TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why Materials? - Ursula Klein, E. C. Spary
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0001
[materials, material culture, sciences, arts, technical expertise, workshops, metals, gunpowder, foods, science, technology]
This book investigates how materials such as metals, gunpowder, pigments, and foods contributed to artisanal innovation, the development of the consumer market, and the formation of the observational and experimental sciences of the early modern period. Focusing on the eighteenth century, the period when mixed technoscientific practices involving materials were transformed into sustained social institutions, it examines the ways in which innovative practices involving materials, technical expertise, and learned natural knowledge converged in workshops, laboratories, and marketplaces. The book looks at materials that were plural in nature and produced by ingenious labor, mundane consumption, and sustained inquiry into nature and art. It also considers the experts who occupied themselves with materials. Furthermore, the book challenges existing theories of the history of science and technology that assume a one-way flow of knowledge between the sciences and the arts, in either direction. It thus offers a new perspective on material culture and raises new questions about the link between practical expertise and learned natural inquiries in the early modern period. (pages 1 - 24)
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Part I: The Production of Materials
Introduction to Part 1
Vermilion, Mercury, Blood, and Lizards: Matter and Meaning in Metalworking - Pamela H. Smith
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0002
[science, technology, matter, Europe, artisans, vermilion, metalworking, pigment making, vernacular science, natural materials]
This article reconsiders the relationship between science and technology by analyzing how matter and its manipulation—making—are linked to deductive and propositional knowledge—knowing—in early modern Europe. Drawing on three essays—Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Systems by Helen Watson-Verran and David Turnbull, Culture as Appropriation: Popular Culture Uses in Early Modern France by Roger Chartier, and Jean Lave's work on “everyday technology”—this article challenges conventional ideas about matter and natural materials. Focusing on vermilion and metalworking, it explores late-medieval and early modern artisans' ways of making, measuring, and naming materials along with their ontology, as well as their impact on the development of alchemical theory. Metalworking in the sixteenth century was part of a web that included vermilion, the color red, blood, mercury, gold, and lizards. This article discusses the intersections between artisanal techniques and the development of modern ways of investigating nature, and delineates a less familiar worldview or “vernacular science” of materials and nature that has apparently informed artisanal practices in pigment making and metalworking. (pages 29 - 49)
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Ceramic Nature - Hanna Rose Shell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0003
[Bernard Palissy, ceramics, clay, earthenware, natural history, coloration, generation, fossilization, nature, life-casting]
Bernard Palissy was a sixteenth-century ceramicist, natural historian, philosophizing experimenter, and public lecturer who, as a trained craftsman, produced and sold beautiful ceramics while seeking to explore nature by molding objects out of clay. Palissy's rustic earthenware plates, highly valued by museums and collectors today and widely imitated in the nineteenth century, became marketable commodities in the sixteenth century. In addition to his ceramics, Palissy is also known today for his writings on geology and agriculture, including his Discours Admirables (1580). His earthenware productions—which served as expressive embodiments of his innovative, and sometimes controversial, theories about natural history—reflected his ideas about three phenomena: coloration, generation, and fossilization in nature. This article explores Palissy's work with clay and how it was connected to his lifelong study of coloration, generation, and fossilization in nature. It also looks at Palissy's life-casting technique as a strategy for “harnessing” nature. (pages 50 - 70)
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The Production of Silver, Copper, and Lead in the Harz Mountains from Late Medieval Times to the Onset of Industrialization - Christoph Bartels
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0004
[silver, copper, lead, Harz Mountains, Germany, mining, metallurgy, smelting, experts, gunpowder blasting]
This article focuses on the production of silver, copper, and lead in the Harz Mountains of Germany from late medieval times to the onset of industrialization. It offers a detailed account of innovations in mining and metallurgy in the region and highlights the metallurgical ventures of many ingenious experts who are not well known in the history of science, but who contributed to the development of early modern sciences such as geology, chemistry, and mineralogy. This group of experts included Lazarus Ercker, Heinrich Albert von dem Busch, Claus von Gotha, Daniel Flach, Caspar Illing, Carl Zumbe, Christoph Sander, and Georg Winterschmidt. This article argues that mining and metallurgy during the early modern period relied heavily on land surveying, stratigraphy, ore prospecting, assaying, data collection, and mathematical data processing, in addition to the writing of technical instructions and treatises. This article also looks at the development of smelting works at Goslar during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the introduction of gunpowder blasting as a mining innovation. (pages 71 - 100)
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Ink - Adrian Johns
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0005
[ink, printing, industrialization, adulteration, natural magic, alchemy, paper, skills, material substance, medieval period]
This article deals with ink and its many varieties, focusing on how they are produced from the medieval period until the beginning of industrialization. In particular, it presents examples of preparing printers' ink. It shows that the makers of different varieties of ink, in trying to ensure the quality of their products, developed clear criteria for judging their quality, discerning good ink from poor ink, and for avoiding adulteration. The story of the establishment of industrial ink making shows that industrialization began in this field, before moving to the far more familiar fields of papermaking and printing itself. The article also discusses the practical use of ink as a material and its associations with natural magic and alchemy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It concludes that the history of ink is a history of an entire system that includes not only the material substance, paper, instruments, techniques, and places but also people, skills, and attitudes. (pages 101 - 124)
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Blending Technical Innovation and Learned Natural Knowledge: The Making of Ethers - Ursula Klein
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0006
[chemical remedies, apothecaries, chemists, ethers, natural knowledge, Germany, technical innovation, adulteration, medicines, material substances]
In the eighteenth century, apothecaries manufactured hundreds of remedies by means of chemical techniques such as distillation, dissolution, and extraction with solvents. These so-called chemical remedies were prepared in the laboratory as volatile ethers, distilled acids, composite elixirs, ardent spirits, sublimated essences, precipitated salts, extracted vegetable and animal oils, and other material substances. Aside from material substances, chemists of the eighteenth century used other items employed by eighteenth-century apothecaries shared, including laboratories, instruments, and techniques of production and experimentation. This article investigates the production of ethers during the late eighteenth century, focusing on practices in Germany. The apothecaries' search for unambiguous ways of identifying ethers was part of attempts to standardize medicines and avoid adulteration and to write experimental histories of material substances. They combined technical innovation with learned natural knowledge to make ethers. (pages 125 - 158)
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Part II: Materials in the Market Sphere
Introduction to Part 2
Enlightened Milk: Reshaping a Bodily Substance into a Chemical Object - Barbara Orland
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0007
[milk, Samuel Ferris, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, Nicolas Déyeux, chemists, organic materials, organic-chemical analysis, animal chemistry, analytical chemistry, experiments]
Milk was a popular subject of research among chemists in Europe during the late eighteenth century. In 1785 and 1787, the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh in Scotland and the Royal Society of Medicine in Paris commissioned studies to assess the physiological and chemical qualities of the milk produced by humans and animals such as cows, goats, camels, sheep, and donkeys. Samuel Ferris, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, and Nicolas Déyeux were chosen to conduct the investigations. This article examines the production of milk during the late eighteenth century, focusing on how chemists attempted to transform milk into a chemically defined object. Experiments conducted by chemists such as Parmentier, Déyeux, and Ferris stimulated new questions about organic materials and new insights into the technique of organic-chemical analysis. These experts thus contributed to both animal chemistry and the then thriving field of analytical chemistry. (pages 163 - 197)
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The Sparkling Nectar of Spas; or, Mineral Water as a Medically Commodifiable Material in the Province, 1770–1805 - Matthew D. Eddy
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0008
[spas, mineral water, tourism, commodification, Peterhead Spa, Scotland, William Laing, nervous disorders, therapy, chemical composition]
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, spas across Europe offered mineral water to customers as a kind of therapy. Numerous studies have shed light on the links between tourism and commodification, the role of patient authority, and the isolation of chemical substances, but there has been no clear account to explain how the chemical composition of the wells connected with the medical theory that legitimated their commodification and use as a remedy. Using Peterhead Spa in Scotland as a case study, this article examines the therapeutic theories that motivated provincial experts to commodify mineral water at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In particular, it focuses on several authors who wrote about the well, including Rev. Dr. William Laing, an ordained Episcopal priest who argued that mineral water from Peterhead could be used to cure nervous disorders. The article shows that chemical language and experiments played an important role in late-eighteenth-century pamphlets and articles (both popular and academic) that addressed the curative power of mineral water. (pages 198 - 224)
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Liqueurs and the Luxury Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century Paris - E. C. Spary
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0009
[Paris, knowledge, power, ethics, food, liqueurs, polite science, distillation, apothecaries, matter]
Focusing on eighteenth-century Paris, this article explores the interconnections among knowledge, power, and ethics concerning food. It looks at how food shops, the marketplace, laboratories, apprenticed distillers and vendors of liqueurs, buyers and connoisseurs of such luxury products, physicians, and pharmacists as well as chemists of the French Academy of Sciences are glued together by the so-called polite science. Liqueur makers and distillers relied on chemistry to innovate and to possess enlightenment as well as for the marketing of their products. This article considers some treatments of distillation penned by members of the apothecaries' and distillers' guilds and shows how liqueurs became the focus for debates about the relationships between matter, bodies, and expertise in the age of Enlightenment. (pages 225 - 256)
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Part III: State Interventions
Introduction to Part 3
Economizing Agricultural Resources in the German Economic Enlightenment - Marcus Popplow
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0010
[agriculture, knowledge, economic enlightenment, agricultural resources, economization, natural resources, Germany, economic societies, peasants]
To avoid hunger crises and avert shortages of plant resources for the arts and crafts, government officials, clergymen, and members of the Republic of Letters introduced a broad set of measures for agriculture, forestry, and animal breeding. This article explores how advanced knowledge, envisioned in the second half of the eighteenth century in many European states in the so-called industrial or economic enlightenment, was used to increase the production of domestic agricultural resources. It analyzes the “economization” of natural resources in Germany and discusses how economic societies acted as mediators between different social groups and sectors of the economic system. Members of economic societies collected data about agricultural practices, performed experiments, and proposed technical measures for agricultural innovation as well as methods for the dissemination of knowledge, including the education of peasants. (pages 261 - 287)
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The Crisis of English Gunpowder in the Eighteenth Century - Seymour H. Mauskopf
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0011
[gunpowder, England, munitions, Royal Laboratory, Royal Military Academy, gunpowder mills, military, ballistic testing, gunpowder production, material production]
This article highlights the complexity of material production by focusing on the gunpowder crisis in England during the eighteenth century. It examines the salient features of munitions production and improvement during the period and discusses the national organization of gunpowder production, procurement, and proving. It also considers government reforms in gunpowder manufacture, testing, and improvement, and describes the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich along with its comptroller, who was entrusted with the supervision of gunpowder proof; the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich trained cadets in artillery and engineering; the private owners of gunpowder mills; and the military, which continually complained about the quantity and quality of British gunpowder. To rationalize gunpowder production and to standardize the quality of gunpowder, British officials carried out systematic experiments and measurement, including ballistic testing. (pages 288 - 320)
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Between Craft Routines and Academic Rules: Natural Dyestuffs and the “Art” of Dyeing in the Eighteenth Century - Agusí Nieto-Galan
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439709.003.0012
[natural dyestuffs, France, dyeing, quality control, Manufacture royale des Gobelins, material production, social cooperation, expertise, academia]
During the eighteenth century, natural dyestuffs derived mainly from animal and vegetable sources were applied to a wide range of surfaces. Dyeing processes required materials such as gums, astringents, acids, alkalis, bleaching liquors, and metallic salts (mordants). The sources of colors, between indigenous dyes and exotic plants from the colonies, were often controversial. This article examines the manufacture and quality control of natural dyestuffs in the Manufacture royale des Gobelins in France to highlight a complex system of material production, social cooperation, and expertise in the eighteenth century. This system included the Gobelins laboratory, workshops of the manufactory (manufacture), and a dyeing school which taught students about dyestuffs and methods of bleaching. The quality tests for dyestuffs played a key role in the rationalization of the art of dyeing. This article shows how the Gobelins laboratory acted as a critical intermediate space between academia and the workshop. (pages 321 - 354)
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Secondary Sources
Contributors
Index
