In recent years, historians of both science and the arts have recognized the vital role of craft knowledge and artisanal practice in the development of the premodern sciences. Nevertheless, unraveling the complex relationships between speculative/intellectual and practical/artisanal traditions in the premodern world has often proven to be a maddening task. This panel begins with the conviction that these domains cannot—and indeed should not—be neatly divided, and embraces their nebulous and permeable boundaries not as an obstacle but a promising opportunity. Hence, we focus on “art-science”: theory-laden crafts and handiwork, or craft-like sciences and philosophy, that have fallen through the cracks of conventional historiographical categories. This encompasses such topics as instrumentalized modes of representation and models of human vision, the cross-cultural exchange of Renaissance artisanal epistemology, and the mathematical-experimental science of musical composition. Though we center on Western European sciences in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we consider the broader implications of art-science as a form of knowledge that crosses and blurs disciplinary and cultural boundaries, inviting new possibilities for teaching and experiencing the history of science. Through these studies, this panel will circumvent anachronistic dichotomies between science and craft, challenge conceptual barriers within the history of science as a discipline, and demonstrate how the knowledge and practices of artisans were embedded in the sciences of the premodern world.
