrite the history of art, and move it from a narrative about individual artists to one that resembles more an artisanal workshop—a collaborative space in which objects, and indeed matter itself, are part of the cognitive and productive process. Baxandall’s is an exceedingly important study and I will come back to the issues it raises, but for now my focus is on the butter. What did the metalworkers do with those pounds of butter? Was it part of the making process, like the soft bread used to erase drawings, the crushed garlic employed in mordant gilding, or the urine of small boys collected for tempering steel? Or, could it have been a part of the workers’ nour­ ishment, like the beer recorded in many contracts? Or was it simply one of those quaint practices of the workshop handed dotvn from master

17

18 Ways of Making and Knowing to apprentice? The account book notes that the butter was purchased “for the gilders against the evil smoke.”2 How could the consumption of butter work against poisonous fumes? Can we reconstruct the world­ view in which this practice made sense? In this essay, I will explore these questions in order to try to delineate what might be called a “vernacular science of matter.” In other words, how making with natural materials was also about knowing nature in a generalized sense. Did artisans pos­ sess a body of beliefs about nature and the behavior of natural materials that underpinned their workshop practices? Before I go on to consider this question, there are, I think, two ways of approaching the question of the relationship between making and knowing or of craft and “sci­ ence.” First, we might think of all the ways in which early modem craft overlapped with or contributed to the development of modern science. In this category, we can find many examples: in metalworking we see that craft techniques, such as the use of precision instruments—the en­ closed balance in assaying, for example—and the practices of trying, test­ ing, and experimenting in smelting and sculpting, were very much like the empirical practices that became enshrined as part of the scientific method. Another example is the advent of the first “scientific herbals” such as that of Otto Brunfels and Hans Weiditz, published in Strasbourg in the 1530s. These texts emerged out of the collaboration between art­ ists, who had independently developed naturalistic representation and botanical nature study as well as the print techniques that made possible the communicative value of these texts, and humanists like Brunfels who desired to analyze the texts of Dioscorides. The printer-entrepreneur Johann Schott was in fact the key to the project by bringing these two men with their previously independent trajectories into conjuncture.3 The history of the production of this herbal illustrates the overlapping worlds and expertises out of which emerged what we have come to label “scientific knowledge.” More examples can be found in the work of “lay” observers in the area of natural history, such as Adriaen Coenen (1514-87), the fish mer­ chant and scribe to the fish auction clerk in sixteenth-century Schevening, Holland. Coenen kept a “memory book” from 1530 to 1587 of his observations on sea life,4 and in other instances, craftspeople made natural historical observations in the course of their making, such as an anonymous French metalsmith, who observed that a crayfish is molded with difficulty, but it is a good practice to learn how to mould much more difficult things. The males can be distin-

i

I

Making as Knowing

19

guished from the females by the eggs that females carry. Also by the four little white legs males have at the end of their body, inside the tail and following the eight main legs. It is not bad to let it dry a little because the shell becomes firmer and more beautiful.5 And,

the viper . . . has beautiful, conspicuous scales on its entire body and especially on its head and under the throat. It has a flat head, a red mouth tending to flesh-colored, its large jaws point upward like those of a horned aspic or like the top of a pig’s snout. Its eyes are very close to its mouth; its open mouth shows double canines on each side. . . . The viper also has a tube of flesh in its throat like the tail of a dog. The other snakes have a double line of teeth.6

We might also bring forward as evidence of this overlap the com­ munity of enthusiastic observers and painters of nature that formed in Nuremberg after Albrecht Durer’s lifetime.7 Such practices went far to validate observational techniques and the claims that such observation and representation could yield a form of knowledge that possessed a high level of certainty, what we might call “scientific” today. This enthu­ siasm for observing and representing nature legitimated the study of na­ ture more generally, and facilitated social acceptance of a new empiricist investigation of nature.8 These examples make clear that craft can be investigative—like natu­ ral philosophy or “science”—and not just productive. These then are a few examples in which craft and the investigation of nature overlap, but I want to push the question of craft and natural philosophy further and map out craft paradigms of nature that do not necessarily end in the lelos of modern science. My effort in this essay is to answer the question of what “vernacular” science taken for itself might look like. To answer this question, we must consider the documents that can give us insight into the mental—as contrasted to the social—world of the artisan. Much artisanal knowledge is largely tacit: apprentices learned their craft not by reading texts or even sometimes by language at all, but rather by working alongside experienced masters and by observa­ tion and repetitive bodily experience. Lacking written documents about this tacit knowledge, how then do we go about building up a picture of artisanal knowledge and “theorizing”? If writing, and even language is lacking, how do we reconstruct historical techniques of making, experi-

20 Ways of Making and Knowing

encing, and knowing? In order to do so, as all museum scholars already know, we must concentrate on practices and objects, as well as drawing from a wide variety of other sources. Some of these sources are very fa­ miliar, such as guild regulations, contracts, inventories, artists’ accounts and correspondence; some are slightly less familiar to the general his­ torian, although obviously well known by the museum scholar, such as technical treatises and written and pictorial descriptions of the workshop (see figs. 1, 2, 3, and 4).’ Another source, again well known to die mu­ seum conservator, is the recipe collection. One of the sources I will dis­ cuss at length in this essay is a sixteenth-century metalsmith’s treatise that often seems to be a stream of consciousness list of a multitude of kinds of sands and burnt bones to be used for frame casting. For example, on a single page, the manual includes a recipe for a medicine to counter eye diseases alongside instructions for the alloying of metals. It seems a random jumble of recipes and processes as they occurred to the author. Such records of practice have often been taken at face value as random lists, but I believe that working through such a treatise can illuminate underlying structures of knowledge. In this essay I employ such texts of practice, but, following Baxandall’s lead, I also examine objects, because, above all else, craft is pro­ ductive knowledge and its products are records of practices as well as repositories of knowledge.10 We might think of an object as the residue of an enormous number of cultural exchanges among individuals and of their belief systems, organized practices, networks, and accumulated knowledge. Objects inscribe the memory of previous generations’ inno­ vations and cognitions, and their making requires very significant ex­ pertise. This expertise is itself the result of a “culture” that has multiple layers—of socialization within a craft, a network of workshops, patterns of consumption and production.” So, to investigate artisanal knowledge, we need to employ objects as a source and think about the techniques of their making, for, as is clear from the metalsmith’s comment about crayfish, making was bound up with knowing for artisans in the early modem period. To return to butter: In what follows, I examine two artisanal practices, both involving the unlikely combination of butter and mercury, in order to draw out the underlying principles by which the craftsmen organized their work and viewed their world. I seek to show that these workshop practices were underpinned by a broad but coherent body of principles and beliefs about nature and the behavior of natural materials; a body of knowledge, as we shall see, that artisans often sought in an empirical and systematic way.

Making as Knowing 21

Fig. 1. Etienne Deiaune (ca. 1518-83/95), A goldsmith’s workshop (one of a pair, ca. 1576). The man serving a client through the window is possibly a self-portrait by Deiaune who worked as a goldsmith in Paris in 1546. Images such as this inform us about artisanal techniques, but must be employed cautiously as evidence. Engraving, 80 x 120 mm. PD 1983, 1114.778. British Museum, London. © The Trustees of The British Museum / Art Resource, NY.

What of the purchase of butter “for the gilders against the evil smoke” in the Fugger account book? In numerous vernacular texts of practice, ranging from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, we find repeated admonitions about the evil smoke of metals. These texts usu­ ally cautioned the metalworkers not to work on an empty stomach and to cover their mouths with cloth or pigs’ bladders. The sixteenth-century metalsmith’s manuscript advises: “If you eat a piece of toast with butter in the morning, neither antimony nor any vapor will harm you. Or put half a pig’s bladder over your face.”12 “And keep some of this butter, some of the spice zedoary, or some gold coins in your mouth, and bandage your face with a wet towel from below your eyes to your chin”(see fig. 5).13 Other manuscript instructions advise the worker to “eat a thick piece of bread and butter” before beginning work,1'1 and a miners’ manual warns that before entering the shafts, miners should eat a piece of bread spread with butter and the herb scabwort. Scabwort is also “good to hold

22 Ways of Making and Knowing

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Fig. 2. Etienne Delaune, ca. 1576. The walls of this goldsmith’s work­ shop are lined with lite tools of the craft: pliers, files, drills, gravers, and hammers. The boy turning the tvinch on the left appears to be drawing wire. The worktable is placed perpendicular to the large win­ dow, in order to provide maximum natural light to the craftsmen. On the right a youth holds a pair of tongs in a small forge, with a bellows and an anvil by his side. Each workman sits with a leather apron tucked into his belt and attached to the table to catch filings of precious metal. Engraving, 80 x 120 mm. PD 1951,1120.5. British Museum, London. © The Trustees of The British Museum / Art Resource, NY. Photo: Erich Lessing.

in the mouth when you are in poisonous air and when the valley is cov­ ered in thick fog.”16 Clearly the use of butter was a widespread practice: What was the system of thought that gave it meaning? Or was it simply one of those rote practices ascribed to craftspeople? The metalworker and author of the 1540 Pirolechnia, Vannoccio Biringuccio, noted that mercury miners often ended up weakened and paralyzed because the nature or essence of mercury was cold. In this, Biringuccio was thinking within the frame­ work of the four elements and qualities; that is, all things were composed

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Fig. 1. Agostino Veneziano, after Baccio Bandinelli. In his Vatican Bel­ vedere “Academy,” Bandinelli and his students study and draw ancient statuettes or models of them, 1531. London, The British Museum. The Trustees of lhe British Museum.

ture with his assistants. The darkness and cast shadows of their study room recall Plato’s allegorical cave, whose chained inhabitants have no access to the sunlit world of the Forms (fig. 1) .l0 Indeed, shadows cast by two of the statuettes standing on a back shelf mimic the famous gestures of classical antiquity’s greatest philosophers, as depicted in the nearby papal apartment. Here, in Raphael’s School of Athens, Plato points up to the domain of the Forms, and Aristotle, palm downward, indicates the natural world on which empirical knowledge is founded.11 Working at night by candlelight was sometimes a practical necessity for practitioners of the visual arts,12 but emphasizing the intellectual dimension of this activity enabled them to tease out underlying contrasts between physi­ cal effort and mental illumination. This was one of the many ways in which Bandinelli, an inordinate self-publicist and untiring exponent of

52 Ways of Making and Knowing the intellectual features of his skill as a sculptor, attempted to persuade his contemporaries that die physicality of the objects he had carved was less significant than the philosophical trudis that informed the designs he had given them. Bandinelli would have rightly claimed that the comb­ maker’s “art” was far less complex titan his own, but the “skill” that each deployed had been learned and improved by reflection. Giorgio Vasari’s depiction of a painter at work, in the main hall of his palace in Florence,1’ seems to exploit complementary imagery' to similar ends (fig. 2). Figures allegorical and contemporary enact a conflation of the classical accounts of the working habits of two Greek painters: Zeuxis, who, when asked to paint the goddess Hera (or the beautiful Helen of Troy), based his depiction on five of the most beautiful local maidens, from each of whom he took the finest part; and Apelles, on whom Vasari was modeling himself, who had followed the older paint­ er’s guidelines and bettered them.14 In Vasari’s version of this tale about “scattered beauty,”15 the story' unfolds at night, so the scenes inside and outside the studio are illuminated by artificial lights (lights of “art” rather than of “nature”). The painter, resembling Vasari himself, has sketched a female figure with his brush, as unfinished works by Apelles showed that he had done,16 and he is now finishing her upper portions; crowned with a half-moon, the woman must be Diana, the moon goddess also portrayed by Apelles.17 Vasari paints from a standing female nude model, but two sitting ones are dressing or undressing and two more are being guided by torchlight to the door of his studio. He works by the light of an overhead chandelier while three assistants draw in a back room, its shutters closed and its light provided by two candles. Implicit are the parallels between the uncovering (or discovery) of ideal human forms, on the one hand, and, on the other, drawing as a road to picto­ rial knowledge; the importance of selecting intelligently from natural models; and mental illumination. For Vasari “the study of drawing” (Zo studio del disegno) had taught him the most valuable precepts of his art (as it had Apelles18), and he pursued this practice “day and night.” Indeed, the young assistants drawing by candlelight who are depicted in his Flo­ rentine house recall Vasari and Francesco Salviati as young students of painting in Rome, where they had exchanged drawings each had done by day so that each could copy those of the other by night.19 Federico Zuccaro would twice depict his brother, the painter Taddeo Zuccaro, drawing by moonlight.20 But however well a painter might train his hand to realize his mind’s discriminating visual selection from partially beauti­ ful maidens, no two depictions of “perfect” beauty would ever look the same. Painters had to adapt their works to physical variables as much

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as comb-makers did, though they worked from models far more varied and complex. Moreover, for painters, as for all those who made things, there was a physical feedback between what they saw taking shape before them, their technical skills, and their responses to momentary whims and contingencies. They learned from dieir own evolving works, and ex­ plored and developed this new knowledge in novel ways.

Art and Nature Before the eighteenth century, “art” was commonly contrasted with “nature,” whose appearances, structures, and processes it tried to emu­ late but whose defects it sought to overcome with the aid of agriculture, medicine, and other human skills. Cesare Ripa’s Arte, described in 1603 in the first edition of his Iconologia and illustrated in its fourth edition of 1611, holds a paintbrush and chisel, in order to imitate nature, and a “pole driven into the ground, whose straightness assures, by virtue of art’s vigour, that the crooked and tender sapling will grow upright”'21 (fig. 3). In gardens human skill operated not only on the fabric of organic and inorganic nature, which, left to go its own way over time, would have

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54 Ways of Making and Knowing taken rather different forms, but also on natural phenomena already modified by “art." In the sixteenth century these material creations were sometimes said to constitute a “third nature,” a symbiotic fusion of art, nature, and nature modified by art, in which the product was no lon­ ger one or the other but rather something entirely new; this idea was indebted to the classical one of a “second” or “new” “nature,” taken up and developed by a wide variety of Renaissance writers and artistic prac­ titioners.22 Two good examples are provided by the artificial mountains in the late sixteenth-century Medici garden of Pratolino, an early liter­ ary description of which was predicated on these commonplace distinc­ tions.23 Both the eleven-meter-high personification of the Appennine range and die mock-up of Mount Parnassus contained internal “grot­ toes” and waters, and both mountains were colonized with automata and mythical inhabitants in order to amplify their meanings.24 Great government projects to reclaim land or control rampaging riv­ ers demanded similar knowledge. Like Pratolino’s artful garden extrava­ ganzas, these initiatives relied on an informed imitation and extension of nature's procedures.2’ The techniques devised by river engineers to control and direct the flow of waters exploited their knowledge of die absorbency of different kinds of soils, containing varying admixtures of pebbles and sand, as well as their understanding of the role of vegetation and root systems in consolidating disrupted riverbanks and riverbeds.26 The knowledge required to work in concert with nature on waterways, to advantageous human ends, could be exploited elsewhere. Fortified earthworks, whose construction was described in 1544 by the engineer Giovan Battista Belluzzi, had to resist not only artillery fire but also flood­ ing rivers and precipitation from above. Belluzzi’s artificial constructions were built up, therefore, of intertwined tree trunks, leafy branches, brushwood, and sod, which bound together the interstices of the fortifi­ cation’s earthen body (fig. 4) ,27 The kinds of technical skills exemplified in these fortifications must also have been demonstrated in the construc­ tion of artificial landscape features in gardens. The roots of the “many kinds of plants”28 planted on the craggy slopes of Pratolino’s Mount Par­ nassus must have helped to consolidate its underlying structure, made up partly of displaced earth from elsewhere in the garden29 and partly of the rigid components required to create its artificial inner chambers (fig. 5).30 In the re-creation of ancient Tivoli’s sacred landscape at the Villa d’Este, identified by a personification of the River Aniene clutch­ ing the Tiburtine Sibyl’s round temple, the precipitous topography and its famous waterfall are reduced from their sublime grandeur to enter­ taining proportions (fig. 6).31 Behind the designers of these miniature

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Fig. 3. Cesare Ripa, “Arte,” from Nova Iconologia di Cesare Ripa Pemgino, Padua, 1618. Photograph from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, “edizione pratica” ed. Piero Buscaroli, preface Mario Praz, Fogola Editore, Turin, 1989, 2 vols., I, p. 55.

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