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Pamela H. Smith is the Seth Low Professor of History and Director of the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University.

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It is a familiar story: early modern Europe saw some pretty revolutionary stuff in terms of the production and understanding of knowledge, especially in the sciences. However, in recent years, this narrative of sweeping change has been replaced by a more nuanced look at the way scientific knowledge was produced in and understood in early modern Europe. The Revolution formerly known as Scientific, scholars now assert, was less of a sweeping change implemented by a few triumphant figures (who also all happened to be European, male, and wealthy), than it was a complicated process of the changing roles of objects, texts, experts, and knowledge.

How did they know? Early modern Europe saw a change in the ways in which knowledge was produced, and in who produced legitimate knowledge. Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800 seeks to examine the changing modes of knowledge in early modern Europe, but to do so in light of new methodologies in the history of science that seek to unseat the old narrative of the triumphant rise of rationality that led to what we now understand as science. The questions the editors ask are vast in scope, and stretch across substantial swaths of the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe, so the work is—by their own admission—exploratory, and seeks not so much to provide answers but to reframe questions. Smith and Schmidt, in fourteen thought-provoking essays, add another dimension to the question of how things are known by asking how things are made known. In so doing, the essays illustrate the complex nature of scientific knowledge, its production, and its social and historical contingency.

The book is separated into three thematic sections: making knowledge from the margins, practices of reading and writing, and the reform of knowledge. The first section digs under stones left unturned by previous generations of scholars, and looks at producers and objects of knowledge that have been traditionally been seen as marginal to the process of making knowledge. These articles discuss the knowledge of women, native inhabitants, craftspeople, and others who are often not credited with the rise of science in the early modern world, and show how their work was in fact critical in several areas of knowledge-making. The first article, “Women Engineers and the Culture of the Pyrenees,” discusses the women laborers and the experience they brought to the construction of the Canal du Midi in the late seventeenth century, and argues that it was not exclusively the work of literate gentlemen and scholars that built the Canal du Midi, but the work of often illiterate peasants, both male and female, but especially the latter. These marginal workers relied on tacit knowledge to construct the greatest engineering marvel in early modern France, and the article nods to many recent trends in the history of science: the role of women in science, invisible technicians, indigenous knowledge, and tacit knowledge.

Sidel’s article on van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece takes on the question of the mode of transmission of knowledge itself, and looks at the Ghent Altarpiece not for its artistic content or social implications, but as a means of transmitting professional knowledge, and that van Eyck’s work was more than a picture, but a picture-handbook, in the tradition of other (though purely textual) Renaissance how-to books. Simon Werret’s contribution uses the history of pyrotechnics to address the historical relation of art to science and their changing ways of making knowledge to argue that in this case, the relationship of art and science in this case was inverted, and the narrative of the inevitable rise of a “scientific” pyrotechnics is ahistorical. Finally, Schiebinger’s article on eighteenth century plant taxonomy illustrates the ways in which local and indigenous knowledge and the means for organizing it were effaced by Europeans scientific elites.

The second section takes off from the fruitful explosion of research on the history of the book, and focuses on books as material objects, and look at literary practices to see how knowledge was made from texts. Rudolf Dekker’s insightful essay links the improvement in the techniques used to measure time to the invention of the modern diary. Using the Huygens brothers as examples, he shows how the two men—the eldest, a daily diary writer, and the younger, the famed horologist—dealt with new notions of time that they themselves were actively producing, and argues that scientific and technological advances had a profound change on a genre of writing, the diary. In contrast to Dekker, Scott Black shows how an already established literary genre, the essay, influenced Boyle’s scientific practices. Black examines the implications of Boyle’s choice of the essay as ideal mode of knowledge transmission of knowledge, and creates a case for a history of science that engages with literary history and the history of the genre. Black argues that Boyle, far from being a revolutionary in his choice the essay, was simply appropriating an old tool for a new way of knowing, and in doing so, Black adds yet another voice to the growing chorus that claims that Boyle is indebted more to premodern practice than might be suggested by Shapin and Schaffer.

Also in this section, Lori Anne Ferrell engages with the issue of religious change, and ties the rise of Protestantism in England to a cumbersome English shorthand system proposed
by the failed English physician Timothy Bright. She proposes that the especially ascetic form of Protestantism of the Calvinists was not only seen as a response to revelation, but as a skill or an art that had to be cultivated and nourished, not unlike a system of shorthand. Her article stresses the connections between thinking, arranging, and believing in early modern Calvinism; a point well made in a work about the making of knowledge. In the introductory essay, the editors noted their intention was to move away from the book, as it had been traditionally studied, to embrace more active forms of making knowledge, but Ferrell reminds us in this article that text may have been ensconced on a page, but words on paper were nonetheless actively manipulated to create new notions that transcended the physical.

The final section looks at reform, a concern that pervaded almost all corners of early modern society. More specifically, the section looks at the impact of major historical changes on knowledge making, honing in on medicine in chapters 10 and 11, the Reformation in chapters 12 and13, and economic change in chapter 14. Claudia Swan’s article discusses natural history collections of seventeenth century Leiden physicians, botanists, professors, and pharmacists, and looks at how their collections, far from being a practical resource for their medical practices or mere hobbies, were important tools for academic and social legitimation, as well as for establishing their medical authority in a tumultuous discipline. The second article on medicine in this section is Ole Peter Grell’s examination of the intellectual and cultural milieu of the Danish physician Ole Worm. He argues that Worm’s ideas about new theories in medicine, like Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood in the body, were mediated by his networks of friends, students, correspondents, and family members that he cultivated both in his own academic pilgrimage in his youth, and through his subsequent job as a professor at the university of Copenhagen. Understanding these networks, Grell argues, is imperative for understanding how knowledge was gathered and validated in early modern Europe.

In the introductory essay of Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Smith and Schmidt write that the debates about making and consuming knowledge has tended to center on objects like books or instruments, but that this focus has “narrowed our perspective on the enormous range of ways in which making knowledge has taken place and continues apace.” The authors of the essays of this work did a wonderful job of showing the cornucopia of possibilities that, as the editors noted, has been obscured in previous works. From books on shorthand to canal engineering to Dutch collections, the diversity of the topics and approaches taken by all the individual authors is one of the great strengths of this work, making it a piece of scholarship that speaks to an equally broad range of disciplines.

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tophats | Jan 7, 2012 |

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Estadísticas

Obras
9
Miembros
219
Popularidad
#102,099
Valoración
4.0
Reseñas
1
ISBNs
20

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