Pamela H. Smith

In showing how an overriding concern with religious salvation was transformed into a concentration on material increase and economic policies, Pamela Smith depicts the rise of modern sicence and early capitalism in the 16th- and 17-century world of the Holy Roman Empire. Smith uses as example the life of Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682), whose ideasfrom alchemy to economicstypify those of his generation. 30 photos.

Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire

The Business of Alchemy

Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes in hubs of exchange where different social and cultural groups intersected and interacted. Entangled Itineraries traces this movement of knowledge across the Eurasian continent from the early years of the Common Era to the nineteenth century, following local goods, techniques, tools, and writings as they traveled and transformed into new material and intellectual objects and ways of knowing. Focusing on nonlinear trajectories of knowledge in motion, this volume follows itineraries that weaved in and out of busy, crowded cosmopolitan cities in China; in the trade hubs of Kucha and Malacca; and in centers of Arabic scholarship, such as Reyy and Baghdad, which resonated in Bursa, Assam, and even as far as southern France. Contributors explore the many ways in which materials, practices, and knowledge systems were transformed and codified as they converged, swelled, at times disappeared, and often reemerged anew.

Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia

Entangled Itineraries

Benjamin Schmidt

Aims to bring together essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. This book looks at production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within different communities.

Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400 - 1800

Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith explores the relationships among alchemy, the court, and commerce in order to illuminate the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how an overriding concern with religious salvation was transformed into a concentration on material increase and economic policies, Smith depicts the rise of modern science and early capitalism. In pursuing this narrative, she focuses on that ideal prey of the cultural historian, an intellectual of the second rank whose career and ideas typify those of a generation. Smith follows the career of Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682) from university to court, his projects from New World colonies to an old-world Pansophic Panopticon, and his ideas from alchemy to economics. Teasing out the many meanings of alchemy for Becher and his contemporaries, she argues that it provided Becher with not only a direct key to power over nature but also a language by which he could convince his princely patrons that their power too must rest on liquid wealth. Agrarian society regarded merchants with suspicion as the nonproductive exploiters of others' labor; however, territorial princes turned to commerce for revenue as the cost of maintaining the state increased. Placing Becher’s career in its social and intellectual context, Smith shows how he attempted to help his patrons assimilate commercial values into noble court culture and to understand the production of surplus capital as natural and legitimate. With emphasis on the practices of natural philosophy and extensive use of archival materials, Smith brings alive the moment of cultural transformation in which science and the modern state emerged.

How and why early modern European artisans began to record their knowledge. In From Lived Experience to the Written Word, Pamela H. Smith considers how and why, beginning in 1400 CE, European craftspeople began to write down their making practices. Rather than simply passing along knowledge in the workshop, these literate artisans chose to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs, and recipe books, sparking early technical writing and laying the groundwork for how we think about scientific knowledge today. Focusing on metalworking from 1400-1800 CE, Smith looks at the nature of craft knowledge and skill, studying present-day and historical practices, objects, recipes, and artisanal manuals. From these sources, she considers how we can reconstruct centuries of largely lost knowledge. In doing so, she aims not only to unearth the techniques, material processes, and embodied experience of the past but also to gain insight into the lifeworld of artisans and their understandings of matter.

Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World

From Lived Experience to the Written Word

Since the time of Aristotle, the making of knowledge and the making of objects have generally been considered separate enterprises. Yet during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the two became linked through a "new" philosophy known as science. In The Body of the Artisan, Pamela H. Smith demonstrates how much early modern science owed to an unlikely source-artists and artisans. From goldsmiths to locksmiths and from carpenters to painters, artists and artisans were much sought after by the new scientists for their intimate, hands-on knowledge of natural materials and the ability to manipulate them. Drawing on a fascinating array of new evidence from northern Europe including artisans' objects and their writings, Smith shows how artisans saw all knowledge as rooted in matter and nature. With nearly two hundred images, The Body of the Artisan provides astonishingly vivid examples of this Renaissance synergy among art, craft, and science, and recovers a forgotten episode of the Scientific Revolution-an episode that forever altered the way we see the natural world.

Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution

The Body of the Artisan

Christy Anderson

Anne Dunlop

This book will appeal not only to historians of art, science, and material culture, but also to general readers with an interest in craft and the history of objects as well as to historians interested in a global history of the early modern period.

Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, C.1250-1750

The Matter of Art

Paula Findlen

The beginning of global commerce in the early modern period had an enormous impact on European culture, changing the very way people perceived the world around them. Merchants and Marvels assembles essays by leading scholars of cultural history, art history, and the history of science and technology to show how ideas about the representation of nature, in both art and science, underwent a profound transformation between the age of the Renaissance and the early 1700s.

Pamela H. Smith

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