Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe

Between Market and Laboratory

Ursula Klein, E. C. Spary, Ursula Klein, E. C. Spary, Emma C. Spary

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780226439693
  9780226439686
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226439709
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Biological Sciences

It is often assumed that natural philosophy was the forerunner of early modern natural sciences. But where did these sciences' systematic observation and experimentation get their starts? In Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, the laboratories, workshops, and marketplaces emerge as arenas where hands-on experience united with higher learning. In an age when chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and botany intersected with mining, metallurgy, pharmacy, and gardening, materials were objects that crossed disciplines.

Here, the contributors tell the stories of metals, clay, gunpowder, pigments, and foods, and thereby demonstrate the innovative practices of technical experts, the development of the consumer market, and the formation of the observational and experimental sciences in the early modern period. Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe showcases a broad variety of forms of knowledge, from ineffable bodily skills and technical competence to articulated know-how and connoisseurship, from methods of measuring, data gathering, and classification to analytical and theoretical knowledge. By exploring the hybrid expertise involved in the making, consumption, and promotion of various materials, and the fluid boundaries they traversed, the book offers an original perspective on important issues in the history of science, medicine, and technology.

PART ONE

The Production of Materials

Introduction to Part 1

The chapters in this first part of our book are concerned with early modern expertise involved in the production of materials, including vermilion, ceramics, metals, ink, and ethers. They explore obstacles and incentives emerging in commercial production or experimental preparations of materials, and they follow the various ways in which practitioners met such challenges. Furthermore, they seek to come to grips with materiality by studying the obstinacy and resistance of materials as well as surprising effects occurring during their transformation processes. What surprises and obstacles emerged in the production of, say, silver in the Harz region of the sixteenth century? What forms of useful knowledge were developed in response to these obstacles? What was, in this local context, the specific role of the hybrid experts who are at the center of this volume? How did these experts combine geometrical, mineralogical, geographical, chemical, and other forms of learned knowledge with local hands-on experience? But not only immediately useful knowledge is at stake here. The chapters are also concerned with the historical actors’ understanding of their materials, the meanings and values they attributed to them, and the orders of things they established. They thus also provide a glimpse of the experts’ ontology and of ontological shifts during the period under investigation. Pamela H. Smith’s and Hanna Rose Shell’s essays, in particular, show that the sixteenth-century practices of making materials were replete with invisible agents and signs, which faded away in the centuries to follow.

In her chapter about vermilion and metalworking, Pamela H. Smith studies in fine detail late-medieval and early modern artisans’ ways of making, measuring, and naming materials along with their ontology, so strange today, and their impact on the development of alchemical theory. The production of the deep red pigment vermilion was a complicated and dangerous technical process that had been explored and described continually in written recipes since the early middle ages. By the early eighteenth century, numerous accounts of innovations in vermilion making appeared in print, which reduced the labor, length, and danger of the process. Such written accounts on the production of materials, Smith argues, contributed to the articulation of alchemical matter theories. Furthermore, the web of signs and correspondences addressed in these accounts—such as the correspondence between the red color of vermilion and blood, generation, and life—manifests a “vernacular science” that differed profoundly from modern understandings of nature. “While the origins of many techniques to investigate, observe, and analyze the material world can be found in the early modern period,” Smith points out, “the meanings of matter and the practices of manipulating matter were rooted in a different understanding of the world.”

The sixteenth-century ceramicist, natural historian, philosophizing experimenter, and teacher Bernard Palissy, studied by Hanna Rose Shell, is a compelling example of a hybrid expert. Trained as a craftsman, he produced and sold beautiful ceramics and at the same time sought to explore nature by molding objects out of clay. As Shell points out, Palissy wrestled almost endlessly with his raw material, clay, to transform it into simulacra of plants, animals, coloration, generation, and fossilization. Apart from his ceramics, Palissy is today also known for his writings on geology and agriculture, especially his Discours Admirables (1580). His texts, Shell argues, can be best understood in direct relation to his trials with clay and creation of ceramic artifacts. Clay was, for Palissy, a vital medium for inquiry into terrestrial and organic processes. Ideas about nature were thus not only expressed in, but also generated by, the process of casting nature in clay.

Christoph Bartels presents a detailed account of innovations in mining and the production of metals, especially silver, copper, and lead, in the German Harz region from the late medieval until the early modern period. His chapter illuminates the metallurgical ventures of many ingenious experts who are obliterated in the history of science, despite the fact that they contributed to the development of early modern sciences such as chemistry, geology, and mineralogy. To this group of experts belonged, in addition to the quite well-known sixteenth-century assayer and controller of the mint Lazarus Ercker, Heinrich Albert von dem Busch, an expert in ore prospecting and stratigraphy, who also introduced new and efficient methods in mining administration; Claus von Gotha, an engineer who solved the urgent problem of drainage in flooded mines by creating new hydraulic machinery; Daniel Flach and Caspar Illing, who introduced new methods of land and mine surveying; the Saxon miner Carl Zumbe, inventor of a new mining technique in connection with rock blasting with gunpowder, which he tested systematically; the administrator Christoph Sander, who significantly contributed to the standardization and rationalization of local smelting processes by introducing new methods in calculating input and output factors; and the young artillery officer Georg Winterschmidt, who participated in the search for a more efficient motor than waterwheels and developed the water-pressure engine around 1750. Early modern mining and metallurgy, Bartels argues, relied significantly on land surveying, stratigraphy, ore prospecting, assaying (the chemical analysis of ores and metals), data collection, and mathematical data processing as well as the writing of technical instructions and treatises.

Adrian Johns’s chapter turns to ink, its astonishing varieties and ways of production from the medieval period until the beginning of industrialization. As ink recipes presented in books of secret and of natural magic demonstrate, the preparation of inks always required practical knacks. It meant long, arduous, and dangerous labor, which stimulated continual trials and adjustments to new techniques of application; Johns provides compelling examples from the ways of preparing printers’ ink. Like the producers of chemical remedies and dyestuffs, addressed by Klein and Nieto-Galan in this volume, the makers of different varieties of ink had to find ways to ensure the quality of their products. They developed clear criteria for judging their quality, discerning good ink from poor ink, and for avoiding adulteration. As Johns points out, adulteration was a permanent concern, which “reflected the dispersal of knowledge and skills” involved in ink making. In addition to its practical use as a material, ink also bore associations with natural magic and alchemy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the second half of the late eighteenth century, it further became an object of entrepreneurial competition and extensive experimentation. The history of ink, Johns concludes, is thus a history of an entire system that includes the material substance, paper, instruments, techniques, and places as well as people, skills, and attitudes.

Ursula Klein takes studies of the production of materials—in this case a particular group of chemical remedies, the ethers—as a route to explore late eighteenth-century apothecaries’ shifts from commercial production to natural inquiry and vice versa. In the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, apothecaries performed endless trials to facilitate techniques for producing ethers and to improve methods of identifying them. The search for unambiguous ways of identifying ethers here was embedded both in attempts to standardize medicines and avoid adulteration as well as in the writing of experimental histories of material substances. As Klein’s chapter demonstrates, there were also apothecaries who smoothly carried their explorations of production techniques and methods of identification further to chemical analysis and theoretical explanation. Such shifts of inquiry contributed significantly to the recognition of apothecaries as learned chemists. Although they clearly manifest apothecaries’ aspiration for higher learning, they often hinged on professional ethos and commercial interests as well. The early modern apothecary-chemists were truly hybrid experts participating both in the world of merchants and artisans and that of university professors and academicians. And it was the hybrid experts themselves in this case, rather than university-educated scholars interested in the arts and crafts, who integrated artisanal expertise into the academic system and thus contributed to its deep social and intellectual reorganization.

2

Vermilion, Mercury, Blood, and Lizards: Matter and Meaning in Metalworking

PAMELA H. SMITH

Historians have debated the relationship of science and technology for many years and, although no consensus has been reached, most would now view science and technology as occupying a kind of continuum, rather than existing in entirely different spheres or possessing completely separate ends. This chapter strives toward such a reconsideration of the relationship between science and technology by examining the ways in which matter and its manipulation—making—are related to deductive and propositional knowledge—knowing—in early modern Europe. Such a focus, I think, leads to interesting consequences. It undermines conventional ideas about matter and natural materials, for it shows that even natural materials cannot be viewed as transhistorical entities. Moreover, it makes clear that historians must pair their discussions of primary texts in the history of science with an account of the practices that accompanied the texts, for these often seem to have formed parts of a continuum, particularly in the texts we now see as part of the history of chemistry.

To begin such an examination, we can draw three important essays to our assistance: First, Helen Watson-Verran and David Turnbull, in Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Systems, note that scientific knowledge is heterogeneous; there is no term that “captures the amalgam of place, bodies, voices, skills, practices, technical devices, theories, social strategies and collective work that together constitute technoscientific knowledge/practices.”¹ For this reason, they use assemblage. Such technoscientific assemblages can bridge “making” and “knowing,” that is, can make the transition from local to general knowledge if they develop a means of transmitting knowledge. This transition was accomplished, they argue, in the templates used by medieval cathedral masons; in the calendars that the Anasazi built into their edifices; in the control of large amounts of information by means of the ceque and quipa by the Inca; and in the memorized map of the heavens and the concepts embedded in navigational practices used by Polynesian navigators. All meld local practices into stable assemblages that connect local to general forms of knowledge.²

Second, Roger Chartier, in Culture as Appropriation: Popular Culture Uses in Early Modern France, considers readers, printers, and the contents of chapbooks. These inexpensive vernacular books have always been considered a cultural form that was solidly “popular,” indeed not just as a component of popular culture, but as its very marker. Against this, Chartier argues that the notion of separate, culturally pure “cultural sets” must be replaced with a “point of view that recognizes each cultural form as a mixture, whose constituent elements meld together indissolubly.” Chartier demonstrates that no single cultural boundary between popular and elite existed in early modern France, but rather, shifting boundaries undergoing constant repositioning was the norm. In his analysis of chapbooks, the redrawing of cultural boundaries was closely related to the publishing strategies of printers. One could argue that the proclaiming of the new experimental philosophy in the seventeenth centuries was a moment of such redrawing of cultural boundaries.³

Finally, the work on “everyday technology” of Jean Lave brings us to reconsider the relationship of thinking and doing and of knowing and making.⁴ As we all know, schemas of knowledge making and knowledge makers are hierarchical, almost without exception placing knowing above doing and making. Tim Ingold, in arguing for the primacy of doing over thinking, that is, of experiential knowledge over propositional knowledge, as well as for the embodied and situated nature of all knowledge, gives us a new starting point: “We do not have to think the world in order to live in it, but we do have to live in the world in order to think it.”⁵ As I will argue in what follows, we need to think about lived experience and the ways in which principles might be embodied and lived, rather than articulated and externalized. I believe that if we take seriously the attempt to see making and knowing, elite and popular, and science and technology as parts of a continuum, we can write a new history of science, one in which phenomena that used to be seen as local can be integrated into an overarching narrative of the making of know...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: The Production of Materials
• Part Two: Materials in the Market Sphere
• Part Three: State Interventions
• Secondary Sources
• Contributors
• Index