Overview

Abstract

Numerous remedies and techniques in early modern Europe (1400 – 1750) emerged out of vernacular usage and were subsequently transmitted upward to texts and text-based regimes of professional training. Such practices have often been seen as the result of so-called trial and error processes. This view, however, does not do justice to the practical material investigations of kitchens and workshops, nor to the larger knowledge systems and “material imaginaries” of natural generation and transformation that underpinned these practices. Drawing evidence from the Making and Knowing Project’s research on practical and craft knowledge, this lecture will illustrate such practical investigations and vernacular knowledge systems and argue for new narratives in the history of science and knowledge.

About the Speakers

Pamela H. Smith is Seth Low professor of history at Columbia University, and founding Director of the Center for Science and Society and of its cluster project The Making and Knowing Project (www.makingandknowing.org).  Her articles and books examine craft and practice, and its relationship to scientific knowledge. The Body of the Artisan (2004), and From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Chicago 2022) make a case for treating craft/art as a way of knowing. Her edited volumes, Ways of Making and Knowing (ed. with Amy R. W. Meyers and Harold Cook, pbk 2017) and The Matter of Art (ed. with Christy Anderson and Anne Dunlop, pbk 2016), treat materiality, making and meaning. An edited volume, Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia (2019), deals with the movement of materials and knowledge across Eurasia before 1800. In a collaborative research and teaching initiative, The Making and Knowing Project, she and the Making and Knowing Team investigate the intersection of craft making and scientific knowing by text-, object-, and laboratory-based research on the technical and artistic recipes contained in a sixteenth-century French manuscript BnF Ms. Fr. 640. In 2020 they released a digital critical edition and English translation of the manuscript, Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France. Her current research treats sites of long term engagement between humans and nature, such as mines and dye production.

Organizer

CRF Project “Making Modernity in East Asia: Technologies of Everyday Life, 19th – 21st Centuries” (RGC CRF HKU C7011-16G), Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong