The history of early modern science has traditionally been written from the standpoint of intellectual history, as a revolution driven by the search for the natural laws that govern the universe. That interpretation has been challenged in recent years by a growing interest in the practices of knowledge making as opposed to the construction of theories, a perspective that brings the empirical work of artisans to center stage. While “making” and “knowing” are generally regarded as belonging to radically different systems of knowledge, the essays in this volume bring forth abundant evidence that craft can be investigative as well as productive, and that making produces not only things, but also knowledge.
Pamela Smith, one of the editors of the volume, has long and persuasively argued that artisans, through their practices and objects, articulated a coherent body of knowledge about nature. In her contribution to this volume, she takes that thesis even further, arguing that making things with natural materials produced scientific knowledge as well as things. In her essay, centering on miners, metalworkers, and ceramists, Smith develops a fascinating picture of the artisan’s mental world, which combined astrological theories with traditional beliefs about the correspondences between minerals and the human body. According to the “vernacular science” that Smith uncovers, the workings of the human body served as a model for all natural processes. Artisans did not simply make things, but developed a “scientific” understanding of natural processes.
Other articles in the volume substantiate Smith’s bold thesis portraying the crafts as a driver of natural knowledge. In a provocative essay, Suzanne Butters explores how new knowledge is produced as new objects are created, arguing that improvisation combined with empirical skill produced works of art that are “material traces of bodies of knowledge” (72). Harold Cook, in a characteristically insightful essay, shows that new techniques for preserving anatomical specimens developed mainly in Holland led to a revolution in anatomical knowledge in the mid-seventeenth century. None of the innovations that produced this anatomical revolution would have been possible as the result of mere thought, Cook argues; they came instead from the development of new techniques. And, as Alisha Rankin shows in a fascinating study of popular medicine in early modern Germany, even popular therapeutics, usually thought of as constituting only how-to knowledge, produced genuine medical knowledge, though different from the theoretical knowledge taught in the universities.
Experimentation was a key element of the artisanal tradition. Moreover, as Alicia Weisberg-Roberts shows in the case of the production of logwood, an important black dye, artisanal experimentation in turn informed early modern natural history. Testing and experiment also figured prominently in the regulation of commodities, as Patrick Wallis and Catherine Wright demonstrate in a case study of artisanal involvement in assessing the quality of goods by early modern English guilds. Artisanal knowledge was largely tacit, often embodied in objects and naturalia, as illustrated in a pair of articles — by Mark Laird and Karen Bridgman, and Joel Fry — on the collection and transportation of seeds from America to England. The ephemeral nature of the knowledge embodied in objects is further underscored by Mary Brooks’s essay on the decay of museum artifacts and the potential distorting effects of conservation. How objects and naturalia are organized and displayed may also affect how they are understood, as underscored by Glenn Adamson in an intriguing study of innovations in cabinetmaking that contributed to new conceptions of knowledge configuration, a process Adamson refers to as the “cabinetization of knowledge.”
Several of the essays in the volume address how the tacit, usually unwritten knowledge of craftsmen was preserved and transmitted in scientific circles. Lisa Ford uses an annotated copy of André Michaux’s Histoire des Chênes (History of oaks, 1801) to reconstruct the steps from collecting and drying to describing and drawing natural-history specimens, while Elizabeth Yale describes how natural-history query lists functioned as a means of gathering and organizing knowledge. From a somewhat different angle, Sachiko Kusukawa examines Conrad Gessner’s fascination with ad vivum images such as nature casts, which Gessner thought had the capacity to evoke the same response to an object as when viewing the object itself. Concerns with image making and representation of nature also animate Horst Bredekamp’s contribution, an intriguing study of Darwin’s early sketches of corals, which provided him with a visual analogue to evolution.
Overall, these wide-ranging essays, uniformly of high quality, serve as reminders that the history of science is not just a history of concepts, but also of making and using objects to understand the world.
