Cook, Harold John (Editor)
Smith, Pamela H. (Editor)
Meyers, Amy R. W. (Editor)
University of Michigan Press
Although craftspeople and artists often work with natural materials, the notion that making art can constitute a means of knowing nature is a novel one. This book, with contributions from historians of science, medicine, art, and material culture, shows that the histories of science and art are not simply histories of concepts or styles, but histories of the making and using of objects to understand the world. An examination of material practices makes it clear that the methods of the artisan represent a process of knowledge making that involves extensive experimentation and observation that parallel similar processes in the sciences. Ways of Making and Knowing offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary history of the ways in which human beings have sought out, discovered, and preserved their own knowledge of the world around them; it has only been through material and human interaction with (and manipulation of) nature that we have come to understand it. Contents: “Making as Knowing: Craft as Natural Philosophy” by Pamela H. Smith; “From Skills to Wisdom: Making, Knowing and the Arts” by Suzanne B. Butters; “Between Trade and Science: Dyeing and Knowing in the Long Eighteenth-Century” by Alicia Weisberg-Roberts; “How to Cure the Golden Vein: Medical Remedies as Wissenschaft in Renaissance Germany” by Alisha Rankin; “Evidence, Artisan Experience and Authority in Early Modern England” by Patrick Wallis and Catherine Wright; “American Roots: Technologies of Plant Transportation and Cultivation in the early Atlantic World” by Mark Laird and Karen Bridgman; “Inside the Box: John Bartram and the Science and Commerce of the Transatlantic Plant Trade” by Joel Fry; “From Plant to Page: Aesthetics and Objectivity in a nineteenth-century Book of Trees” by Lisa Ford; “The Labor of Division: Cabinetmaking and the Production of Knowledge” by Glenn Adamson; “Making Lists: Social and Material Technologies in the Making of Seventeenth-century British Natural History” by Elizabeth Yale; “The Preservation of Specimens and the Take-Off in Anatomical Knowledge in the Early Modern Period” by Harold J. Cook; “Conrad Gessner on an “ad vivum” image” by Sachiko Kusukawa; “Corals versus Trees. Charles Darwin's Early Sketches of Evolution” by Horst Bredekamp; “Decaying objects and the making of meaning in Museums” by Mary M. Brooks; “Epilogue” by Malcolm Baker.
...MoreReview Margócsy, Dániel (2015) Review of "Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge". Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period (pp. 94-97).
Review Lehmann, Ann-Sophie (2015) Review of "Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 423-424).
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