Article
ID: CBB620818895

Knowing Nature by Its Surface: Butchers, Barbers, Surgeons, Gardeners, and Physicians in Early Modern Italy (2022)

unapi
Amateurs Crafts and craftspeople Scientific communities; interprofessional relations Knowledge production (modes) Philosophy of science Measurement Experiments and experimentation Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships Observation Early modern Europe

This article draws attention to several different practices of observation, manipulation, and experimentation with the surface of natural things. Beginning from the observation that the surfaces of natural things invited observation, manipulation, measurement, and re-configuration, with the promise to unveil the knowledge of depths, this article explores how practical knowledge about the surface of things and bodies led to new conceptions of nature and matter as composed of layers, corpuscles, and artificially reproducible solid parts in early modern Europe. This article explores issues of knowledge production, and studies the ways in which material knowledge-making practices contributed to the habits of observing and experimenting with the surface of nature. By discussing three groups of cases in which nature was known by its surface and practice was mixed with theoretical appraisals of matter—surgeons, butchers, and food-cutters; gardeners and agronomists; and physicians—this article argues that “cognitive models” focusing on the description as well as the manipulation of natural surfaces informed both artisanal practices and natural philosophy, bridging the “high” and the “low” in the age of the “scientific revolution.”

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Authors & Contributors
Smith, Pamela H.
Bonney, Rick
Boumans, Marcel
Daston, Lorraine J.
Friedrich, Markus
Kendig, Catherine
Journals
Nuncius: Annali di Storia della Scienza
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Annals of Science: The History of Science and Technology
Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period
Publishers
Johns Hopkins University Press
Oxford University Press
Concepts
Experiments and experimentation
Philosophy of science
Scientific communities; interprofessional relations
Amateurs
Crafts and craftspeople
Observation
People
Boyle, Robert
Cassirer, Ernst
Galilei, Galileo
Galilei, Vincenzo
Goldstein, Kurt
Glauber, Johann Rudolph
Time Periods
Early modern
17th century
18th century
19th century
16th century
20th century
Places
Europe
Japan
United States
North America
South America
Institutions
Experimentalists
Royal Society
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